Claire Misfeldt

Communications Capstone

Prospectus D1

Introduction

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has transformed from a viral infection into a social phenomenon in the United States as issues of individual freedom and community action have become more apparent. States where the Republican party has the majority power, like , saw high volumes of cases due to relaxed policies about mask wearing and building capacity.

However, while state representatives were more adamant about reopening the State and continuing with business as usual, Texas city officials were trying to push for stay-at-home restrictions and mask mandates. This disconnection on COVID-19 responses in Texas, especially in the spring and summer of 2020, highlights the ever growing tension between state and city governments. Part of this is due to the fact that the Austin, , and are part of the Democratic party, while 's is independent from any political party yet has more progressive than conservative policies. Because of the differing political ideologies, conservative Texas state politicians and city officials saw more conflict than resolution in terms of agreeing how to respond to the pandemic.

I believe that this site of differing ideologies and responses is more apparent on Twitter.

The limited character space ensures that tweets from high-ranking politicians will be carefully constructed by a social media team and the follower aspect means that the tweets can reach a larger audience. By applying Kenneth Burke’s theory on Dramatism and Walter Fisher’s concept of the Narrative Paradigm to Texas politicians’ tweets, I believe a deeper understanding of new media and political narrative formation will occur. Especially in the current state of American politics, it is important to understand how traditional forms of storytelling that rely on hero and

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villain characters can be reconstructed on Twitter. Political narratives in America have always relied on this narrative aspect, but it never had the same reach as new media allows today. The ability to publish a tweet to thousands of people multiple times a day is a relatively new concept and has only been successfully utilized by politicians recently.

Besides communications concepts surrounding narrative and new media, there is also another layer to consider when examining politicians’ twitter accounts. As well as aiding in the polarization of American politics, the COVID-19 pandemic has also provided more evidence that poor, BIPOC communities are more susceptible to government inaction. These communities are more likely to contract and die from COVID-19, possibly due to lack of universal healthcare and the fact that people in these communities make up a majority of the essential workforce. Texas state politicians pushing for no mask mandates and zero to little social distancing guidelines means that these BIPOC communities are deemed disposable as long as they contribute to the economy. Looking at how reopening policies relate to neoliberalism and necropolitics, I believe this will enrich my capstone paper by putting the reopening process in context with the assumed disposability of certain Texans.

I will be looking at tweets by the Texas governor, Greg Abbott, and tweets by the mayors in each of the major Texas cities. Democratic Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner, Democratic

Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson, Democratic Austin Mayor , and Independent San

Antonio Mayor Ron Ninberg. I will also include Lina Hidalgo, the Harris County Judge residing in Houston because she received a lot of media coverage for her mandates regarding mask

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wearing and social distancing. This in turn, allowed her to receive a lot of backlash from Texas conservatives, especially in the State offices. My questions are as followed:

What is the relationship between state officials and city officials during the pandemic?

Which officials, if any, align with Abbott’s decision to reopen the state?

What kinds of narratives do each of these officials push in their tweets?

Do these tweets re-enforce an “us versus them” narrative in regards to COVID-19 responses?

Literature Review

Twitter (And False Information) as the Medium (4)

Even before the onset of new media technologies politicians have always utilized mass media to help boost their campaigns and approval ratings. This is no surprise considering that mass media stories from major news networks can help “integrate and homogenize our society”

(Graber, 2) and essentially reaffirm the larger American hegemony. However, media stories don’t solely rely on media technologies such as T.V. networks anymore, thus changing the way the media story is perceived by a larger audience. Marshall McLuhan states this in his idea that

“media is message,” (2) meaning that the “medium [that communication is given] shapes and controls the scale and form of human association and interaction” (9). Whereas before, there were a few select ways to get news, like T.V. programs and newspapers, there are hundreds of outlets that claim to be a reliable news source. Now with social media platforms like Twitter acting as a news source for many Americans, the information is conveyed in a strikingly different fashion.

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This medium of news reporting has the ability to produce personalized news stories and has a tendency to publish factually inaccurate reports. “The vast amounts of diverse information produced by new technologies permit people to create their own information diet” (Graber, 358).

