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A Medium-Based Rhetorical Analysis of Newspaper Coverage of the Brooklyn
Museum Controversy
Author: Peter Cramer
Degree: Ph.D. in Rhetoric, Carnegie Mellon University, 2005
This dissertation analyzes the newspaper coverage of the Brooklyn Museum
controversy. The object of controversy was Chris Ofili's The Holy Virgin
Mary, a painting that appeared in the Sensation exhibit at the Brooklyn
Museum in the Fall of 1999. In the painting, Ofili used elephant dung
along with other more traditional art and craft materials. It was the dung
that led New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani to take offense to the painting
and to the exhibit generally. This project focuses on the role of media in
controversy by asking how newspapers depict the Brooklyn Museum controversy
as they report it. In order to answer this question, the project examines
an archive of newspaper texts about the controversy from the top three
circulating newspapers in New York City, The New York Post, The Daily News,
and The New York Times. It performs three analyses: a rhetorical analysis
of serial coverage, a computer-aided style analysis, and an analysis of
news actors' direct quotations. The analysis of serial coverage narrates
the unfolding news event and draws conclusions about journalists'
definition of the event, its topical and temporal boundaries, and its role
as a precedent for other news events. The computer-aided style analysis
draws comparisons across the three newspapers represented in the archive,
revealing a number of differences in the way that the language of
newspapers represents the controversy to readers. One of the central
conclusions of this analysis is that the newspapers differ in their
treatments of citation and quotation in controversy coverage. The analysis
of news actors' direct quotation is an effort to build on this finding by
showing who is quoted by each newspaper and how often they are quoted. It
draws conclusions about how the differences in direct quotation among the
newspapers affect reader experience of the controversy coverage. This
project contributes to existing work in rhetorical studies and
argumentation research, both of which address controversy as a key concept
but neither of which have fully centered on the value of medium and reader
effects in their analyses. In order to develop its approach to the study
of controversy, the project draws on research in rhetoric of controversy,
analyses of news media, and computer-aided rhetorical analysis. It
leverages this research to articulate its medium-based and reader-focused
analysis. |