The rhetoric of the newspaper: The 'Washington Post' and Marion Barry

The discourse of a reputable daily American newspaper is analyzed to answer the question "What is rhetorical about news writing?" The study takes as its sample of newspaper discourse, the Washington Post's coverage of the District of Columbia's controversial mayor Marion Barry during his troubled third term of office, specifically the period between the Ramada Inn incident of December 1988 and the arrest of the mayor on drug charges in January 1990.;The code of objectivity which governs journalistic writing demands that newspapers make clear the distinction between "fact" and "opinion" in their columns. Specimens of news discourse on the topic of Marion Barry from different parts of the paper are analyzed to demonstrate the rhetorical implications of this journalistic convention.;Chapter One examines the rhetorical tradition in American newspaper journalism and the history of objectivity as an ethical construct. The next two chapters analyze the conventions peculiar to newspaper discourse that have a distinct rhetorical function. Using the critical methodology of major rhetoricians and discourse analysts, these chapters demonstrate the strategies and devices available in the genre of newspaper writing for creating salience--the salience of "arrangement" in Chapter Two, and the salience of "accrual" in Chapter Three. Chapter Four explores the workings of Kenneth Burke's "identification" and Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca's "association/dissociation" in the context of the Barry case. Specifically, the chapter treats race as a special constraint in the rhetorical situation involving the traditional white newspaper and the black mayor, and examines the newspaper's management of this constraint in the news reports, editorials and commentaries it published on the topic of Barry.