Social-elite constructionism: The rhetoric of commercial news.

Abstract

I argue that contemporary journalists paradoxically require a subjectivist epistemology to comply with the standards of what is known as "the ideal of objectivity." Because of this, these writers have lost much of the fact-claiming and meaning-making ability that makes their work so important. In order to understand how knowledge and meaning are constructed in journalism, we need to look past the surface rhetoric of the reporter and uncover the institutional rhetoric that has developed during the course of the 20th century. In this dissertation, I apply the classical rhetorical terms kairos and nomos to the political economy of the news industry and the professional conventions produced by that industry.