Roderick P. Hart

Rhetorical sensitivity and social interaction

Contemporary attitudes toward communication can be viewed as two‐dimensional—expressive and instrumental. The argument of this article is that the instrumental, or as we would label it, the rhetorical approach, best promises to facilitate human understanding and to effect social cohesion. Five characteristics of rhetorical sensitivity are described. These are features which, if incorporated and operationalized in discourse, can help men make the most of social interactions. The rhetorically sensitive person (a) tries to accept role‐taking as part of the human condition, (b) attempts to avoid stylized verbal behavior, (c) is characteristically willing to undergo the strain of adaptation, (d) seeks to distinguish between all information and that information acceptable for communication, and (e) tries to understand that an idea can be rendered in multi‐form ways.

The Political Sins of Jon Stewart

We accuse Jon Stewart of political heresy. We find his sins against the Church of Democracy to be so heinous that he should be branded an infidel and made to wear sackcloth and ashes for at least two years, during which time he would not be allowed to emcee the Oscars, throw out the first pitch at the Yankee’s game, or eat at the Time-Warner commissary. Our specific charge is that Mr. Stewart has engaged in unbridled political cynicism. And it is no coincidence that ‘‘sin’’ and ‘‘cynicism’’ have an assonant quality. But we are not accusing Mr. Stewart of being an apostate, one who has abandoned the Democratic Faith altogether. Unlike an apostate, a heretic professes faith in the overall tenets of the religion but disagrees with, or fails to practice, or tries to undermine, its most vital beliefs. In contrast, Mr. Stewart cleverly claims to advance the tenets of democracy during his nightly assignations while in truth leading the Children of Democracy astray. He plants in them a false knowledge, a trendy awareness that turns them into bawdy villains and wastrels. ‘‘If anyone,’’ says the apostle Paul, ‘‘preach to you a gospel, besides that you have received, let him be anathema’’ (Galations 1:9). ‘‘Receive him not into your house nor say to him, God speed you,’’ says John (II, 1:10). A person of such mien who ‘‘will not hear the Church,’’ says Matthew (18:17), should be regarded as ‘‘the heathen and the publican.’’ We think that Jon Stewart is both a heathen and a publican. Naturally, we understand that Stewart is also very, very popular. That is part of our charge against him. Jon Stewart makes cynicism attractive; indeed, he makes it profitable. Each night, he saps his audience’s sense of political possibility even as he helps AT&T sell its wares. Stewart urges them to steer clear of conventional politics and to do so while steering a Nissan. Mr. Stewart is especially attractive to young people, so his website offers them portable cynicism in the form of CDs, DVDs, clothes, books, and collectibles. Stewart knows there’s money to be made in cynicism.

Attitudes toward Communication and the Assessment of Rhetorical Sensitivity.

This series of studies operationalized the concept of rhetorical sensitivity first discussed by Hart and Burks in 1972. A measuring instrument (RHETSEN) was developed and the attitudes‐toward‐communication held by several thousand individuals were thereby assessed. RHETSEN was found to have sufficient reliability and validity. When a national sample of college students responded to RHETSEN, it appeared that their feelings about encoding messages were related to their various sociocultural backgrounds. When a large group of adult nurses took the test, their responses seemed associated with their particular professional duties and life experiences.

The rhetoric of goodbye: Verbal and nonverbal correlates of human leave‐taking

Human communication research has identified and investigated numerous aspects of interpersonal transactions, but has largely ignored the process by which people terminate these encounters. Through controlled observation and laboratory testing, this study sought answers to the following questions: (1) What specific verbal and nonverbal behaviors are associated with the termination of communicative exchanges; and (2) Do these verbal and nonverbal termination behaviors vary according to the situational and relational constraints that bind two communicators. Twenty‐five behavior styles were scrutinized during eighty interviews. Results indicated that behavioral regularity attends leave‐taking—signalling inaccessibility and signalling supportiveness.

