The Last Person in Print

End of Blog.

News in Danish: Velkommen i taletanken

A rhetoricians' think tank, a collaborative blog devoted to everyday rhetorical criticism, has opened at http://taletank.wordpress.com/. So - if your Danish skills allow it - please drop by and think aloud.

Challenge the Straw Man #1: Still more informants become narrators

So is it really still controversial for reporters to make use of the first person or to get otherwise personal in their writing style?

In their recent article on image-evoking language constructions in written news (which appeared in Nordicom Review) Ebbe Grunwald and Jørgen Lauridsen have a pretty clear statistical answer to the 'otherwise' part of my question:

Parallel to [...] relatively rapid changes in the newspaper medium itself, new writing and narrative forms have appeared. The known genres, e.g. news journalism, constructed within the frames of the 'inverted pyramid' now often appear as hybrid forms. This means that personal styles of expression more frequently find their way into newspaper articles where they challenge the anonymous writing style of traditional journalism. (p. 93-94)

Grunwald and Lauridsen are mapping the use of exposures, a.k.a. linguistic image constructions, a.k.a. showing as opposed to telling, in five Danish national papers to discover how frequently such techniques are used.

It is a premise of their investigation that as soon as a reporter creates an image ("the faces of our creditors look more and more disbelieving") instead of making a general or abstract statement ("the credit-worthiness of the country has deteriorated"; this is Grunwald and Lauridsen's example), the reporter becomes an active narrator rather than simply an informant. When you invent an image like that you have obviously made an interpretation, selected and emphasised certain aspects of the material at the expense of others. As a consequence, the journalist's presence and her function as a rhetorical decision maker becomes visible, and readers begin to form an opinion about the journalist and her credibility.

Grunwald and Lauridsen conclude that exposures have in fact found their way into Danish news journalism, but the frequency varies from one paper to the next (the most image evoking news journalism is found in Politiken and Ekstra Bladet).

So the traditional paradigm of news journalism is still powerful - the straw man is not all straw - but our journalistic informants do seem to become still more willing to explicitly adopt the role of narrators.

As for the force and impact of these linguistic exposures as an indicator of increased narrator activity, Grunwald and Lauridsen have studied that too. I'll get back to that part in a later episode of Attack the Straw Man.

Men-of-Straw We Live By

Many research projects take a conventional truth as their starting point: "It is often said that...", "It is widely believed that..."- and then the researcher goes ahead and challenges this truth. The approach makes sense, of course, but sometimes these truths that we're up against are presented in a somewhat distorted fashion. Our supposed opponents are shaped as a caricature suited to serve as a foil to our own claims.

(Note how I'm saying 'we', as I'm just about to challenge my very own straw man.)

Well, whenever I have introduced my PhD work I have been claiming that, surprisingly, it is still possible for print reporters to cause a stir by using the first person singular. Teachers and handbooks of journalism still advise against it; readers still react strongly to it as they write letters to the editor expressing their love or hate for reporters who make the rhetorical choice to enter the stage themselves at the expense of the story they were supposed to be covering; and the recent (afore-mentioned) debate at WriterL proves that the first person singular in reporting remains (again: somewhat surprisingly) a narrative form that quite a few people, even among feature journalists devoted to long narrative forms, still take a strong and general stand against: Don't do it! Don't say I! It's too hard to do it well, and remember, as another objection goes, that you're a reporter, not an artist.

But the times they are a-changin', of course, and as professor Martin Eide wrote in a review of my dissertation (Rhetorica Scandinavica 41/2007):

Is it not a galopping norm these days that journalists must "put themselves on the line?"

In the coming posts, I'll make an effort to discover how much of a gallop we're talking about and how much straw should be pulled out of my straw man.

Input is welcome:
Do reporters (and note that we're not talking about columnists and commentators) get personal in the papers you're reading - and does it make you raise an eyebrow at all?

Facts are a dead horse

According to this weekend's issue of Information, a number of historiographic passages in Åsne Seierstad's Angel of Grozny: Inside Chechnya were removed in the editing process. It is Seierstad herself who reports this during a debate meeting in Copenhagen last week, and she argues that such passages tend to lessen the emotional impact of the narrative.

This is not a controversial statement in itself, but apparently her opponent in the debate asks about a specific part of history which he finds highly relevant to the story and yet missing from her book.

It was covered in the original manuscript, says Seierstad and refers to her editor who read that particular passage and then stated that "facts are a dead horse".

