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May 1, 2008
Of Visual Enthymemes and Rhetorical Intentions
The White House employs experts to get the administration's message to the people--directly and through the news media. How good a job they do is partly a matter of politics and ideology. But I think it's clear that presidents are able to employ among the best propagandists available in America.
It seems, however, that the propaganda experts screwed up with the Mission Accomplished banner. From the Associated Press:
"President Bush is well aware that the banner should have been much more specific and said `mission accomplished' for these sailors who are on this ship on their mission," White House press secretary Dana Perino said Wednesday. "And we have certainly paid a price for not being more specific on that banner. And I recognize that the media is going to play this up again tomorrow, as they do every single year."
This is a reasonable interpretation. I think it's also utter bullshit. But it is reasonable. Here's why: The banner was a visual enthymeme, aka a rhetorical syllogism. An enthymeme is always missing one or more parts, i.e. major and/or minor premises. What makes the enthymeme such a persuasive rheme (a unit of rhetoric) is that the audience supplies the missing part(s). Each individual member of an audience makes the syllogistic connection by supplying whatever missing parts make sense to that person.
So you throw up a banner behind the president. You know the audience will interpret it; you want them to interpret it or you wouldn't have put it in that particular spot in the first place.
The administration has the right to interpret its own messages, to make claims for its own communicative intentions. What did the administration intend to indicate with that banner? We need to re-visit that moment to see what claims were made at the time. But I'll make this prediction (knowing that I could be wrong): No one is going to find any public statement by any administration official made at the time to the effect that the banner refers to the mission of a specific boat and crew.
Tags: journalism, politics, rhetoric
Posted by acline at May 1, 2008 8:00 AM | | Spotlight