Possible Research Project

Pundits are those journalists who make a living offering opinions. In our culture war mentality, we have pundits on the left and right who offer their opinions for mass consumption. In doing so, they engage in argumentation.

Argumentation is serious business but it is not an exact science. Rhetoricians and others who study argumentation try to provide some guidance and part of that guidance comes in the form of identifying reasoning fallacies, moments where speakers/writers/advocates shortcut reasonable thinking and build an argument using questionable building materials. I learned about these from what remains my favorite public speaking textbook The Speaker's Handbook by Jo Sprague and Douglas Stuart. Short, concise, unadorned. Truth be told, all of us who communicate with any regularity succumb to reasoning errors. Ultimately most arguments break down somewhere along the line. At some point, we make the leap from verifiable fact to value judgment that is at the heart of inferences. Inferences are necessary if we are going to do anything with facts. That leap is often emotional and difficult to justify. So, reasoning fallacies happen as a natural course of communicating.

But it seems to me that reasoning fallacies are especially common among pundits particularly among pundits who view America as divided between liberals and conservatives in an intractable culture war. I'd like to test a hypothesis. Here's my hypothesis: Pundits whose frame for moral/political/ethical/religious discourse is shaped by the culture war metaphor commit logical fallacies as part of their rhetorical strategy.

Testing this hypothesis involves several steps.
Step 1--creating an operational definition of "culture war metaphor."
Step 2--identifying pundits whose frame for moral/political/ethical/religious discourse is shaped by the culture war metaphor.
Step 3--code samples of pundits work for examples of reasoning fallacies.

If it can be shown that the norm among culture war pundits is to rely on reasoning fallacies, then I can conclude that reasoning fallacies are indeed engaged as culture war rhetorical strategy.

I may need to add a step of identifying those who reject the culture war metaphoric frame and code their work as well. Compare sample groups.