A copy of a posting to CRTNET:
I want to thank Tim Levine for posting his commentary on the “lameness” of NCA journals. I thank him not because I agree with his conclusions, but because his posting offered a very teachable moment for one of my classes.
I teach the Communication Department’s Introduction to Graduate Studies course at the University of Maryland, a course that is both about socialization to the university/department and to the discipline as well as an introductory discussion of research methods. The distribution of Tim’s posting in class generated considerable discussion, particularly about how research claims/arguments are made and the evidence or data used to support those arguments. Two lessons emerged from this discussion.
One lesson that the students quickly identified was the importance of care and precision in moving from data to the larger claims or arguments that are advanced in research. This, of course, relates to the second main lesson here—it is essential to understand how data/evidence are collected and used when making evaluative/normative claims about some empirical phenomenon.
Tim relies primarily on ISI’s Journal Citation Reports impact factor for his argument that NCA journals are “lame.” (Tim also employs Google Scholar—though my own experience with tracing citations through this source is that it is still quite new and unreliable, missing some obvious citations and including others that are unusual and rare.)
Interestingly, the year-by-year impact factors that ISI calculates are “the average number of times articles from the journal published in the past two years have been cited in the JCR year.” So, ISI will average the number of times articles published in QJS in 2006 and 2007 are cited in other ISI journals in 2008 for QJS’s 2008 impact factor.
The result, of course, is that there are wide shifts in impact ranking over the 11 years of ISI reports. Just last year, for example, Communication Monographs had the highest impact factor ranking of any NCA or ICA journal (and Communication Research)—it was #4 in 2007 with an impact factor of 1.512. The next closest journal was Communication Research at #5 (1.481). The Journal of Communication was #15 in 2007 with an impact factor of 1.156. Similar year-to-year shifts in overall impact factor rankings among Communication journals happen for virtually all of the journals Tim mentions. I’ve posted two graphs that display these shifts here: ISI Journal Graphs.
While it is true that ICA journals and CR are generally ranked higher in impact factor among Communication journals than are NCA journals, my students were quick to note, given the manner of data calculation by ISI and the significant shifts in this data, that these rankings may be explained by factors other than simply journal quality—they may involve citation and publication practices, editorial shifts and changes in journal focus, the differences in research and citation expectations in the humanities as opposed to the social sciences, etc. The students did conclude, though, that there is little here to justify the argumentative/normative conclusions that NCA journals are “lame,” a “home for irrelevant scholarship,” or a “poor choice for publication outlet.”
Tim asks in his post if he is “just missing something and reading the data wrong?” As we concluded in my course, that may be the case. It may also be the case that while the data on citation impact and patterns reveal much, they may not justify Tim’s rather sweeping indictment of NCA’s publications.
A couple of interesting stories for a beautiful fall day!
Maureen Dowd speculates on a conversation between George W. Bush (43) and Bill Clinton (42) upon hearing that 44 has won the Nobel Peace Prize. Even amidst the humor of the piece, Dowd manages to highlight the possible alternatives that might have been more plausible as recipients of the Nobel than Obama.
And the front page of the Washington Post today has a story about the coarsening of public discourse and political rhetoric as related to viral videos and technological change. Refreshingly, the story has a historical sensibility that recognizes the limits of presentism and recites some interesting negative moments from the past–Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and the like. Perhaps this sensibility comes because the story consulted and cited Tom Benson from Penn State.
Has the Obama administration totally mismanaged the health care debate?
Now, the White House announces that the president wants to address a joint session of Congress next week on health care. One of my graduate students wonders if that’s a “risky” move. It seems to me that this is a correct judgment–Obama is taking a big risk. I’m wondering about how these moves work historically.
Such speeches seem to be a creature of the rhetorical presidency, but in a rather unusual way. Books of presidential message and speeches from the eighteenth century contain numerous statements to Congress, but they weren’t delivered oratorically. Even State of the Union messages were delivered in writing until Woodrow Wilson actually went to Capitol Hill to deliver his report. Of course, Wilson is often identified as among the first of the truly rhetorical presidents.
