Rhetoric Movie Review

TS #1: The Message

The core message of this advertisement is that by reading and subscribing to the New York Times, the reader will experience the clarity and calm they are seeking within a chaotic world that has made truth ever elusive. The first key rhetorical choice I made while constructing the ad was to use pathos, and in particular the emotions of fear and apprehension, to create a sense of unease in the audience. I created apprehension through layering multiple vocal tracks and creating an up-tempo visual that complemented the vocal track; rather than communicating clearly with the audience, both of these devices created a cacophony which was impossible to understand. In their article, “The Role of Fear in Persuasion,” Professors Jason Anderson and James Dillard write that “research on fear/threat appeals has correlated fear intensity with persuasion,” and so I used the audio and visual chaos to cast ideological confusion as a threat to the audience which would help heighten their susceptibility to the message that by reading our paper they could defend themselves against that threat (Anderson and Dillard 909). After the audio and visual stimuli gradually reach a frenetic crescendo, I then created a calm silence followed by four crystal clear piano notes, with the final note pitched lower as if it were a conclusive period in a sentence. A final higher pitched note would have affected the audience in the same way interrogative intonation does, as when we ask questions and we raise our vocal pitch at the end of the sentence. But I made the rhetorical choice not to pose a question at the end of the ad, but in fact to give the audience the answer: subscribe to the New York Times. The main rhetorical device of the ad, then, is not one based on logical argument (logos), but on the emotional trajectory I created by shaking the audience with fear and apprehension and then calming them, with the final lasting image of our brand as the conclusive ending to this emotional trajectory.

TS# 2: The Ethos of the New York Times :

This emotional trajectory from fear to calm also need to be grounded by the New York Times’ ethos of objectivity and self-awareness, and so I interspersed liberal and conservative talking points in an alternate pattern to persuade the audience that our institutional credibility is committed to bi-partisan investigation. One of the most often talked about issues facing our culture today is pervasive media bias that caters exclusively to its own predetermined and loyal audience; one of the most effective rhetorical choices of the ad is to acknowledge this elephant in the room, which we did with the statement “the media is dishonest” flashing on the screen. By owning and acknowledging the audience’s possible distrust, we can begin to gain that trust by embracing their skepticism rather than more directly propping up our own trustworthiness. By carefully placing the audience’s concerns about the media front and center in our own media driven advertisement, the ethos of self-awareness we are building is meant to place the New York Times on the same side of the reader as a skeptical disbeliever in the ability of the media to tell the truth. The objectivity we create as part of our ethos is further reinforced by a nuanced assessment of truth as “hard to know,” and so we carefully obscured the possible bias of our publication by further developing this ethos not as a confident truth teller, but a humble investigator who stares down and faces the insurmountable amount of confusing information currently available in the atmosphere of our 24 hours news cycle. I previously noted how the actual music which is pathos based is meant to convey conclusive confidence; here I complemented this confidence with the ethos of self-awareness that any direct statement about such confidence would alienate an audience increasingly distrustful of national media outlets. Gallup, a nationally renowned research and polling company that has existed since 1935, conducted a poll on media distrust seen below which shows how in 2016 the public has reached a new national low fir having very little confidence in the mass media such as newspapers as the New York Times. Thus our ethos of self-awareness and objectivity was designed to counteract this tangibility distrust and hostility present in our audience (Swift).

Figure 1: Gallup Poll on Media Distrust

TS #3: The Audience (Gender/Class/Education/Political Leanings/Religion/Special Interests):

Even while I used this ethos of objectivity and self-awareness to persuade the audience of the ad that we offer professional and impartial reporting, our primary audience of potential subscribers was a politically liberal, coastal, college-educated, and middle aged audience whose demographics match the demographics of current readers and were predicted by the time slot of the Oscars Broadcast.

WHO already reads the New York Times: