Spinning Spin for the FYW Classroom
It's the morning of the first presidential debate here in Oxford, Mississippi--or, possibly, the morning of the first non-debate, the townhall discussion with Barack Obama that superseded the debate when John McCain didn't show. It's ten hours till the debate is supposed to start, and we still don't know.
As we bite our nails and worry whether all these preparations will be for nothing, or almost nothing, clicking Renew on our Google news feeds every five or ten minutes to see whether McCain has decided to come after all, one of the things that strikes a rhet/comp person is the rhetoric--from both the McCain and the Obama camps, from the media, and from the impassioned commenters at the bottom of every news story.
Most particularly, I'm interested in the spin-in-advance that the candidates' spin-doctors have been putting on the debate--specifically, the shaping of the ideal viewer for it, not just what Walter Ong calls the "fictionalization" of the viewer/listener/reader but the affective construction or organization of the audience.
Fox News, for example, writes:
What interests me about this is that the spin-doctors (including the candidates themselves, presumably on advice from the hired spin-doctors) are doing brilliantly what we attempt to teach our first-year writing students to do: constructing, organizing, shaping, fictionalizing their readers. They're setting their audiences up to expect little of their own candidate and much of the opponent, so that audiences will be pleasantly surprised when their own candidate does better than expected and disturbed and annoyed when the opponent does worse.
And it occurs to me that political spin, thus conceived, might well make an effective classroom tool for helping students learn that skill. Surely they can feel the shaping influence on them of spin? If we can only get them to become conscious of that feeling, learn to articulate not only how spin shapes their response but how the spin-doctors do it, maybe they'll get better at it?
As we bite our nails and worry whether all these preparations will be for nothing, or almost nothing, clicking Renew on our Google news feeds every five or ten minutes to see whether McCain has decided to come after all, one of the things that strikes a rhet/comp person is the rhetoric--from both the McCain and the Obama camps, from the media, and from the impassioned commenters at the bottom of every news story.
Most particularly, I'm interested in the spin-in-advance that the candidates' spin-doctors have been putting on the debate--specifically, the shaping of the ideal viewer for it, not just what Walter Ong calls the "fictionalization" of the viewer/listener/reader but the affective construction or organization of the audience.
Fox News, for example, writes:
With three days to go until the first general election debate, each presidential candidate is predicting a strong showing for his opponent — a sign the campaigns are trying to manage expectations for the event.
Barack Obama’s campaign is spreading the word that John McCain enters this Friday’s match-up with a "home court advantage," since foreign policy, considered McCain’s strong suit, is the topic of the night.
Likewise, John McCain said Tuesday that Obama is "very, very good" when it comes to debates, stressing his opponent’s skills as an orator in making the case that Friday’s duel at the University of Mississippi will be no cakewalk.
What interests me about this is that the spin-doctors (including the candidates themselves, presumably on advice from the hired spin-doctors) are doing brilliantly what we attempt to teach our first-year writing students to do: constructing, organizing, shaping, fictionalizing their readers. They're setting their audiences up to expect little of their own candidate and much of the opponent, so that audiences will be pleasantly surprised when their own candidate does better than expected and disturbed and annoyed when the opponent does worse.
And it occurs to me that political spin, thus conceived, might well make an effective classroom tool for helping students learn that skill. Surely they can feel the shaping influence on them of spin? If we can only get them to become conscious of that feeling, learn to articulate not only how spin shapes their response but how the spin-doctors do it, maybe they'll get better at it?
posted by Doug Robinson at
10:24 AM
3 Comments:
Teaching the writing of spin, as opposed to solely the recognition of spin in other people's writing, may do wonders for student writing. But there are ethical consequences that the class would have to discuss. Mere POV and the resulting rhetorical organizations suggest that all descriptions are spin, so ethical writing is not merely a faithfulness to the "facts."
On the contrary, it's possible to argue that "ethical writing" has nothing to do with accuracy or "truth." Ethical writing might be little more than a faithfulness to opposing viewpoints--even when every acknowledged viewpoint is inaccurate(?). Truth in this estimation is a gap around which the inherent spin of discourse circulates.
I can imagine a great exercise that incorporates the pundits' opposing versions of the same political event, the students' uses of rhetorical devices to structure their own versions, and a class discussion of truth and ethics in writing.
Great idea, Doug!
Hm, yes, ethics--which for me would have to entail a metarhetorical perspective, contra Aristotle, who insists that "authors should compose without being noticed and should seem to speak not artificially but naturally" (Rhetoric 3.2.4, Kennedy's translation). Speaking or writing "without being noticed" of course naturalizes perspective as truth, which to my mind is unethical. Highlighting the shaping of the reader, therefore, would also have to entail a highlighting of the shaping of the (named) writer.
Interesting interpretation of Aristotelian rhetoric as unethical.
I think there's a shared space between writer and reader, what we often refer to as the effect on the reader. The effect is not merely a recognition of the Other who responds. It's a recognition of one's own subjectivity that manipulates the Other into responding.
The type of discussion you propose would involve the teacher's shifting the perspective back and forth between an acknowledgment of the reader, the response, and the writer who spectrally appears in that response.
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