A group of faculty colleagues and graduate students (along with some significant others and kids) recently went to Ford’s Theater for a matinee performance of The Rivalry–a stage play about the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. The play was great, the acting was convincing, and the experience at Ford’s Theater was simultaneously eerie and compelling. Also of interest was the presence of the newest justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor, at the play. She sat right in front of a group of us, in the balcony.
Of course, thoughts of Lincoln bring to mind the tremendous contributions of rhetorical scholars who have examined our 16th president’s rhetorical discourse. At the top of that group is Michael Leff, who passed away on Friday, February 5th. Over the last few years, I was pleased to get to know Mike a bit more, specifically at the annual ECA conventions, where Leff was always a presence, as well as at other meetings and conferences. His loss is quite sad and he will be sorely missed.
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.”
A group of faculty colleagues and graduate students (along with some significant others and kids) recently went to Ford’s Theater for a matinee performance of The Rivalry–a stage play about the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858. The play was great, the acting was convincing, and the experience at Ford’s Theater was simultaneously eerie and compelling. Also of interest was the presence of the newest justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor, at the play. She sat right in front of a group of us, in the balcony.
