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The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School Department of Communication Arts and Sciences THE IRONIC VOICE AND SUBJUNCTIVE MOOD OF PUBLIC RADIO PROGRAMMING A Dissertation in Speech Communication by David Dzikowski Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy August 2009 ii The dissertation of David Dzikowski was reviewed and approved* by the following: Thomas W. Benson Sparks Professor of Rhetoric Dissertation Advisor Chair of Committee J. Michael Hogan Professor of Communication Arts & Sciences Jeremy D. Engels Assistant Professor of Communication Arts & Sciences Matthew Jackson Associate Professor of Telecommunications James P. Dillard Professor of Communication Arts & Sciences Head of the Department of Communication Arts and Sciences *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School iii ABSTRACT Through a rhetorical analysis of irony in Car Talk, a critique of contrastive epistemics in All Things Considered, and an examination of the superintending ideology of Urban Agrarianism found in A Prairie Home Companion, the rhetoric of public radio programming emerges as ironic, constituted of coherent incompatibilities, and productive of critical thinking about art, science, and politics. Public radio programming is in a subjunctive mood, emphasizing the contingency and possibility of public judgment. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ......................................................................................... v CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION ......................................................................... 1 CHAPTER TWO: THE IRONIC VOICE OF PUBLIC RADIO PROGRAMMING ....................................................................................................... 12 CHAPTER THREE: THE ARGUMENT OF JUXTAPOSITION IN PUBLIC RADIO PROGRAMMING ......................................................................................... 78 CHAPTER FOUR: THE SUPERINTENDING IDEOLOGY OF PUBLIC RADIO PROGRAMMING ....................................................................................................... 126 CHAPTER FIVE: RHETORIC AND THE PUBLIC IN PUBLIC RADIO .............. 220 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................ 241 v ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A dissertation is the product of many debts: to colleagues and professors, to family and financial institutions, to those who wrote before. Some debts can never be repaid, but a few should be acknowledged. I will be paying back my wife, and my daughter, and CitiBank for the rest of my life, but that is a personal matter. In scholarship, however, the debts are public. Of the many conversations that sustained this work through the graduate program, those with Steve Martin and Marlin Bates were the most constant. I discovered that my friends who were studying rhetoric were asking the same questions that I was asking about radio. Thomas W. Benson, as a dissertation director and friend, has always been the most encouraging, and he helped me to see in rhetoric a discourse that moves past simple Manichaeism without stalling in ―insipid centrism.‖1 He also introduced me to the dangerous idea that the closer we are to persuasion, the further we are from rhetoric. Steven H. Browne, J. Michael Hogan, Christopher L. Johnstone, and Matthew Jackson, beyond rounding out the dissertation committee, have encouraged my work through their enthusiasm for it, and they have inspired it through their own work. When time had come to finish and defend the dissertation, Drs. Browne and Johnstone were leading study-abroad programs, but Dr. Jeremy Engels was willing to join the committee, and for that I am grateful. 1 Thomas W. Benson, "Beacons and Boundary-Markers: Landmarks in Rhetorical Criticism," Landmark Essays on Rhetorical Criticism, ed. Thomas W. Benson (Davis, CA: Hermagoras Press, 1993) 32. vi Part of Chapter Two was presented at NCA 2002 and I am grateful for the comments of the respondent, Matthew McAllister, now at Penn State University. Part of Chapter Four was presented at NCA 2004 and I am grateful for the comments of the respondent, Gary A. Copeland, a Penn State Speech Communication Ph.D. Part of Chapter Five was presented at WSCA 2006, and I am grateful for the comments of a Penn State undergraduate, Dana Cloud, who completed her Ph.D. at the University of Iowa. In scholarship, some friends are known only through their work. Take, for example, Peter Hagen. Another returning adult student in the Penn State program, he wrote a dissertation on verbal irony that was singularly helpful in launching my ideas about irony in public radio programming.2 Our mutual friend, Herman Cohen, and I agree that his was a beautiful dissertation, and