Paul Johnson Paper Proposal Digital Public Sphere July, 2009 Towards a Stylistic Typology of Liberal and Conservative

Blogs This paper proposes to undertake a stylistic analysis of six of the most popular blogs on the internet. In order to keep the scope and magnitude of the study within reason, I will limit my analysis to the six blogs treatments of a single issue: the Russian incursion into the Caucasian state of Georgia in early August, 2008. I will limit my study to all the posts made in the two weeks following the incursion, starting with the day of the event. Any further expansion of the analysis risks a near infinite analysis of all coverage relating to Russia and aggression in the last few years, and such a study is beyond the scope of this paper. My paper takes as its jumping off point two very important works in the rhetorical canon. The first is Edwin Blacks study of The Second Persona (1999). If, as Black argues, The critic can see in the auditor implied by a discourse a model of what the rhetor would have his real auditor become (p. 335), then a study which examines whether there are certain stylistic typologies that manifest themselves among blogs that claim a certain partisan political identification might help to discover if there are certain styles that lend themselves more to the identification within the political traditions of conservatism and liberalism1. These tokens of ideology lend clues to the frames of reference being utilized by the writers of these blogs, and leave clues and hints about the second persona established within the text (p. 336). While recognizing, with Robert Hariman, that the analysis of political style has to identify its subject both as a relatively stable and comprehensive pattern of motivation
1

Liberalism in the modern political sense of progressive politics attached to goals of social justice and equality, not the classical idea of liberal government through sense of emotional community ala Adam Smith.

Paul Johnson Paper Proposal Digital Public Sphere July, 2009 embedded in specific social practices and as a dynamic process that is inherently unstable and unsettling (1995, p. 179), I can do no better than an anecdotal analysis of the coverage that these representative clusters of blogs provide to create a mini-compendium of political style. Harimans work on political style helps to give me a vocabulary with which to analyze the discourses and arrangement utilized by the blogosphere to discuss the Georgia incursion. As these questions of political style are intimately related to the process of being civic (and attendant questions of power, masking, and structure), Harimans typology of styles helps me to classify and group the different approaches taken by the respective blogs. I will read six different blogs for this paper. The three on the right will be National Review Onlines The Corner, the Minnesota based Powerline, and Hot Air, the collective blog populated mostly by Ed Morrisey and Allahpundit. The three liberal blogs I will read include Joshua Micah Marshalls Talking Points Memo, the immensely popular Daily Kos, and Tapped, the group blog of the American Prospect magazine. I will only read articles related to the Georgia incursion, including those that are generally about US-Russian foreign policy and relations. I am interested in whether there are differences stylistically in the way that blogs report international incidents, and also, if there are concomitances between liberal and conservative blogs when reporting, particularly on matters of foreign policy concern (which ought to be dominated by the realist political style, if Harimans assertions about Machiavelli hold water).

Paul Johnson Paper Proposal Digital Public Sphere July, 2009 Works Cited Black, E. (1999). The Second Persona. In J. Lucaites, C. Condit & S. Caudill (Eds.), Contemporary Rhetorical Theory: A Reader. New York: Guilford Press. Hariman, R. (1995). Political Style: The Artistry of Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.