There aren’t a lot of joint session speeches that come to mind. Big crises (Pearl Harbor, 9/11) give rise to such speeches, but I’m not sure that there’s many on particular public policy questions. Garth Pauley notes in his Voices of Democracy analysis of LBJ’s speech on civil rights legislation before a joint session that “Presidents rarely deliver special messages to Congress in person to advocate for a specific bill, especially on domestic policy; Harry Truman had been the last president to do so. Such speeches are risky, as they put the president’s crediblity on the line and chance making members of Congress resentful, feeling they are being coerced into action and having their law-making duties usurped.” (Garth Pauley, “Lyndon B. Johnson, ‘We Shall Overcome’ (15 March 1965),” Voices of Democracy 3 (2008): 24).
This is the challenge facing Obama, and it’s unlike the other rhetorical challenges he’s faced. Perhaps the hardest part for Obama will be finding the balance between general principles and delineations of the problems with the current health care system and specific policy proposals. And this is the problem he’s faced all along–the initial decision to not spell out a specific proposal but to leave that task to Congress.
In his fervent quest not to repeat the mistakes of the Clinton health care plan, Obama created a rhetorical vacuum that filled all too quickly by speculations about “death panels” and pulling the plug on grandma to Canada-style federal takeovers of health care. Sibelius and Gibbs give away the farm on the public option, then the administration backtracks. Now no one’s happy–not the left who are worried about being sold out by their knight in shining armor nor the right who were suspicious of Obama all along.
Will one big time speech do the trick? Probably not.
John Kerry said something I found quite interesting this morning on Meet the Press. The show was, as might be expected, devoted to memorializing Ted Kennedy.
When asked about what Kennedy taught Kerry upon the junior senator’s arrival in Washington, Kerry said: “David, when I first got involved in politics, I thought that politics was just about the issues. You know, you believe this, you believe that, you fight for this, you fight for that. What Teddy showed me is that politics–and this is slightly contrary to what Tip O’Neill said when he said all politics is local–all politics is personal. And that’s really what Teddy taught a lot of us, I think.”
What I find most interesting about this lesson is Kerry’s utter inability to bring the lesson about personal politics to life in his ill-fated 2004 presidential campaign. I don’t believe this is the only reason Kerry lost, but I think there’s plenty of evidence that he was simply unable to make a connection, to move people or persuade people that he was the person to lead, the leader to be president, the president to change the country. Unlike Ronald Reagan in 1980, Kerry didn’t ever manage the complicated political task of convincing a broader public of his capacity to be president in opposition to an incumbent.
Kerry’s words echo McGee’s admonition in 1978: “Human beings make up a government, not measures or issues.”
As someone born at the very end of the baby boom, the other Kennedys are a distant childhood memory for me, living largely in the realm of image and nostalgia. Not so, Ted Kennedy. Ever a part of my generation’s political consciousness, this Kennedy’s passing seems more authentic, more real and meaningful than the tragic assassinations in Dallas and Los Angeles.
I was particularly struck, this morning, listening to C-SPAN radio and the highly polarized reactions to Kennedy’s passing–from the deeply moved citizens who valued Kennedy’s persistence on their behalf in the areas of civil rights, education, the elderly, the disabled, and on and on, to the equally moved citizens lamenting Kennedy’s betrayal of his faith because of his support of abortion rights or angry because Kennedy so embodied liberal causes and progressive politics.
Missing somewhat from the memory coverage is a full appreciation of Kennedy’s rhetorical acumen and his rhetorical failures. Quoted ad nauseum are Kennedy’s powerful words in his 1980 convention speech: “For all those whose cares have been our concern, the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.” I would like to see a bit more coverage of Kennedy’s other rhetorical masterpieces–his powerful speech on the Senate floor that set the entire tenor of the effort to defeat Robert Bork’s nomination to the Supreme Court, his fantastic speech at the 1988 Democratic convention (”Where was George?”), his journey into the lion’s den at Falwell’s Liberty University to discuss “Truth and Toleration in America.”
And the failures–especially the Roger Mudd interview. Some cable news folks are discussing these rhetorical moments, but the mainstream coverage seems stuck in 1980 and then its retread in 2008.
Of course, this raises the rather interesting question about how oratory and rhetoric figure in the collective memorializing of public figures, particularly political ones. Admittedly, I’m an NBC viewer, so my sense of how Kennedy’s oratory is used in the memorializing coverage is limited by the choices NBC has made. On NPR, Nina Totenberg featured considerable coverage of Kennedy’s Bork speech, so the source may seriously affect the choices made. But more than anything, it’s intriguing to study how the first drafts of memory in the wake of such a public death as Ted Kennedy’s employ oratory and public rhetorical performances.
