Stases and News: Let the Audience Decide

In reading both of these articles, a connection can be drawn between the stases and the audience and, in the case of the Killingsworth and Palmer article, the news and society/human interest. The main concern I had being how the stases can affect audience as well as the information to support the claims or argument that the stases is making. In delving into these ideas, the issue of scientific studies grabbed my attention as well. The overall validity of the news and the supporting claims they give for their arguments are in fact moot and pointless.

Fahnestock and Secor state that stases  "...operate as a set of potential assumptions or reactions. Their apparent logical order does not reflect an externally imposed requirement of validity" (431). In other words as long as the stases does not need to have a valid point, rather it could be a set of logical statements that draw the read to a certain conclusion on their own. This is can be seen in the Killingswort hand Palmer article  in the section about global warming in which information and statistics are given about how the earths climate is changing. The information follows a logical order due to a common theme of global warming. The reader is drawn to want to take action and stop global warming, even though the article does not state that the reader should do so.

Reading the statistics and supporting scientific studies lead me to another realization. In the Fahnestock and Secor article on pages 432 and 433, they say that the majority of studies and experiments do not have outcomes that support a thesis or provide a clear conclusion. However in the the article on global warming (and even in news today), there are all these statistics and studies that are being thrown around. Yet most of them are not valid, they are just logical. They share a common theme and are used with other studies that have no solid evidence to lead the audience to a certain conclusion, even if the conclusion isn't fully true. It isn't a new concept or idea, but when viewing the articles and ideas the news puts out as stases, it makes a bit more sense.

In conclusion I found that these articles interact with one another via the audience. The audience is what determines what is news or relevant, and what information is given to support the stases the news is making. I did see the line of questioning used in the rhetorical analysis of stases carry over into how information is given in the news, but it seemed to obvious to write about. Though I'm sure it will be a topic of discussion in the next class.