11/28/2011

ECA - Communication Quarterly, 59.5 Published

Communication Quarterly, 59.5 Published

Communication Quarterly’s fifth issue of Volume 59 is now available and features a range of articles about political communication authored by scholars from around the nation. This is the first “#5” for a volume in CQ’s history!

Access CQ at www.ecasite.org. Volume 59.5 includes:

Don Waisanen, from Baruch College (CUNY), examines the hyperreal social critique of The Onion News Network. Waisanen argues that the ONN uses ironic iconicity rather than slapstick or the usual tomfoolery of much comedy programming, to invite rhetorical insights about contemporary media events and political practices. The ONN’s ironic iconicity crafts a multimodal online rhetoric and demonstrates the contingency, recursivity, and judgment of news communication norms and practices.

Jennifer Stromer-Galley & Lauren Bryant, from the University at Albany-SUNY, offers a content analysis of the questions asked and answered in the CNN/YouTube debate from the 2008 presidential campaign. Their results indicates that the CNN/YouTube debate questions from citizens failed to reflect the broad set of issues of interest to those who submitted questions, and instead included a disproportionate number of culture-war issues and campaign strategy questions.

West Chester University’s David Levasseur, J. Kanan Sawyer, and Maria Kopacz attempt to unravel the tension between gendered styles of discourse and moral frames by examining rhetoric drawn from the 2007 debate over comprehensive immigration reform. To account for the success of conservative messages within this debate, their essay calls into question the nature of the relationship between television and the “feminine style” and expands understanding of the discursive operation of deep moral frames by drawing a distinction between intra-familial and extra-familial policy discourse.

Other articles in CQ 59.5 include:

• Sara DeTurk examines the communication experiences of people who challenge social injustice on behalf of others.
• Sarah Hagedorn VanSlette & Josh Boyd enrich the theory of “outlaw discourse” by exploring the role of the “trickster” in such rhetoric.
• Christopher R. Darr explores Adam Ferguson’s notion of civil society to explain how (in)civility operates in the context of U.S. Senate debates.
• John H. Parmelee, John Davies, & Carolyn A. McMahan look at the rise of non-traditional site use for online political information.