The Newspaper as an Epideictic Meeting Point

Abstract

This article shows how epideictic rhetoric and argumentation may be interrelated in a general-interest newspaper framed as a single discourse produced by a collective author. In more specific terms, the view advanced here is that newspaper as whole has an epideictic dimension which, in terms of argumentation, is the fundamental or predominant one. The usefulness of this approach is twofold. In terms of rhetoric, to explore the applicability of epideictic rhetoric to journalistic discourse; and in the field of journalism studies, the goal is to draw on the theory of epideictic rhetoric so as to refine the conceptualization of the nature of argumentation in the newspaper as such. Given this twofold perspective, the account of newspaper discursive practices will be general, and the classical and contemporary epideictic theory will be briefly summarized. However, the outcome of this analysis is an example of a fruitful encounter between the two fields.

Fragmentary narrative reasoning. On the enthymematic structure of journalistic storytelling

“…Journalism is one of these, with work being done especially on argumentation in the newsmaking process (Burger & Delaloye, 2016;Luciani, Rocci & Zampa, 2015;Zampa, 2015Zampa, , 2017Zampa & Bletsas, 2018;Zampa & Musi, 2016;Zampa & Perrin, 2016). For what concerns the news product, the editorial has been at the center of scholarly attention (Gauthier, 2002;López Pan, 2015;Zampa, 2015Zampa, , 2017.…”

“…2.1 on questioning basic narratives). In this perspective, Lòpez Pan's (2015) interpretation of news texts as having an epideictic function in the sense of promoting adherence to shared values and creating a sense of community is particularly fitting. 3 Endoxa often remain implicit, because they are taken for granted by both parties -in Aristotle's words, "for if any one of these is well known, there is no need to mention it, for the hearer can add it himself" (Aristotle, Rhetoric, I, 1357a).…”

“…To prove this claim, we analyze fragmentary narration in two editorials and in the corresponding reports. Building upon previous studies that consider journalistic texts enthymematic (López Pan, 2015;Zampa, 2015Zampa, , 2017, we reconsider studies on journalistic writing as storytelling from an argumentation theory perspective. 2 This approach shows how the two rhetorical modes of narration and argumentation -together with description and exposition -are intertwined in everyday journalistic writing, opening up to a research line that will broaden the still limited scope of studies in argumentation dealing with narration, and deepen the widespread and often superficial understanding of journalism as storytelling.…”

Mediatization and the Language of Journalism

“…These include sociolinguistic approaches to style and variation (see, for instance, Bell, 1991, on audience design), conversation analytical work on broadcast news media (Montgomery, 2008), work in the tradition of systemic functional linguistics on register and genre (Martin and White, 2005), rhetorical (López Pan, 2015) and pragmatic (Verschueren, 1985) approaches to news language, corpus analytical studies (Bednarek, 2006b), critical discourse analysis (Richardson, 2007), multimodal analysis of news language (Machin and Niblock, 2008), and linguistic ethnographic work on news production (Van Hout, 2015). It would lead too far to discuss all these approaches in detail, let alone their degrees of topical, analytical, and methodological overlap or their uptake in other disciplines such as cultural and media studies, communication, and political science.…”

Argumentation in journalism: Professional practices and the public sphere

“…The contextual dimension of argumentation was already an integral element of the Aristotelian project, as testified first by the distinction between dialectic and rhetoric, and then by the distinction among the different rhetorical genres: judicial, deliberative and epideictic. The promise of a discipline capable of tackling non-reductively the use of reason in different arenas of social life is implicit, if not realized, in seminal works of modern argumentation theory, such as those of Toulmin (1958Toulmin ( /2008 and Perelman and Olbrechts-Tyteca (1969). Over the last two decades, research on argumentative practices in different social contexts has developed considerably and has become increasingly explicit in dealing with context developing theoretical constructs for dealing with contextual factors in argumentative practices.…”