The more likely you are to click on an article that displays inaccurate information, the more likely you’ll be recommended to articles that contain similar false information. In 2020, this spread of false information has become so grand that some scholars are calling it an “infodemic” referring “to the phenomenon where an overwhelming amount of information transmitted about a problem obfuscates the identification of a solution to the problem” (Lin, 1). While Twitter is attempting to combat the false information spread on the platform with new terms of policy

(Hope, 1), there was still damage done at the beginning of the pandemic. Information about mask wearing social distancing was ignored by state representatives in Texas leading the high volume of cases.

New Media and the 2016 Election Season

The way politicians have interacted with social media platforms like Twitter has drastically changed since former president, Donald Trump’s win in 2016. That year saw a shift in

Twitter usage for political campaigns, yet Republican candidates were more likely to sparingly use the platform in favor of older forms of mass media communication like T.V. (Smith et al.,

22). The Democratic candidates were using their social media platform less as a way to promote themselves and more as an avenue to engage with the American public (21). This strategy seemed to work, especially with Hillary Clinton who was utilizing the platform more than other

Democratic and Republican candidates.

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However, Trump’s engagement on Twitter surpassed Clinton’s and it can be argued that his constant and consistent use of the platform is what allowed him to eventually win the 2016 election. Not only that, but Trump’s strategy with the platform involved “negative campaigning,” that attacked institutions as well as other candidates and “self-glorification,” that set him apart from career politicians (Kayam, 166). His account seemed to be run by him (164), instead of a team of social media strategists, which enforced a greater parasocial bond between Trump and his Twitter followers. When he retweeted or responded to a follower, it felt like more of a genuine response from Trump himself (166). His actions would go on to influence the way

Clinton used her platform after winning the Democratic primaries, shifting to what some called an “uncivilized” way of political campaigning (Zompetti, 53). Still, Clinton was projected to win the 2016 election and when Trump won instead, many mass communication scholars had to rework the way they approach new media technologies (Schmierbach, 667). The outcome of this election changed the way that politicians would continue to use social media as a way to engage with the American people.

Dramatism and Narrative paradigm

The theory of dramatism is based on the performance and motivations of rhetorics in communications. Another way of looking at it, as Kenneth Burke writes, is “[w]hat is involved when we say what people are doing and why are they doing it” (xv). As a way of analysis, Burke gives five key terms to understanding dramatism: Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, and Purpose. For reevaluating these terms in a new media construct, it’s easier to understand them as content of the post (act), the larger social context the post was published under (scene), who posted (agent),

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which social media platform was utilized (agency), why this was posted at all (purpose).

Applying the pentad to new media, and Twitter for the sake of this paper, helps understand the motive of the post and what larger issues of narrative formation are occurring.

As a form of argument making, the narrative paradigm fits well into not only the condescending nature of new media posting, but also the rhetorical structure of political communications. It relies on “literary, aesthetic theme[s]” (Fisher, 2) instead of pragmatic reasoning. Not to say that logic is void from the narrative paradigm, but more to say that one doesn’t need to be factually correct to be persuasive; there just has to be probability and fidelity.

“[N]arrative probability [is] what constitutes a coherent story, and their constant habit of testing narrative fidelity, whether the stories they experience ring true with the stories they know to be true in their lives” (8). Politicians can rely on their audience’s own lived experiences as evidence instead of providing it in the tweet, regardless of political party.

Neoliberalism and necropolitics

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the politics of disposability amongst BIPOC communities in the United States. Not only were these communities more likely to die from the virus than white communities, but BIPOC were more likely to lose their jobs or have their wages decrease significantly (Crockett and Grier, 89). This isn’t the only instance of a virus disportionately affecting BIPOC communities more than white ones (Hull et al., 1740), however this pandemic response has been unlike any other in the past, with states ordering stay-at-home orders to slow the spread of COVID-19. While the virus can infect anyone regardless of race, it’s

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institutionalized forms of oppression that can account for the higher rates of COID-19 mortality in the U.S.

“As states loosen or lift shelter-in-place restrictions, falsely pitting ‘the economy’ against

public health, policy research must explore differential access to resources for recovery.

Racialized disadvantage is often built into institutional routines for distributing resources

that may appear to be race neutral” (Crockett and Grier, 89).

