I don’t want to get philosophical, but instead rhetorical. What is “truth” in rhetoric? Within our discussions in class, we spoke about the rhetorical aspect of truth and briefly distinguished it from the philosophical concept of truth. They are not the same thing, but rather two ways to approach and view our knowledge. And these truths vary and change, but can be used to persuade us into believing a certain way. So to begin, we discussed how truth comes from knowledge. I found this very simple to understand- you can’t believe in a truth without first having some sort of knowledge of it. However, what I questioned was if this knowledge also involved understanding. Is the mere knowledge of a “truth” enough for belief, or does belief in a truth require understanding? Before we went on in our discussion, I held the stance that in order for truth to hold, it must be known AND understood, meaning that there needs to be evidence and support in order to have the audience or listener understand what the truth is about and have the opportunity to believe it. This ties back to the concept of rhetorical truth where we ask the question: How do we know what we know? I will elaborate a bit on this in the next section.

So to continue, another aspect that was elaborated on in our discussion was this difference in rhetorical and philosophical truth. In rhetoric, there is a cultural construction of knowledge where we ask the questions: what is known? How do we know it? However, in philosophy, we have what is seen as universal truth where the question asked is: what can be known? And to stick to rhetorical truths, what needs to be shown in these truths is evidence and backup to claims of truth. With this in mind, let me introduce the ideas of episteme, doxa, and techne which we elaborated on in class. Episteme means knowledge or “justified true belief.” The word derives from the Ancient Greek word for knowledge or science. In other words, it means truth that stands as fact. This may be through evidence and testing and shows it as absolute fact. Doxa, however, juxtaposes episteme. Doxa means common belief or popular opinion. Behind doxa there is no real evidence except the fact that others believe it to be true. Doxa therefore changes from person to person and brings the variety in truths in rhetoric.

However, one thing worth mentioning is that episteme and doxa are not separate realms or spheres of thinking. We discussed in class that these concepts are more like a spectrum. There are varying levels of each where a truth is seen closer to episteme or closer to doxa. Furthermore, one of the important things to keep in mind is the concept of logos and its influence in doxa and episteme. I already touched a bit on it, but to elaborate a bit more, logos works as the separation between doxa and episteme. The evidence behind a truth establishes it as doxa or episteme and creates the foundation on which the truth stands.

When it comes to popular opinion on politics in the United States, partisanship between our two major parties has created a rift when it comes to media coverage. With this polarization of consumers, networks are influenced by both the companies that own them, and the fight to keep viewership high. The result is that mainstream media holds significant sway over the public’s consumption of information regarding politicians and those around them, but it will almost always be met by a conflicting vision from the other side.

In this way, Hillary Clinton, a Democrat who has been a target of media review for many years now, has a pretty tight control over her image with about half the country, and fairly little control over the rest. It wasn’t always like this though, as before Hillary was such a powerful figure in the U.S. Government, her image was determined (in the media) by her relation to others, such as her marriage to Bill Clinton. While she was a successful lawyer in her own right, she didn’t have anywhere near the personal influence she does today, or the backers to help her create a media image, and therefore was subjected to whatever spin they wished to put on the story of the day.

Now however, as Hillary runs for president, her media control is very noticeable. While some things have stuck from when she first started being covered, such as being called “Hillary” or “HRC” among other things, her campaign media managers actively work to develop her image, be it on social media, what she wears, or even what interviewers are allowed to ask her many news stations. One of her top donors, Time Warner Cable, who has donated over $400,000 to her campaign, owns CNN. With her new large support network and backing of the DNC, it is easy to see the micromanaging of her image that occurs.

For example, in CNN politics a poll was issued after a debate asking about the victor, and online respondents answered that Sanders had won 81% to Hillary’s 13%. This was quickly removed and replaced with an opinion piece titled “Clinton triumphs in Democrat debate as rivals compete to lose.” showing a clear spin from what could be considered the “public’s opinion” (although online polls are subject to brigading, especially from the younger voting group that supports Bernie).

Jumping over to Fox News, we see the opposite side of this. Regardless of what Hillary does, it will only bring up the negative, as we see from its coverage of her in almost exclusively speculation about her e-mail scandal. While Hillary can control her own image in public, and a portion of the media’s coverage of her in a positive way, at this point in time a person’s public image is created by such a large variety of sources that there is no hope for influencing them all.

