Jim A. Kuypers

Last updated
Jim Kuypers
Nationality American
Alma mater Florida State University
Louisiana State University
Occupation(s)Professor, Business and Political Communication Consultant

Jim A. Kuypers is an American scholar and consultant specializing in communication studies. [1] A professor at Virginia Tech, he has written on the news media, rhetorical criticism and presidential rhetoric, and is particularly known for his work in political communication which explores the qualitative aspects of framing analysis and its relationship to presidential communication and news media bias.

Contents

Career

Kuypers graduated with a Bachelor of Science and a Master of Arts from Florida State University. He was a senior lecturer in rhetoric and oratory, Director of speech at Dartmouth College, taught at Florida State University, and Florida Atlantic University. He taught at Louisiana State University, where he earned a Ph.D. in communication studies. Since 2005 Kuypers has been teaching at Virginia Tech.

Scholarship

Kuypers' work falls into two categories: political communication and rhetorical criticism. The former spans both communication and political science, involving the study of the political rhetoric of individuals and groups. For Kuypers, politics is a process that takes place through communication, rather than the sheer exercise or attempt at power. [2]

Political communication

Kuypers searches for media bias, and how the news media frames political news. He developed a qualitative (rhetorical) version of framing analysis [ how? ] designed to look for bias, and to understand how the original messages of political actors are reframed by the press before transmitted to the public. [3] He has investigated how news broadcasts, stories, and editorials shape public understanding of issues and events in a particular direction. Quote: "Framing is a process whereby communicators, consciously or unconsciously, act to construct a point of view that encourages the facts of a given situation to be interpreted by others in a particular manner. Frames operate in four key ways: they define problems, diagnose causes, make moral judgments, and suggest remedies. Frames are often found within a narrative account of an issue or event, and are generally the central organizing idea." [3]

A framing analysis trilogy

Presidential Crisis Rhetoric and the Press

Kuypers' first major work examining framing, politics, and the news media was the 1997 book Presidential Crisis Rhetoric and the Press in the Post-Cold War World. In this work he examined the changed nature of presidential crisis rhetoric since the ending of the cold war, and first advanced a qualitative version of comparative framing analysis. It was here that he first used the term "agenda-extension" to describe a process where the news media "beyond the strict reporting of events" and instead foster a particular understanding of an issue or event. [4] In relation to other theories of the press, Kuypers argues that "agenda-extension begins when media gatekeepers decide to publish a particular story because issues are often framed by station managers, producers, or editors by how they decide to tell a particular story. Although deciding what story to tell (gate-keeping) is the first step in all news reporting, the press takes a second step when determining how much attention to give to the story (agenda-setting), and a third step when they determine how to tell the story (agenda-extension). [5]

Press Bias and Politics

In his 2002 book Press Bias and Politics: How the Media Frame Controversial Issues Kuypers comparatively analyzed the speeches of five public figures, ranging from ministers to presidents from 1995 to 2000. He examined approximately 700 press reports on controversial issues that were published in 116 different newspapers. He reports finding a "left of center bias in mainstream press reporting".[ how? ] Kuypers puts forward four distinct journalistic practices allowing bias to seep into reporting. He concludes that only "a narrow brand of liberal thought" was supported by the press, with "all other positions shut out or shut down". Kuypers has stated in an interview with the Cybercast News Service that "this bias hurts the democratic process in general" and that the U.S. mainstream press "is an anti-democratic institution". [6]

Bush's War

Kuypers' third book was Bush's War: Media Bias and Justifications for War in a Terrorist Age. According to Kuypers, "The idea [in the book was to] look for themes about 9-11 and the War on Terror that the President used, and then look at what themes the press used when reporting on what the president said. After identifying themes, I determine how those themes are framed. Through this comparative analysis, we can detect differences in the frames presented to the American people, and determine the nature of any press bias." [3] Kuypers found that the news media echoed the president's themes and the framing of those themes immediately following 9/11. But just eight weeks later, the press had changed its manner of reporting, was actually framing Bush as an enemy of civil liberties, and was actively helping critics of the president.[ page needed ]

Framing analysis and moral foundations theory

President Trump and the News Media: Moral Foundations, Framing, and the Nature of Press Bias in America

In this work Kuypers incorporates elements of Moral Foundations Theory to investigate the ideological underpinnings of press reports. Using a rhetorical version of framing analysis, he analyzes four major speeches by President Trump and compares them with the reporting on those speeches by the mainstream news media. The moral foundations of both Trump and the news media are examined to assess their respective moral/ideological underpinnings. The results both extends and refutes parts of framing theory by demonstrating how frames do not give rise to moral assessments as previously thought, but rather the presence of moral foundations provide moral substance to frames as they are developed and found throughout news coverage. [7] These results, the first combining framing analysis and moral foundations theory in this manner, reveal how journalists inject bias consciously and unconsciously into hard news stories, and that their moral foundations act to privilege liberal concerns and denigrate conservative concerns. Kuypers argues in this work that the news media framing acted to treat President Trump not as a source of news, but as a political opponent while at the same time helping the political opposition of the President. By evaluating journalistic practices through the lens of their own published ethical standards, Kuypers argues that contemporary journalistic practices are damaging the American Republic and makes the case for immediate incorporation of viewpoint diversity within news organizations.