Now this is a controversial statement in itself. The phrase is an expression of resignation which completely outmatches the journalistic notion of BBIs, boring but important passages or entire boring but important stories, by saying either

BNI, boring so nevermind the importance, or worse:

IBDH, important - but dead horse.

Return of the Toggle Switch

So I presented Brian's legendary speech - and what was my point?

Well, I really like the speaker's blunt attempt to grant his audience rhetorical agency - which really, of course, he isn't, because he is not giving these people any directions or specific challenges to work with. He simply tells them that they need to think for themselves. Generally.

As a basic message listen to me, but think for yourselves is a fine principle to stick to for journalists and for rhetors in general. But there is no way to assert this freedom as a general principle. It must be done in specific relation to the given situation. Rhetorical agency must be granted from case to case by means of perhaps some more information, provocation, flattery, irony or fresh imagery.

Any rhetorical situation is heavily constrained by audience expectations that the rhetor must accept and then challenge. For "rhetorical agency is possible only within the communication practices of a given community of discourse", says a definition at Kairosnews which pops up in a google search for 'rhetorical agency'.

And now we're approaching the topic of the I's:

Somewhat surprisingly, the gesture of switching to the first person in a piece of news journalism still counts as a way of breaking the rules and thwart audience expectations (may I quote Nadja who expressed in a comment below how she "really - as in REALLY - never understood" why this is so). Saying "I" is a way of challenging the usual authoritative perspective of the press by reminding the reader that the reporter is a person with an individual sense of judgment.

But often the first person reporter not only draws attention to her own limited perspective, but also, by implication, to a false aura of authority and objectivity in the work of her colleagues. She distances herself from the rhetoric she herself is dealing in, as she decides to talk more plainly.

This is a very real dilemma - and readers may well join this brave and honest reporter in her adoption of the oppositional stance. Tell us! Tell us more!! And the first person narrative may become an appeal to free thinking and action which is really just as general and vague and paralysing as that of Brian. To distance yourself from the discourse you need to use is obviously paralysing. For it is not a question of either-or, honest or dishonest, subjective or objective, master or slave.

So what is it? What am I suggesting?

That we be specific in matter as we outline our situation.

And that we take manner seriously as part of the matter.

And, finally, that we try to change perspectives as we go along. Work the toggle switch and direct attention back and forth from manner to matter or from the fluff to the stuff (I've been told that this is Richard Lanham's latest popular rephrasing of this (his) concept of rhetorical toggling between depth and surface).

I.e. expose your rhetoric as rhetoric even as you are asserting what you consider to be an important truth. Because it is rhetoric, and most audiences need to be reminded of this, I believe, in order to be able to think for themselves.

I should exemplify and I will, but not tonight.

Now listen to me

BRIAN:
No. No, please! Please! Please listen. I've got one or two things to say.

FOLLOWERS:
Tell us. Tell us both of them.

BRIAN:
Look. You've got it all wrong. You don't need to follow me. You don't need to follow anybody! You've got to think for yourselves. You're all individuals!

FOLLOWERS:
Yes, we're all individuals!

BRIAN:
You're all different!

FOLLOWERS:
Yes, we are all different!

DENNIS:
I'm not.

ARTHUR:
Shhhh.

FOLLOWERS:
Shh. Shhhh. Shhh.

BRIAN:
You've all got to work it out for yourselves!

FOLLOWERS:
Yes! We've got to work it out for ourselves!

BRIAN:
Exactly!

FOLLOWERS:
Tell us more!

The presidential pronoun

In a current discussion at WriterL about writing in the first person, one member suggests that you avoid "I" alright, but still allow yourself to use "me". If you follow this rule of thumb you avoid placing yourself at the very beginning of your articles and sentences and avoid looking blatantly self-centered. This is a fine piece of advice, comparable with the old and quite challenging convention of never opening a personal letter by saying: I...

Still, of course, your rhetoric may well be centered completely on yourself and address your personal supporters exclusively, if only perhaps in more of an elegant manner. Mind the following analysis. It is Joe Klein at Time who takes a look at Barack Obama's use of personal pronouns, and I quote at length:

"We are the ones we've been waiting for," Barack Obama said in yet another memorable election-night speech on Super-Confusing Tuesday. "We are the change that we seek." Waiting to hear what Obama has to say — win, lose or tie — has become the most anticipated event of any given primary night. The man's use of pronouns (never I), of inspirational language and of poetic meter — "WE are the CHANGE that we SEEK" — is unprecedented in recent memory. Yes, Ronald Reagan could give great set-piece speeches on grand occasions, and so could John F. Kennedy, but Obama's ability to toss one off, different each week, is simply breathtaking. His New Hampshire concession speech, with the refrain "Yes, We Can," was turned into a brilliant music video featuring an array of young, hip, talented and beautiful celebrities. The video, stark in black-and-white, raised an existential question for Democrats: How can you not be moved by this? How can you vote against the future?

