2016,
being a year that is a multiple of four, is an election year with the highest
office in the land, the Presidency, up for grabs.
It's one
of the most interesting and controversial election cycles in American history
and, as such, thousands of pieces of writing exist across all media that
express differing viewpoints, information, and opinions on both main candidates
as well as their third-party counterparts.
The piece
of writing I decided to use for this journal entry is a column written by
Stephen Collinson for CNN, titled "The No-Transparency Election"
which, as can be assumed, critiques the lack of transparency from both Hillary
Clinton and Donald Trump during their long careers in the public eye.
This piece would likely result in similar
views by Edbauer and Blitzer in regards to the rhetoric presented within it.
Blitzer discusses rhetoric as largely the product of the situations surrounding
it, the context which creates it. In regards to this article, Blitzer would
most likely continue to express this belief.
“Let us
regard rhetorical situations,” Blitzer writes, “as a natural context of
persons, events, objects, relations, and exigence which strongly invites utterance.”
The viewpoint expressed in Edbauer’s essay is not completely different than that of Blitzer’s, only he comes from the perspective that rhetoric and the context that surrounds it does not come in a vacuum.
Within the abstract of his essay, he makes this point clear, stating “rhetorical situations operate within a network of lived practical consciousness or structures of feeling.”
No more
are these viewpoints more clearly expressed than in Collinson’s column. Collinson
writes on the heels of Hillary Clinton’s bout with pneumonia and the
controversy surrounding it, primarily controversy focused on potential health
concerns with the Democratic nominee.
He
compares this to a separate controversy surrounding Republican nominee Trump, who
remains the only candidate in modern history to have not released his tax
information. In doing so, the article makes the larger point that, whilst most
would consider these minor incidents in a vacuum, they are both the latest
instances from the candidates that displays a disconnect between them and the
public.
Collinson
writes, and correctly, that this an issue because one of them will win the
election and become the President and in doing so will need to have the public’s
trust, yet both have yet to earn it.
In simpler
terms, the rhetoric displayed in the article is a product of the context that
surrounds the candidates and the election as a whole.
No comments:
Post a Comment