Call for protest of ABC's slamming of interaction research

[bev sauer]

A note on slamming:  The NY Times, in its list of silly subjects at the
MLA, once slammed one of my first papers:  The Rhetoric of Disaster.

"The Rhetoric of Disaster"is also the name of my first NSF grant, which was
slammed again in Congress.  The book, the Rhetoric of Risk, will appear in
August (Lawrence Erlbaum Associates).

I have since had 4 NSF grants investigating communcation practices that
affect communication in a crisis.  The first sentence of my current project
begins, "In a disaster, firefighters must communicate...."  The book was
written two years before 9-11.

People slam what they don't understand.  They are threatened and fail to go
beyond the title.  In my own case, I feel a bit like Cassandra--my voice
was unheard because those in power did not take the Rhetoric of Disaster
seriously when it might have made a difference.

I am currently on leave at Johns Hopkins University, where I was hired in
August 2001 (fortuitously or not) to create a Center for Crisis
Communication.

Bev Sauer
Associate Professor of English
Carnegie Mellon University

on leave,
The Johns Hopkins University
Washington DC Center


--On Friday, April 5, 2002 12:02 PM -0500 Christian Nelson
<cnelson at COMM.UMASS.EDU> wrote:

> In a series of reports on ABC's Good Morning America, titled "You paid
> for it," an ABC reporter slammed three NSF-funded projects, two of which
> were related to research likely of interest to folks on this list.
>
> Yesterday, they slammed a study of presidential press conferences. The
> PI for the study is Steven Clayman, a respected conversation analyst in
> the Sociology Dept. at UCLA. Anyone who bothers to look up the award
> information on the NSF site (which the reporter clearly didn't) will
> discover from Clayman's abstrast that ABC misrepresented his research.
> They did so by suggesting that Clayman was only interested in
> determining whether press conferences have become more adverserial (for
> ABC's report see
> http://abcnews.go.com/sections/GMA/GoodMorningAmerica/GMA020404Reporter_s
> tudies_taxpayer.html).
>
> Anyone who bothers to look at Clayman's previous research or talks to
> those who know about it (again, something the reporter clearly didn't
> do) will realize that he has much bigger fish to fry, and is not really
> interested in testing arm-chair hypotheses so much as describing
> significant interactional practices that have gone undescribed
> heretofore and only then drawing out the significant implications of his
> phenomenon. Finally, in light of Clayman's larger objectives, anyone
> looking at the start and end dates of Clayman's grant (Sept. 2001 to
> August 2003) will recognize that to judge his research at this point is
> premature at best. I'm glad to see that official objections to ABC's
> coverage are planned, but I urge all NCA members to let ABC know  (at
> http://abcnews.go.com/sections/GMA/GoodMorningAmerica/GMA_email_form.html
> ) that they object to such unfair, not to mention anti-intellectual,
> coverage. Not only our profession, but the nation itself can ill-afford
> to look the other way when the networks shift from spewing out garbage
> to attacking those who attempt to provide the nation with significant
> information.
>
> BTW, I only caught the tail end of the coverage of the study on smiles
> this morning. It seemed that they must have recut their report pretty
> quickly, because they devoted a fair chunk of time to an NSF staffer
> noting the importance of the study, and the reporter also suggested why
> the study might be important when discussing his piece with GMA host
> Elizabeth Vargas. He even suggested that the study might help in
> eventually detecting terrorists--certainly something most audience
> members would consider valuable. But, while even specifically prompting
> these positive comments, Elizabeth Vargas managed to smirk and harrumph
> throughout. Apparently, even journalists believe that the audience's
> need to feed its anti-intellectualism comes before its need for security
> even in the most seemingly perilous of times. (BTW, it's a great example
> of verbal and non-verbal signals sending diametrically opposite
> messages.)
>
> --Christian Nelson