And yet there was something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messianism — "We are the ones we've been waiting for" — of the Super Tuesday speech and the recent turn of the Obama campaign. "This time can be different because this campaign for the presidency of the United States of America is different. It's different not because of me. It's different because of you." That is not just maddeningly vague but also disingenuous: the campaign is entirely about Obama and his ability to inspire. Rather than focusing on any specific issue or cause — other than an amorphous desire for change — the message is becoming dangerously self-referential. The Obama campaign all too often is about how wonderful the Obama campaign is.

Read the rest of the article at http://www.time.com/time/politics/article/0,8599,1710721,00.html.

The overall strategy described here seems somehow related to the step-by-step introduction of self - first "they", then "we", then "me" and then, finally, "I" - that I have been pointing out in Lisbeth Davidsen and Åsne Seierstad's reporting. In this political context it might work well as a buildup of expectations to the elections; an approach based on pure formal identification (in Kenneth Burke's sense) on a macro (campaign) level:

Use "you", "we" and the occasional "me" on the campaign trail, but keep your "I" on hold until you're finally in a position to say: "I, the president of the United States..." Voters may swing along with the verbal gradation and decide to help their candidate release the ultimate personal pronoun.

That's me in the corner

One of the first person singular users at Rumspringa Magazine, David Jacobsen Turner, is presently (was recently?) a trainee at Weekendavisen, a Danish weekly which sports the slogan "Personlighedernes avis", i.e. the paper for personalities, strong characters.

And David Jacobsen Turner reports back to the student magazine Lixen how the atmosphere at the editorial offices is nothing like that of the notorious hectic and buzzing news room. Staff members tend to be quietly absorbed in their con amore projects, no stories are obligatory, no trips are simple duty calls. The staff consists of an equal mix of trained journalists and academics who are often able to rely on each other's expertise rather than the usual suspect experts used in other media.

It sounds like a caricature, and David Turner knows that it does: He has been assigned a snug office of his own just down the hall from these people, and the risk of developing self-obesity is immediate!

Yet he can't believe his luck: "I fucking freaking love Weekendavisen," declares the trainee and relates how he is free to dispose of the standard news pyramid structure in his articles, how he has said "perhaps" in three subheadings already and, of course, how he says "I":

I write 'I'. You bet that I do. I-I-I-I-I.

Read all about it (in Danish) at Lixen; use the search word: "egoboost".

More media, more messages

The most artistic and experimental of the Danish alluders to Wallraff represented in my PhD work was the late Claus Beck-Nielsen who is obviously still alive. Beck-Nielsen announced his own death in 2001 and has been performing under various pseudonyms since then.

In writing he has adopted a peculiar persona who is travelling through Copenhagen and Iraq, mostly by foot, and reporting back to his fellow Danes in a seriously dry and alienated tone.

All the more wondrous to watch him ('Some Body') perform live last night in Odense - reporting back from Iran and from his personal life - in song.

Along with him was a band totally superior in their toned-down Black Christmas double bass, drums, guitar and steel accompaniment, and, well, the show made me acutely aware of my usual quite exclusive focus on the written word. So here's a link to Claus Beck-Nielsen Memorial at MySpace where the band is currently fighting the "feel-good-tyranny" of MySpace from within by encouraging visitors to sign up as "friends" of the band in order to become their enemies. Since,

To be a friend or not to be! That's no question. That's tyranny!

The first person in an elevator

Veranda revisited:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tm3WvDpPBac&feature=related

How to point your fingers at people

Why do reporters always congratulate each other for having managed "not to point their fingers at anyone" in a piece of journalism? This was posed as a rhetorical question from Mads Brügger who visited the department today and spoke in favour of subjective and, yes, well, moralizing journalism. You investigate a story and find fault with particular people - so why not explicitly blame them?

Well, blaming as such ought not to be a controversial aspect of investigative journalism, so it's surely the manner of blaming which can be controversial.

How do you usually point your fingers at people in writing?

