Political Rhetoric and Your Freedom, the Reasonable Person Standard

I just finished watching a rerun of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and he said something that really hit home with me, and was a very articulate, yet not pretentious, way of explaining my personal position on political discourse in the modern and postmodern eras. I can't remember the exact quote, but he was talking about the mannerisms and style of rhetoric used by politicians when speaking. I should elaborate here, I am describing the flow of words and sentence structure along with word choice that effects how information is presented to and received by an audience.

Stewart's comment was something to the effect of "Why can't we just sit down and talk like adults, without the use of 'code.' Politicians devise sentences that allow them the 'wiggle room' to go back and restructure our positions later for 'plausible deniability.'"

The purpose of this blog is not to show examples of our of politicians performing, it is rather to argue for the loss and potential recovery of the Reasonable Person Standard, as described by Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Paul Waldman in their book, The Press Effect: Politicians, Journalists, and the Stories That Shape the Critical World (great read, really very interesting if you're into Journalism or Sociology at all, easy to follow for the most part). The Reasonable Person Standard (RPS) is relatively self-explanatory, but it still warrants further explanation.

Now, I should tell you I'm not going to cite anything here. If/when I use a quote, I'm not going to do page numbers in the book and all that jazz. I'm posting my formal essay after I finish this blog, and it contains all the proper citations for the references I'm using. So check that one if you need specificity.

The RPS could be obtusely defined as "common sense;" however, this would be an oversimplication. I think the best way to explain it is to think of jury duty. When your on a jury, you're job is to look at the facts, and decide what a reasonable person placed in that situation would do or understand. It's not rocket science, there are absolutely no academic requirements for serving on a jury. Now Jamieson & Waldman go more in depth and explore about nine other guidelines for political press coverage, which are more specific in how to successfully execute the Reasonable Person Standard in a journalistic setting and are important, but not necessary here. They can pretty much just be lumped under the umbrella of the RPS. Again, refer to the formal essay for detail.

When politicians use spin or misleading rhetoric to confuse the public perspective, they are undermining your right to information and your right to make your own choices based on pure information. Dare I say it, your freedom? Isn't that kind of what freedom is, at least from a very broad democratic perspective. People are supposed to be able to make their own decisions about their lives, based off of accurate information provided to the public. Now, I'm not going to argue that most people don't want to participate and are uninterested in active democracy, but that's partly due to the difficulties in finding clear, unspun information that is widely available and easy to understand. Enter what is supposed to be the role of journalism in society. With spreading postmodern skepticism, however, the media is losing its reputation as an unbiased source of clear and reliable information. To go in deeply here would take too long, and would not be effective for the purpose of this blog, but maybe I'll write about it soon in another.

This is becoming one of the great problems of society in our time. The manipulation of information to present a distorted view of facts is undermining our freedom and our ability to govern ourselves. Then again, we've done it to ourselves. We've made the true facts so complicated, so difficult to find, that most Americans have given up searching for them. Further, any information that is presented to individuals rather than observed by them is increasingly beoming suspect as fraud in the mind of the individual. We've let a few bad apples spoil the bunch. Fellow Americans, call for reliability and accuracy from your media. Demand clarified, but not oversimplified information. Don't allow rhetoric to twist facts to fit the story, use the facts to write the story. Become an active member in your democracy. Freedom is yours for the taking.

Supes