Argumentation and Representation: A Case Study of How Political Arguments are Represented in Print News

This thesis is an in-depth case study that examines how major policy speeches containing extended arguments are condensed and reported in written news sources, specifically looking at what claims and evidence are omitted and how such omissions might affect media consumers. Kathleen Jamieson's seminal study, Eloquence in an Electronic Age: The Transformation of Political Speechmaking, documented how radio and TV "shrink" political discourse, but less is known about this process for newspapers. Although newspapers and digital publishing platforms typically have more extended coverage than radio or TV, they nevertheless engage in accommodations that require omitting key components of more extended political arguments. This study focuses on two instances of political argumentation and their subsequent news media representations: President Obama's ABC News interview in which he came out in support of same-sex marriage in May 2012 and Obama's address to Congress on the need for health care reform from September 2009. In each case, the argument is broken down into its major claims, then traced through a variety of liberal and conservative mainstream and independent news sources, selected because of their large readerships. The analysis shows that news outlets excluded major claims from these political arguments, instead choosing to highlight simply the overall position or focusing solely on the anecdotal evidence provided with the argument. For example, of the six major claims in Obama's same-sex marriage interview, news outlets tended to directly report an average of 1.8 main claims (30.5% of the claims), while sometimes indirectly including one or two of the others. Many media outlets also chose to exclude claims that individuals on both sides of the political spectrum might agree on, therefore contributingand perhaps escalating -the controversy surrounding these issues.