Overall, I believe Hillary has a much higher amount of agency in the creation of her own public image than almost any other person in America, but with this visibility and power comes the detractors who will always exist on the opposite side of any vision she tries to create.

Her eyes longingly gaze toward a life she was never able to obtain. Her children, poor and afraid, huddle around her, slumped over strong shoulders that have tirelessly borne the burden of raising an impoverished family for years.  She is the Migrant Mother– the iconic face of The Great Depression, captured in a moment, remembered for decades to come.

Back in 1936, this image catapulted Dorthea Lange, a struggling photographer, into everlasting fame. “Migrant Mother” ignited empathy across the nation for those hit hardest by the depression. However, one crucial element is glaringly absent from this quintessential piece of visual rhetoric– its context.

In the beginning of this unit, we talked about the Rhetorical Triangle– a model developed by Blitzer that defines the key elements required to analyze a text. He pins audience, writer, and context to each of the triangle’s vertices, indicating that they’re each equally important. We know both who both the speaker and decoder of this message is, but when and where was this photo taken? Who is this so called “Migrant Mother” and what’s her story? Without answers, this photograph lends itself to contextual manipulation, which it did have to endure in the form of propaganda after it was published.

When pressured for context, Lange admitted to staging the photograph without knowing anything about her subject. The image is striking, but there’s no telling whether or not it accurately depicts the reality of the Great Depression. All we know is that it portrays an accurate depiction of America’s memory of this time period, an analysis we can only make when we evaluate the context of this image’s distribution– the fact that Lange gave her audience absolutely no context to reference.

There’s a reason Blitzer included context in his triangle. Without it, it’s easy to misconstrue information and impossible to gain a holistic understanding of a circumstance. Even the deprivation of background information is valid context for analyzing situations, as understood in the analysis of “Migrant Mother” by Dorthea Lange.

Based on what we learned in class, “doxa” refers to common belief and popular opinion, while “episteme” is portrayed as more of a justified, true belief. We briefly touched on the distinction between the two with some examples such as evolution, and how that shifted from a general knowledge of the creation of humans through the Bible (doxa) to a solidified idea that humans evolved from early primates through series of adaptations which can be justified scientifically (episteme). However, even after the examples we covered in class, the distinction was still really confusing to me as I tried to identify the respective terms in the context of my essay. After some careful research (aka a five minute google search), I have a clearer view on what doxa and episteme are in relation to each other.

To start off, doxa is like a foundation of knowledge or beliefs. A solid mass of common thoughts that may be shaky in some areas, but has enough following to be built upon later to create a substantial argument. An example of this would be “people with bad hygiene are unattractive.” There hasn’t been any scientific studies (that I am aware of) that attribute people’s perceived attractiveness to whether they smell good, which is subjective in itself. We don’t all like the same type of smells, some people like being natural and decide not to wear any sort of fragrance, while others (me included) love to bathe in our favorite scents because that is what we like as individuals. An important principle of doxa is that it is culturally contingent, it changes from culture to culture so it excludes some part of a general audience. Episteme differs from doxa in this sense, it deals with less subjective views and uses objective observations to make arguments more substantial.

In the building metaphor, if doxa is the foundation, episteme is the steel beam that makes up the frame work of the argument. Besides using basic reasoning skills to come to a conclusion, which is commonly done in doxa, episteme goes beyond that and reveals the actual process that lead to the conclusion. It demonstrates a deeper knowledge and understanding of the argument that allows the idea to become immutable, which is why science is a good form of episteme because it is observational, empirical, and sometimes inductive. An example of this would be the practice of law. If we saw someone blatantly breaking a law, our first impulse would be to say that the person is guilty! This is doxastic in nature, we are creating a judgment based on our personal belief that this is wrong and the social conventions of “laws” should not be broken. In contrast, a lawyer would use logos to view the situation, there’s a process that they must undergo to reach the conclusion on whether or not that person is truly guilty. What specific law did they break? Is there observable proof that a violation occurred? There is a methodical approach to episteme that sharply differs from the way conclusions are reached using doxa.

