A Rhetorical Approach to News Discourse: Media Representations of a Controversial Study on...

Since the rhetoric of science emerged as a field of inquiry, there have been at least two possible areas for investigation: the study of how science is used in public discourse and the study of how scientists argue and persuade within their professional communities. But, as the field developed, research in the latter area outpaced that in the former, leaving 'the professional discourse of scientists ... as the "prototypical" form of text studied in the [rhetoric of science]' (Ceccarelli, 2001, pp. 314-315). Often, rhetorical work in the first area has concerned itself with how scientific information is changed or distorted as it is accommodated for the general audience (e.g., Fahnestock, 1986) and has thus tended to reify the notion that scientific and public discourse occurs in two separate spheres (Locke, 2002). This traditional view of science communication, often called the deficit model, holds that public or social knowledge is external to, and inferior to, scientific knowledge, and that communication between these spheres is unidirectional, from science to the public (Myers, 2003).