Rhetorical criticism

Kuypers edited the 2009 book Rhetorical Criticism: Perspectives in Action in which he explains rhetoric and rhetorical criticism, and presents 16 different perspectives on how to perform rhetorical criticism. Kuypers has written about "rhetorical criticism" and tried to explain "advocacy based criticism" in his 2000 article "Must We All Be Political Activists?" [8] and the 2001 article "Criticism, Politics, and Objectivity: Redivivus". [9]

In his latest work on rhetorical criticism, "Purpose, Practice, and Pedagogy in Rhetorical Criticism", Kuypers brings together 15 nationally and internationally recognized rhetorical critics who each contribute a chapter examining the three areas mentioned in the title of the book. According to Kuypers, the chapter authors "enter into the continuing discussion about the purpose of criticism, yet move beyond this to address on a personal level how they actually perform criticism, and also how they actually teach criticism to others. All the authors in this book agree on the societal importance of knowledge about the creation and critique of rhetoric. Additionally, the authors collectively provide wide ranging and strong justifications for teaching rhetorical criticism." [10]

Selected publications

See also

Related Research Articles

Media bias is the bias of journalists and news producers within the mass media in the selection of many events and stories that are reported and how they are covered. The term "media bias" implies a pervasive or widespread bias contravening of the standards of journalism, rather than the perspective of an individual journalist or article. The direction and degree of media bias in various countries is widely disputed.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Rhetoric</span> Art of discourse

Rhetoric is the art of persuasion, which along with grammar and logic, is one of the three ancient arts of discourse. Rhetoric aims to study the techniques writers or speakers utilize to inform, persuade, or motivate particular audiences in specific situations. Aristotle defines rhetoric as "the faculty of observing in any given case the available means of persuasion" and since mastery of the art was necessary for victory in a case at law, for passage of proposals in the assembly, or for fame as a speaker in civic ceremonies, he calls it "a combination of the science of logic and of the ethical branch of politics". Rhetoric typically provides heuristics for understanding, discovering, and developing arguments for particular situations, such as Aristotle's three persuasive audience appeals: logos, pathos, and ethos. The five canons of rhetoric or phases of developing a persuasive speech were first codified in classical Rome: invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery.

The Media Research Center (MRC), formerly known as Culture and Media Institute (CMI), is an American conservative content analysis and media watchdog group based in Reston, Virginia, and founded in 1987 by L. Brent Bozell III.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Communication theory</span> Proposed description of communication phenomena

Communication theory is a proposed description of communication phenomena, the relationships among them, a storyline describing these relationships, and an argument for these three elements. Communication theory provides a way of talking about and analyzing key events, processes, and commitments that together form communication. Theory can be seen as a way to map the world and make it navigable; communication theory gives us tools to answer empirical, conceptual, or practical communication questions.

Rhetorical criticism analyzes the symbolic artifacts of discourse—the words, phrases, images, gestures, performances, texts, films, etc. that people use to communicate. Rhetorical analysis shows how the artifacts work, how well they work, and how the artifacts, as discourse, inform and instruct, entertain and arouse, and convince and persuade the audience; as such, discourse includes the possibility of morally improving the reader, the viewer, and the listener. Rhetorical criticism studies and analyzes the purpose of the words, sights, and sounds that are the symbolic artifacts used for communications among people.

Criticism of the war on terror addresses the morals, ethics, efficiency, economics, as well as other issues surrounding the war on terror. It also touches upon criticism against the phrase itself, which was branded as a misnomer. The notion of a "war" against "terrorism" has proven highly contentious, with critics charging that participating governments exploited it to pursue long-standing policy/military objectives, reduce civil liberties, and infringe upon human rights. It is argued by critics that the term war is not appropriate in this context, since there is no identifiable enemy and that it is unlikely international terrorism can be brought to an end by military means.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kathleen Hall Jamieson</span> American academic

Kathleen Hall Jamieson is an American professor of communication and the director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. She co-founded FactCheck.org, and she is an author, most recently of Cyberwar, in which she argues that Russia very likely helped Donald J. Trump become the U.S. President in 2016.

Media bias in the United States occurs when US media outlets skew information, such as reporting news in a way that conflicts with standards of professional journalism or promoting a political agenda through entertainment media. Claims of outlets, writers, and stories exhibiting both have increased as the two-party system has become more polarized, including claims of liberal and conservative bias. There is also bias in reporting to favor the corporate owners, and mainstream bias, a tendency of the media to focus on certain "hot" stories and ignore news of more substance. A variety of watchdog groups attempt to combat bias by fact-checking biased reporting and also unfounded claims of bias. Researchers in a variety of scholarly disciplines study media bias.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Digital rhetoric</span>

Digital rhetoric can be generally defined as communication that exists in the digital sphere. As such, digital rhetoric can be expressed in many different forms —including but not limited to text, images, videos, and software. Due to the increasingly mediated nature of our contemporary society, there are no longer clear distinctions between digital and non-digital environments. This has led to an expansion of the scope of digital rhetoric to account for the increased fluidity with which humans interact with technology.