Hillary Clinton is probably one of the most talked about women in society over the past 20 years. Ever since she first went into politics she has been praised, criticized, and a topic of controversy. Especially over the last couple years now that she has shown an interest in running for president. Hillary probably has more control over her image now than she ever has. Back in the day when she was the first lady she was the subject of mass scrutiny, as are most first ladies, as she was the first woman in the position to demonstrate a level of independence and separation from the president. She has always been very vocal and expressive about her strong opinion and beliefs about issues in the country. Now that she is running for president, her ability to shape her image is very clear. It is very easy to see that many issues that Hillary believed strongly one way about back in the 90s, she has completely changed her stance on in order to cater to a larger audience and gain more support. There are many anti Hillary campaigns on the internet where they put direct quotes from her side by side and they are pretty much exact opposite statements. Even with this level of anti Hillary propaganda and controversy that exists in society, she has still managed to covey a good image to democratic voters and gain much support. While the media does shape societies opinions about many popular figures, in todays society there are many ways in which the figures themselves can manipulate the popular media, especially now a days with the prevalence of the internet, in order to shape the opinions about them. Hillary Clinton especially has pulled on the issues of feminism and equal representation to boost her overall approval. Many Hillary Clinton supporters want to vote her into to office just based on the fact that she would be the first woman president, and Hillary knowing this uses that to her advantage even more. While the internet has allowed there to be more transparency in the lives and actions of presidential candidates and politicians in general, it is much easier for those people to manipulate the media online to push whatever agenda they are trying to on to the public. While I do not believe that people are only supporting Hillary and only want her in office because she is a woman, I do believe that he is very aware of her status and definitely uses the feminism card to gain more supporters and to boost the approval from her current supporters. The media is a very powerful tool in todays society, not only in elections but in how people are viewed by the public in general. In fairness I think Hillary Clinton would be stupid to not pull the feminism card in order to boost her support. I honestly do not think she would even be a prominent figure in the current race if she did not have so much support for being a woman.

Hillary Rodham Clinton has had a very long and public battle with the media to protect her “public image.” In fact, she has tried to control it so much that she is often criticized for her fake personality, as evidenced by the constant comparisons of her personality to that of a robot. However, this is obviously contradictory to her wishes, as being a likable and relatable person is critical to a career politicians success. Her handling of her campaign has taken almost every wrong turn possible, and this leads me to the conclusion that public figures do have some control over how they are perceived by the public at large. Hillary was once a highly-regarded politician, but her mishandling of situation after situation has lead to a decline in overall public image.

With the upcoming presidential elections, and the current fight over who will represent the two main parties, public perception of Hillary Rodham Clinton and every other potential candidate is of utmost importance. However, partly due to her own actions and partly due to media influence, Hillary and her public image have taken a great stumble down in what was once thought to be an easy path to represent the Democrats in the general election. Her involvement in Benghazi and the email server scandal have been the main driving force behind her decline popularity, but her handling (or possibly how the media chose to display her handling) of the situations definitely made things worse. Instead of issuing a statement she was wrong and admitting that it was very, very poor judgement on her part, Hillary decided to fight back against the media. The ultimate downfall here comes from the two ways the media chose to respond to Hillary’s comments. The first plan of attack was to keep researching the scandals and making a much bigger deal out of the situations than they would have, had she chosen not to fight back. The extra research lead to some discoveries that she really did not want to become public, which are having a negative impact on how she is viewed. The other way the media is fighting back against the Hillary machine is by giving more favorable coverage of her opponent and less favorable coverage of her. Hillary has managed to make a very close race out of one that was hers to take through her interactions with the public and the media. When you think that her path to becoming president is in doubt due to a socialist who wants to give away everything for free, an idea that has never been successful in any part of the world, it is clear that her campaign’s actions up to this point have had an impact on her campaign. This impact though is very bad for her public image, and shows that public figures do have some control over their public image, and that they should think long and hard about how certain actions will be perceived. Bernie has made all the right moves (two years ago he was not very well known, whereas Hillary was a name that everyone knew and had some opinion of), Hillary had made all the wrong moves, and that is why the primaries have not been the cake walk Hillary was once thought to have.

In the 1990’s, the Internet was this new and crazy idea. The media and television stations were able to yield more power over the public image of Hillary Clinton. Today, the Internet plays a vital role to daily life, and with the evolution of social media, celebrities, politicians, and other public figures are able to control their image more. Although the media still has the ability to manipulate any visuals from public figures, having social media takes away the middleman (the media) in a way. If someone follows Hillary Clinton’s account directly on Twitter, then watching the news might not be a top priority.