One award winning way is described well by James Etthema and Theodore Glasser in their Custodians of Conscience (1998):

"For journalists who must honor objectivity yet evoke outrage, ironist rhetoric holds great stylistic appeal."

In a chapter on 'The Irony of Irony-in-Journalism' they show how investigative reporters simply quote people and then, just as simply, present facts that contradict or undermine the quoted statements. Alongside each other, those words and deeds/facts create an ironic contrast and appeals to ironic knowingness among the readers. We're put in a position to shake our heads at the liars or hypocrites and say: Yeah right!

Brügger, I believe, was basically pulling away from such subtle yet well-known montage techniques and encouraging reporters to show as well as tell (by saying that, well, "at least it has worked for me").

Small world

All this time I have completely overlooked a striking, if almost completely irrelevant connection between Wallraff and Thompson: In Denmark (and probably elsewhere too) a big nose is sometimes dubbed 'a günter' and sometimes, yes, 'a Gonzo'.

If Camp is a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers...

...then what?

Close Writing by Sontag

“Many things in the world have not been named; and many things, even if they have been named, have never been described,” writes Susan Sontag by way of introduction to her “Notes on ‘Camp’” (1964). Her essay is not an argument, but a reflective description, an exemplary one, in which Sontag encircles the elusive notion of Camp through a series of propositions which are stated with bold authority: “Camp is… / Camp taste has… / Camp is art that… / The experiences of Camp are… / Camp taste is, above all,… / The Ultimate Camp statement: …”

Yet Sontag’s notes are notes indeed. Her propositions are tentative, and they’re illustrated or rendered plausible by examples that are compared and contrasted. So examples serve as qualifiers that mark differences between pure Camp and Camp that fails, naïve Camp and self-conscious Camp, etc. The angle changes and the light shifts as we go along, and I kept thinking that this ought to be tried out as a rhetorical exercise. By way of a parallel treatment, paragraph by paragraph, even sentence by sentence, one might approach, let’s say, the elusive notion Gonzo journalism or Gonzo sensibility:

If “the hallmark of Camp is the spirit of extravagance” what is the hallmark of Gonzo? If Camp is “a woman walking around in a dress made of three million feathers”, what is Gonzo? If “without passion one gets pseudo-Camp… merely decorative, safe, in a word, chic” what quality differentiates pure Gonzo from pseudo-Gonzo? And so forth.

Basically, Sontag’s notes made me try this at home, shifting my focus into my fingers.

A bad case of self-coverage and not bad at all

When Raoul Duke has escaped his hotel bill and is pulling his fireapple-red shark convertible into the parking lot of a cafe on the fringe of Las Vegas, he hears a roar overhead and looks up "to see a big silver smoke-trailing DC-8 taking off". He is wondering whether his colleagues are on board the plane; his colleagues who were in Las Vegas in order to cover the Mint 400 motorcycle race just like himself: "Did they have all the photos they needed? All the facts? Had they fulfilled their responsibilities?"

Duke himself has been famously distracted by drugs and by Las Vegas itself and has covered all these weird and spectacular circumstances in stead. As a matter of fact, he doesn't even know who won the race and here's were another notion of self-coverage comes in:

I wanted to plug this gap in my knowledge at the earliest opportunity: Pick up the L. A. Times and scour the sports section for a Mint 400 story. Get the details. Cover myself. Even on the Run, in the grip of serious Fear. . .

This may seem like a rather coarse demonstration of Hunter S. Thompson's attitude towards traditional journalism. Just as coarsely demonstrative as the recent booklength adventure of Morten Sabroe did seem at first. The word went that Sabroe had gone to New York to write a book about Hillary Clinton, but ended up writing a book about himself. Naughty fans giggled in anticipation while tired non-fans wrote letters to the editor saying, oh, surprise, surprise! How long can Sabroe be allowed to go on like this?

As it happens, Sabroe's book is very good. Hostile readers might like it very much too. It's mainly about Sabroe's mother Who Art in Heaven (and about himself). And about Hillary Clinton too, but not much. I had the book handed over late at night on the day of its publication, read the first half before going to sleep, the other half on the train the next morning and didn't want to put it back in my bag after finishing it, but rather, well, advertise it, let it glow as I carried it along through the hallways to my office. I wasn't exactly among the hostile readers to begin with, of course, but still I wonder why the sense of identification is that strong. More later.

