Rhetorical situations, media effects and salience

In The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation, Vatz clearly takes issue with Bitzer’s arguments in The Rhetorical Situation. Vatz positions himself nearly opposite from Bitzer in the section “The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation;” Vatz claims that situations are created rather than discovered and that situations are rhetorical rather than rhetoric being situational. He states that rhetorical discourse is explained by the interpreter and further suggests that a situation is meaningless without the interpreter’s involvement.

Vatz frames his discussion around the presence of salience and quotes Perelman: “By the very fact of selecting certain elements and presenting them to the audience, their importance and pertinency to the discussion are implied” (157). With these words, Perelman suggests that due to media’s selection and framing, people are told what it is important and what is deserving of attention. Later in his argument, Vatz uses an extended example of the Vietnam War. He claims that United States citizens did not fully understand the war because of the way the media had been representing it. Vatz writes: “No one understands or understood the ‘situation’ in Vietnam, because there never was a discrete situation. The meaning of war (war?, civil war?) came from the rhetoric surrounding it. To give salience to a situation in an area roughly the size of one of our middle-size states and to translate its exigencies into patriotism-provoking language and symbolism was a rhetorical choice” (159). Vatz goes on to include two other events—the Cuban Missile Crisis and President Kennedy’s assassination—as relevant to his dialogue on salience.

The issue of salience Vatz discusses was not something new for its time (1973). Its ideas were communicated in the first empirical study of agenda setting, a media effects theory, in 1968, when Max McCombs and Donald Shaw researched that year’s presidential election. The researchers asked voters what the important issues were, regardless of what the politicians said, before the election. McCombs and Shaw looked at nine different media outlets and found that the majority of content in local newspapers and television and radio reports before the election matched voters’ options. The study revealed the high correlation between what people thought the issues were and how the media ranked them. As a result of the study, McCombs and Shaw were able to determine the degree to which media determines public opinion. This first-level of agenda setting is all about issues of salience.

It is interesting to see the correlation between media studies and rhetoric, especially from Vatz’s point of view. He states: “To view rhetoric as a creation of reality or salience, rather than a reflector of reality clearly increases the rhetor’s moral responsibility…Instead, he must assume responsibility for the salience he has created…In short, the rhetor is responsible for what he chooses to make salient” (158). Thus, just as the media controls and creates salience, as does the rhetor. Both disciplines of salience have cited extended examples of political situations and their predominance. Perhaps Vatz’s essential question—“What is the relationship between rhetoric and situations?” (158)—could be answered with the help of the agenda setting theory.   

Sources:

Vatz, Richard. “The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 6 (1973): 154-161.