it is worthy of more emulation than I have managed. Thanks to Dr. Hagen, I was introduced to Wayne Booth‘s A Rhetoric of Irony, which proved foundational for the claims in chapter two regarding Car Talk and the ironic voice of public radio. Thanks to another friend, Lisa Hogan, I had the opportunity to teach Wayne Thompson‘s essay on juxtapositions to students in the Basic Course.3 This essay suggested the extraordinary power in bringing together ideas that, although incompatible, are nonetheless coherent for the audience. This notion, given further scaffolding from Carroll Arnold‘s essay on successful American political discourse as a tri-partite 2 Peter L. Hagen, "The Rhetorical Effectiveness of Verbal Irony," Ph. D., The Pennsylvania State University, 1992. 3 Wayne N. Thompson, "Barbara Jordan's Keynote Address: The Juxtaposition of Contradictory Values," Southern Speech Communication Journal 44 (1979). vii combination of pragmatism, transcendentalism, and doctrine, and from Tom Benson‘s essay on rhetoric as ways of doing, knowing, and being, became important background for chapter three.4 Here, I make claims about the pluralistic structures in All Things Considered, for example. Making claims about the coherent incompatibilities found in the programming became the organizing principle of the dissertation as a whole. On Mike Hogan‘s suggestion, I read David Danbom‘s work on urban and rural life during the Progressive Era to discover, among other things, that the notion of ―urban agrarianism,‖ which I had coined for myself as the superintending manifestation of irony and juxtaposition in public radio, was already a term of art in historical sociology.5 Perhaps it is the peculiar American genius of being successful by moving in opposite directions simultaneously, a character reflected in and sustained by public radio programming, that is an audience characteristic that accounts, in part, for the formal appeal of public radio. Public radio programming, in its journalism and, more obviously, in the cultural programming that is a counterpart to that journalism, pluralistically embraces urbane values and agrarian virtues, not in some indiscriminant muddle, but with a true objectivity that gives voice to opposing points-of-view. The interplay of program form and journalistic content is the main arena for these productive contradictions. On the topic of journalism, much has already been written from a historical and structural perspective regarding the workings of radio in America, generally, and public 4 Carroll C. Arnold, "Reflections on American Public Discourse," Central State Speech Journal 28 (1977), Thomas W. Benson, "Rhetoric as a Way of Being," American Rhetoric: Context and Criticism, ed. Thomas W. Benson (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989). 5 David B. Danbom, Born in the Country: A History of Rural America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). viii radio, in particular, and news, specifically. I am indebted to friends in the College of Communication at Penn State whose seminars in mass media and telecommunications history and criticism have introduced me to the literatures of journalism, and particularly, to the literatures of historiography and the ―rhetorical turn‖ in journalism. In the History and Comparative Literature departments, I am grateful to those professors who have indulged my obsession with radio and rhetoric. From off campus, the efforts of Michael McCauley, Jack Mitchell, and other historians, the chronicle of the growth of NPR in journalistic outlets, and the structural critique of NPR by Tom McCourt (and of media, at large, by his mentor, Robert W. McChesney)6 provide a foundational element Mike Hogan has identified as supporting rhetorical education in the academy: rhetorical history. And those who have offered the structural critiques of media have done the heavy lifting that is required to problematize the apparently normal, natural, or organic appearance of cultural institutions like the media as historically situated. In parallel, Anthony Giddens‘ notion of structuration observes fissures in otherwise hegemonic systems that allow for historical perspective without too much historical determinism.7 My contribution is in the somewhat different area of rhetorical criticism, but it is made possible, in no small degree, by the existence of histories and structural critiques that, in all common sense, must be written first. For their trailblazing, I am grateful. For 6 Michael P. McCauley, NPR: The Trials and Triumphs of National Public Radio (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), Jack W. Mitchell, Listener Supported: The Culture and History of Public Radio (Westport, Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2005), Tom McCourt, Conflicting Communication Interests in America: