Spiro Agnew's Rhetoric against the News Media Analytical Essay by scribbler

The paper relates that in 1969, Vice President Spiro Agnew gave an unprecedented address to a group of Republican officials in Des Moines, Iowa, complaining about the behavior of the American news industry. The paper goes on to show how although Agnew at times manages an air of reasoned argument, the rhetoric he deploys actually relies almost entirely on insinuation and the emotional emphasis resulting from a deep-seated sense of entitlement. The paper demonstrates how Agnew worked to create the kind of faulty semantic sequence identified by Alfred Korzybski that manages to convince the audience of its veracity by positing the particular words of the speaker as directly correlational to the facts referenced by those words. The paper argues that in this way, Agnew is able to make his irrelevant complaints about New York and media criticism sound like reasoned rebuttals to the administration's critics.