Political Debate: Forms, Styles, and Media

Although presidential debates have been studied extensively, few truly basic, generic questions have been raised. The following study does so by asking (a) What textual features distinguish debates from other types of campaign messages? (b) How have such factors as time, format, party, and incumbency affected political debates? and (c) How did the 1996 debates relate to such trends? In answering these questions the authors present findings from the Campaign Mapping Project, a research endeavor funded by the Ford and Carnegie Foundations and devoted to examining campaign behavior from 1948 to the present. The study suggests that debates add sobriety to campaigns, ground political discourse, make candidates introspective, and restrain political overstatements. Moreover, the generic regularities of presidential debates provide an equal footing to incumbents and challengers, Democrats and Republicans, as well as former and recent presidential campaigners. In essence, debate encourages all politicians to speak a common language.

The American people in crisis: a content analysis

This study examines how images of the American electorate were deployed after the 11 September 2001 terrorism incident and during the Clinton impeachment. Transcripts of congressional proceedings, news coverage, and presidential campaign addresses were analyzed to determine how the phrase the American people was used during these two crises and in unrelatedpresidential campaign speeches. The analysis considered the roles, actions, qualities, and circumstances ascribed to the people, as well as the time orientation and the forces aligned against the people. The results show that (1) relative to presidential campaign rhetoric, both crises resulted in greater concentration on the electorate; (2) the crises differed from one another as well, with the impeachment texts featuring a contentious electorate and the 11 September texts identifying the peoples psychological strengths and anxieties; and (3) both crises were also affected by exogenous factors-partisanship in the case of impeachment, and the passage of time for the terrorism incident.

Contemporary Scholarship in Public Address: A Research Editorial

This essay considers some of the research currently being published in the area of public address and isolates several factors (anecdotal fixation, personality fixation, conceptual anomie, translation fallacies, taxonomical fascination, and tabloid scholarship) that keep some of that research from being all that it could be. The essay is an opinion piece. It does not constitute probative argument. Based on his own values and tastes (and some experience in the area of public address research), the author comments on the strengths and weaknesses of that research. By employing the editorial form, the author thereby invites continued discussion of these ideas.

The Evolution of Candidate Bush A Rhetorical Analysis

This article examines George W. Bush’s campaign rhetoric in both 2000 and 2004 and compares his style to that of his predecessors. Using DICTION, a computerized language analysis program, the study finds that Bush was quite tentative during the 2000 campaign and eschewed use of a narrative style. By the time his reelection campaign began, however, Bush had dramatically increased his hortatory and narrative scores, meaning he had found both an important story to tell and a forceful way of telling it. Because these qualities increased steadily with time, and because they seem to have been initiated by the terrorist attacks of September 11, they signal important epistemological, sociological, psychological, and political aspects of the Bush presidency and perhaps, of the national electorate itself.

Absolutism and situation: Prolegomena to a rhetorical biography of Richard M. Nixon

This study is an initial attempt at rhetorical biography and details an automated language analysis procedure for assessing verbal absolution. The study proceeds deductively by first positing five features of the “public personality” of Richard M. Nixon and then using these constructs to interpret certain stylistic probings made of his rhetoric. The results of the investigation indicate that Nixons verbal absolutism was (1) less pronounced than that of a comparison group of speakers, (2) highly variable, (3) explainable only when a network of rhetorical variables was considered, and (4) manifested variously (and predictably) from situation to situation.

Easy Citizenship: Television's Curious Legacy

This article argues that television has reduced the burdens of citizenship for the average American and that that reduction is dangerous. Television does all of this by overwhelming viewers with the sights and sounds of governmental life and by supersaturating them with political information. All too often, however, this tumult creates in viewers a sense of activity rather than genuine civic involvement. In addition, television constantly tells the story of specific persons in specific situations, thereby producing a kind of highly individuated, cameo politics that distracts viewers from common problems and public possibilities. Television does this work, and much more, in a highly entertaining fashion and is often genuinely informative. But television also produces an overwhelming passivity in viewers even while making them feel politically involved. The article argues that the American polity needs real, not hypothetical, involvement if it is to meet its civic obligations.