The Case of Self-Coverage

That phrase, the subtitle of an article in a 2004 issue of Journal of Communication, caught my attention for reasons obvious at least to myself. My terministic screen misguided me, though, as the curious term self-coverage is not about individual introspection, but about corporate introspection, i.e. journalists reporting on cultural products and activities produced by the same combined 'news and entertainment firms' that they themselves work for. The term is also used about media self-coverage in general, metacoverage and 'news from our own world'.

But - what is dawdling then?

"I wasn't kidding around"

Barbara Ehrenreich, undercover in low-wage America working as a waitress, a cleaning person, a nursing home aide and a retail clerk, picked a spectacular form of field work which helped her build a compelling narrative ('Will she be found out? Will she even endure it?') and which offers itself to being passed on as a sensational anecdote ('Do you know what she did to be able to discover these things?').

Still Ehrenreich's presentation of the events is rather understated concerning the dramatic action involved, and one line in particular stayed with me after first reading Nickel and Dimed:

There's no way, for example, to pretend to be a waitress: the food either gets to the table or not.

[Read the full introduction here.]

You're a matter of course! So - embrace yourself? Or please try to distance yourself from yourself?

Rumspringa is the name [and what does it mean?] of a new magazine edited by journalism students at my new workplace in classy cooperation with students from the Funen Academy of Fine Arts. And this is roughly how the editors present their work by way of introduction:

In the long stories here at Rumspringa the narrator isn't hiding behind objective observations, but becomes part of the story himherself. ... Journalists are just as entangled in the world as everyone else, so we don't pretend to be writing through an objective filter ... we're honestly dishonest. ... We don't invent, and we don't direct, but neither do we pretend that we're not there.

Well, of course we're there, they seem to be saying in the blogosphere at CVA ['Centre of Wild Analysis'], and of course we're entangled in the world. So the rhetorical strategy for the CVAers becomes the opposite of the rumspringars': They make an attempt to dissociate themselves from their entangled individuality and do not sign their blogposts individually.

So are they hiding behind CVA? Or are they just kidding around? Well, they claim that they're not. Rather they want to 'keep their positions of enunciation open' in an attempt to 'keep the symbolic alive', and they argue for their collective strategy (roughly) as follows:

The trouble with real writers [bloggers or others] is that they feel and eat too much and they think too much about sex. We distinctly want to dissociate ourselves from that! CVA [and blogging collectively] is ... about exercising your ability to change your position of enunciation. ... It's a mistake [made by Descartes and others] to equal your position of enunciation with your being.

You may change your being by changing your position of enunciation.

Both arguments are very appealing - and the latter is rather new to my own way of thinking (and blogging) too. What's at stake here? Is there a difference on the level of awareness and/or ambition? Or is it a matter of attempting social change by means of rhetoric on two different platforms: The journalists challenging themselves and their readers by abandoning the standard prose style of their colleagues in printed reporting - opposing the voice of what Tom Wolfe called the 'pallid little troll' - on the one hand; and philosophers challenging themselves and their readers by challenging the self-aware blogger style on the other?

Either you're with us

My comments' box here at Blogger seems to be able to swallow comments rather than publish them - but one was rescued in summary and sent to me by e-mail in stead:

The commentator, R, had a striking experience with Danish reporter Camilla Stockmann's writings. A few years ago Stockmann covered an event in R's own professional surroundings, and her account struck him as arrogant and condenscending as she was portraying his colleagues as members of some peculiar, exotic tribe in a remote country (which, in fact, they are not).

Then, via links in my previous blogpost, R read Stockmann's account of Alexander Brener and Barbara Shurz' provocative appearances in Copenhagen last year. As it happens, R himself has encountered Alexander Brener live in Ljubljana, Slovenia, a couple of years ago where Brener turned up at a public meeting where Brener approached Slavoj Zizek, who served as a moderator at the event, and spat Zizek right in the face, twice. Reading Stockmann's reportage R suddenly found himself siding with her, partly grateful for getting some more information about Brener, partly having his feelings of contempt for the man confirmed.

So what R is suggesting is that Stockmann's writing style is certainly able to communicate a sense of facination, but also a - cheap, says R - sense of identification at the expense of people who are portrayed in the journalistic coverage without getting heard.

I've returned to Stockmann's text on several occasions now, so it may not come as a surprise that I tend to agree with R. Stockmann's article immediately caught my interest when I originally saw it in the paper, but as I was reading it I felt invited to develop contempt for the two provos, even to pity them. And they may have deserved it, the text does make a good case that they do deserve it, but the reassuring or affirmative drive of the narrative against the two still seemed unfair. Let me stop here, though, and just link back to October06.