Rhetorical situation and "More Perfect Union"

According to Bitzer, the rhetorical situation is the context in which the speaker creates rhetoric.  Under this definition, the rhetorical situation for Obama's "More Perfect Union" speech is that Obama's pastor had made a very racist comment in his sermon.

Even though Obama tried to gloss over his pastor's "poor choice of words," the media kept pressuring him to address the situation, thus the speech was created.  It would be too presumptuous of me to say that the media agreed with Bitzer when they pushed Obama to answer this rhetorical situation, but their actions make it look as if they did.

However, Vatz says that there is no such thing as a rhetorical situation.  He says that "meaning is not intrinsic in events, facts, people, or 'situations'" nor are facts 'publicly observable'" (156).  According to this, the sermon in and of itself has no natural or essential meaning.  This means that the meaning we have of the sermon is based on what the news anchor or blogger has to say about the sermon.  Even videos can't be entirely trusted as we are only seeing one sermon by this pastor and we may only be seeing just a snippet of the sermon. This means that we are not only getting a condensed/censored version but also a translated version.  While I do not think that anyone has skewed the pastor's views on racism, it is possible for it to have been skewed.

While I understand this point that Vatz makes, is this twisted view not a rhetorical situation in itself?  Even Vatz says that "one never runs out of context" (which context to me seems equivalent to situation in this discussion).  We may not be so controlled by the rhetorical situation as Bitzer seems to claim, but I don't think Vatz can go so far as to say that the rhetorical situation is a myth.

Biesecker seemed to agree with Vatz as she examined Derrida's speech on difference and differánce.  I did not appreciate my first exposure to Derrida and try to avoid him as much as possible.  I did glance over Biesecker's article, but did not read it particularly closely.