Honors Theses
Date of Award
2010
Document Type
Undergraduate Thesis
Department
Philosophy and Religion
First Advisor
Stephen Goforth
Relational Format
Dissertation/Thesis
Abstract
There is currently a growing cynicism about objectivity in cable news reporting and commentary, and there have been many allegations of pandering and bias on the part of and concerning commentators on 24-hour news outlets. There have been changing trends in how many American citizens acquire information and analysis from these mediums—leading to what has been coined the '‘infotainment*' of certain comedians, extremists, and any network, corporation, or commentator who would give consideration to giving a target audience what they desire or expect. In the following thesis, we will offer definitions for rhetoric and persuasion founded in a type of self-interested individual rationality which will have great explanatory power in why the arguments and debates of cable news commentators are structured in specific ways. We will also briefly touch upon journalistic codes of professional ethics while holding to Robert Nozick *s theories ofsuch ethical principles acting as a resistance to temptation. We then discuss the effect of this theory of persuasion and rhetoric on our idea of democratic discourse and its constituent facts. As a transition from philosophical to more economic concerns, we then discuss conceptions of individual rationality and how they fit within our theoreticalframework of democratic discourse and persuasion. We examine the possibility of the rationality of an agent not implying her knowledge of an objectively correct answer. This, we will see. leaves commentators much license to formulate sophistic arguments for the purposes of targeting specific demographics and increasing ratings. The ability being established, we will then construct a game theoretical model of a market for cable news and commentary in order to show the behavior of a rationally acting cable news network within that market. I will make several simplifying assumptions and outline the parameters of our model in order to show that, under some conditions, cable news networks have an economic incentive to target political demographics. Coming to the end of our discussion we make a summary of the arguments and add some comments on our market model.
Recommended Citation
Cruthirds, Zachary Mark, "Persuasion and Rhetoric in Cable News Commentary: A Philosophical" (2010). Honors Theses. 1975.
https://egrove.olemiss.edu/hon_thesis/1975
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