Pundit Boxscore for Tuesday 15 April 2003

THE RHETORICIAN RESPONDS: Lying in Pond's favorite rhetoric scholar, Andrew Cline of Rhetorica, responds to yesterday's question -- What makes a columnist good?

This is an interesting question. Before it can be answered, however, one must deal with intention. What does a columnist intend to do?

From a rhetorician's perspective, I'm interested in the politics of intention. In other words, what changes to the hearts and minds of an audience does the columnist wish to make? Some such intention is always present. And, as I would argue, it is always political (if not always in the overt sense of partisanship).

I often challenge my students with this True/False assertion: Any rhetoric that works is good rhetoric. It takes them about 2 seconds to discover that this is more than an assertion about persuasion; this is an assertion about definition and moral philosophy.

What does a columnist intend to do? What fascinates me about your site is that you catalog columnists by partisanship and thereby call attention to what I would call overt political intentions, i.e. these folks want to overtly affect the political process for their party/ideology.

Now, if they succeed, if they gain a big and growing audience, if they sway public opinion, then I would suggest that, in terms of utility, they have achieved their intention and are then, by definition, good columnists.

But, what of the intention that inheres in professional practice? Are not columnists supposed to be journalists, opinionated to be sure, but still bound by certain professional practices? Such a question begins to muck up the "clarity" of my original assertion.

We might also question the morality of a columnist's ideology/political practice. More muck.

Prof. Anthony Downs demonstrated many years ago that people will seek out political information that offers the most utility, i.e. easy to get and easy to use. Partisan columnists play a large role in political utility.