It is important to note that Hillary Clinton is a special case since she is running for presidency. Even with social media, television and news station possess a large role in how she is portrayed since the presidency campaign is a high coverage topic. Nevertheless, I believe the news stations hold more influence over the older generations, whereas Internet-based media has a stronger presence in the younger millennial generation. For example, there are viral posts comparing Hillary Clinton against Bernie Sanders, her main competitor for the Democratic nomination, and highlight how “old” or “out-of-date” Clinton is with younger voters. Official media organizations are not responsible for those posts, but instead it is the young adults who are social media users.

Either way, wherever or however people rely on obtaining information, repetition is a crucial factor when enforcing ideas or statements, whether good or bad. There’s a saying that if you tell yourself something enough times, then you will eventually start to believe it. If the media portrays a message enough times, people will start to believe it – similar to war propaganda. A present day example would be Jimmy Kimmel’s Lie Witness News, which showcases how people are willing to lie to sound like they are knowledgeable about the topic. While visual manipulation is probably present, the message continues to be the same and doxa is created, people continue to believe and comment on how ignorant those people featured in the video are. That can be hard when the public relies on news stations to be honest and factual, when in reality they are biased or altering the news.

As stated in the HRC article, images from the 1992 campaign are recycled for stories and therefore, can be re-contextualized for whatever story the media intends to portray. The video shown during class, “Hillary Clinton for Millennials”, used several images and videos from that time period. While the video was published to YouTube in 2015, it displayed visuals from decades ago. News recycling is not something new and will not be eradicated in the near future. From the HRC article, there are multiple motives for the use of news recycling: appearance of consistent and factual stories, saving money, and impression that the news stations was there capturing the important events. Although these are conceivable motives, at what point is news recycling not suitable? There are certainly more current videos and images of Clinton, yet decade old images and the squiggly, colorful aesthetic of the 1990’s were prominent in the “Hillary Clinton for Millennials” video. This exemplifies how the media is trying to create a common belief about Clinton using news recycling. As Hillary Clinton continues to run for presidency and be in the spotlight, her control over her image deceases more and more everyday. Clinton’s social media posts can only sway the public so much, and even then, those posts can be manipulated and reframed by the media.

Personally I do not think Hillary has much control over her public image. Anything Hillary does can be spun to make it seem like she’s rude/nice/crazy/anything you want. Even when the Monica Lewinsky news broke, the media controlled how the public saw Hillary. They used old photos of her crying to make it seem like was super upset. I’m sure she was upset but they used old photos to get their point across. The media even uses certain camera techniques to portray Hillary in a certain way. For example with spectator positioning, they are able to make viewers feel they are the recipients of Hillary’s anger. Plus you have more conservative media outlets that will never portray Hillary in a good light. While Liberal news outlets will rarely make conservative politicians look good as well. I think very few politicians have control over their own public image. Anything you say as a politician is blown up and made a huge deal.

The use of repetition constructs truths by engraving an idea into your brain. At first when you see an image/story you may not believe it. However after you see something a couple times across multiple networks, you start to believe the story. Hearing the same story from different sources over and over somehow makes us believe the story is more credible. A recent example of repetition in the media was the Bruce Jenner transition news. I remember at first I didn’t believe it when only a couple news outlets were reporting the news. I thought in my head that there was no way Bruce Jenner, the world’s greatest athlete, could feel stuck in the wrong body. I remember after a couple magazines/other news outlets reported he was transitioning that I thought maybe it could be true. Once I heard Diane Sawyer, a credible journalist, was doing a special on Bruce Jenner, I knew the rumors had to be true. It just took seeing the rumors multiple times for me to believe it to be true. An example from the article of repetition being used comes from NBC. The NBC introduction of the changing logos over the years and different anchors serves to constantly remind us of the history of NBC. Seeing the history of anchors over and over makes us believe NBC is a credible news source.

I think feminism has really changed and stayed the same since this article was written. There’s still a pay gap, reproductive rights issues, and many other things. However, I think feminism in the 90’s was a big deal and paved the way for the feminists of today. Feminism in no way is near perfect today, but I think women are for sure taken more serious now. Back in the 90’s, a woman was only thought to be able to support her husband in the White House. Today, we’ve had various women run for president and we may even seen one become our president in the next year. I don’t know if the media’s approach toward feminism has truly changed. I think women are still criticized/judged much more heavily than men.