Karlyn Kohrs Campbell is an American academic specializing in rhetorical criticism at the University of Minnesota.

Frame analysis is a multi-disciplinary social science research method used to analyze how people understand situations and activities. Frame analysis looks at images, stereotypes, metaphors, actors, messages, and more. It examines how important these factors are and how and why they are chosen. The concept is generally attributed to the work of Erving Goffman and his 1974 book Frame analysis: An essay on the organization of experience and has been developed in social movement theory, policy studies and elsewhere.

The third persona is the implied audience which is not present in, or is excluded from, rhetorical communication. This conception of the Third Persona relates to the First Persona, the "I" in discourse, and the second persona, the "you" in discourse. Third Persona is "the 'it' that is not present, that is objectified in a way that 'you' and 'I' are not." Third Persona, as a theory, seeks to define and critique the rules of rhetoric, to further consider how we talk about what we talk about—the discourse of discourse—and who is affected by that discourse. The concept of the third persona encourages examination of who is implicitly excluded from a discourse, why they are excluded, and what this can tell us about how that discourse participates in larger networks of social or political power.

Dramatism, a communication studies theory, was developed by Kenneth Burke as a tool for analyzing human relationships through the use of language. Burke viewed dramatism from the lens of logology, which studies how people's ways of speaking shape their attitudes towards the world. According to this theory, the world is a stage where all the people present are actors and their actions parallel a drama. Burke then correlates dramatism with motivation, saying that people are "motivated" to behave in response to certain situations, similar to how actors in a play are motivated to behave or function. Burke discusses two important ideas – that life is drama, and the ultimate motive of rhetoric is the purging of guilt. Burke recognized guilt as the base of human emotions and motivations for action. As cited in "A Note on Burke on "Motive"", the author recognized the importance of "motive" in Burke's work. In "Kenneth Burke's concept of motives in rhetorical theory", the authors mentioned that Burke believes that guilt, "combined with other constructs, describes the totality of the compelling force within an event which explains why the event took place."

In the social sciences, framing comprises a set of concepts and theoretical perspectives on how individuals, groups, and societies organize, perceive, and communicate about reality.

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Whataboutism or whataboutery denotes in a pejorative sense a procedure in which a critical question or argument is not answered or discussed, but retorted with a critical counter-question which expresses a counter-accusation. From a logical and argumentative point of view it is considered a variant of the tu-quoque pattern, which is a subtype of the ad-hominem argument.

The rhetoric of health and medicine is an academic discipline concerning language and symbols in health and medicine. Rhetoric most commonly refers to the persuasive element in human interactions and is often best studied in the specific situations in which it occurs. As a subfield of rhetoric, medical rhetoric specifically analyzes and evaluates the structure, delivery, and intention of communications messages in medicine- and health-related contexts. Primary topics of focus includes patient-physician communication, health literacy, language that constructs disease knowledge, and pharmaceutical advertising. The general research areas are described below. Medical rhetoric is a more focused subfield of the rhetoric of science.

The rhetorical presidency is a political communication theory that describes the communication and government style of U.S. presidents in the twentieth century. This theory describes the transition from a presidency that directed rhetoric toward the United States Congress and other government bodies, to one that addresses rhetoric, policy and ideas directly to the public.

Political bias is a bias or perceived bias involving the slanting or altering of information to make a political position or political candidate seem more attractive. With a distinct association with media bias, it commonly refers to how a reporter, news organisation, or TV show covers a political candidate or a policy issue.

Brian L. Ott is professor of Communication Studies and Director of the Texas Tech University Press (TTUP) at Texas Tech University. He is an author and communications expert in the field of study of rhetoric and media.

References

  1. "Jim A. Kuypers". liberalarts.vt.edu.
  2. [Denton and Kuypers, Politics and Communication in America: Campaigns, Media, and Governing in the 21st Century]
  3. 1 2 3 [Bush's War]
  4. [Jim A. Kuypers, Presidential Crisis Rhetoric and the Press in the Post-Cold War World, Greenwood Press, 1997.]
  5. [Jim A. Kuypers, Rhetorical Criticism: Perspectives in Action, Lexington Books, 2009.]
  6. "New book shows liberal bias dominates media news coverage". CHRISTIAN TIMES. EP news. 2 November 2002. Archived from the original on March 13, 2003. Retrieved 27 February 2014.
  7. [Jim A. Kuypers, President Trump and the News Media: Moral Foundations, Framing, and the Nature of Press Bias in America, Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2020.]
  8. "Must We All Be Political Activists?" n.p.
  9. "Criticism, Politics, and Objectivity: Redivivus" n.p.
  10. [Jim A. Kuypers, Purpose, Practice, and Pedagogy in Rhetorical Criticism, Lexington Books, 2014. xi.]