Media Term Thursday #34
/Rhetoric
Using language effectively to please or persuade an audience. Therefore, in communications studies it is the use of all the codes and conventions used by a media text producer to persuade and audience to its message: selection and omission of particular images; symbolic, technical codes; narrative; audience positioning.
The point of rhetoric is to be so persuasive that the audience is overwhelmed so much by the preferred meaning that they struggle to create a resistant reading.
For example, a particular news network might use seductive graphics, dramatic music, repetition of slogans, a limited variety of paid ‘experts’ for commentary, selection of some details of some news stories to the exclusion of others, in order to create a particular context (fear, patriotism) to seamlessly insert a certain agenda and promote a certain point of view of the left or right wing of politics.