The idea that the economy matters more than public health guidelines aligns with the concept of the neoliberal state where “freedom [...] reflects the interests of private property owners, businesses, multinational corporations, and financial capital” (Harvey, 7) instead of the vast majority of the public. Like how in Flint, Michigan, access to clean water was cut off from the community to “simultaneously make and save money” resulting in the entire population suffering from lead poisoning (Sze, 56). Neoliberalism is essentially the disposability of certain populations in order to preserve economic privatization.

State reopenings during the pandemic via government intervention contrary to the advice of public health officials demonstrates Neoliberalism’s influence on current government actions.

By having an active role in this reopening process that ignores public health, the Texas state government is participating in necropolitics. Based on Foucault’s concept of biopower where the sovereign exerts regulatory control over a population (139). In other words, the state controls whether a population lives or dies. Achelle Mbembe expands on the death principle, stating that governments hold “unlimited power of destruction” (15) that is exerted in favor of the marketplace and lets their citizens suffer. “They henceforth make power over the living- or again,

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the capacity to voluntarily alter the human species- the absolute form of power” (14). This is power that is not based on the welfare of the state but rather on the protection of the wealthy, which in turn allows for certain groups of the population to die.

Methodology

For my analysis, I will be looking at a total of 18 tweets, three from each politician. The politicians will be Republican governor Greg Abbott, Democratic Houston Mayor Sylvester

Turner, Democratic Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson, Democratic Austin Mayor Steve Adler,

Independent San Antonio Mayor Ron Ninberg, and Democratic Harris County Judge Lina

Hidalgo. For each politician, I will find at least one tweet from March 13th when Abbott declared a state of emergency, April 17th when Abbott announced his plans to “reopen” the state, and June 25th when the reopening process was paused. Not all of these dates will be exact, so

I’m keeping a time frame of two to three days when I do the full twitter search I will not only be looking at the rhetoric of the tweets themselves, but how much engagement the tweets get. How many likes and comments did they tweet get? What’s the comment section like? Is there discourse over the content of the tweet? This will help determine if narrative probability and fidelity are working for their audiences.

For each tweet, I will identify each portion of Burke’s Pentad and Fisher’s narrative features. I will also see if there is a consistent narrative of the economy, individual freedom, and public health. I will make note of which words appear in multiple tweets by multiple politicians.

I will also see if other politicians are mentioned in the tweets, mainly reactions by the mayors and Hidalgo on Abbott’s decisions, to see if either side is attempting to portray themselves as a

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hero. I will also notice who their target audience is, seeing if any politician is attempting to appeal to a more conservative or progressive audience.

Works Cited

Burke, Kenneth. A Grammar of Motives. University of California Press, 1969.

Crockett, David, and Sonya A. Grier. “Race in the Marketplace and COVID-19.” Journal of

Public Policy & Marketing, vol. 40, no. 1, Jan. 2021, pp. 89–91. EBSCOhost,

doi:10.1177/0743915620931448.

Fisher, Walter R. “Narration as a Human Communication Paradigm: The Case of Public Moral

Argument.” Communication Monographs, vol. 51, no. 1, Mar. 1984, p. 1. EBSCOhost,

doi:10.1080/03637758409390180.

Foucault, Michel. The History of Sexuality. 1st American ed., Pantheon Books, 1978.

Graber, Doris A. Mass Media and American Politics. 7th ed., CQ Press, 2006.

Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford University Press, 2007.

Hope, Lacy. “Protecting Pandemic Conversations: Tracing Twitter’s Evolving Content Policies

During COVID-19.” Journal of Business & Technical Communication, vol. 35, no. 1, Jan.

2021, pp. 88–93. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1177/1050651920958393.

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Hull, Shawnika, et al. “Masks Are the New Condoms: Health Communication, Intersectionality

and Racial Equity in COVID-Times.” Health Communication, vol. 35, no. 14, Dec. 2020, pp.

1740–1742. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/10410236.2020.1838095.

Kayam, Orly. “Straight to the People: Donald Trump’s Rhetorical Style on Twitter in the 2016

U.S. Presidential Election.” Language & Dialogue, vol. 10, no. 2, May 2020, pp. 149–170.

EBSCOhost, doi:10.1075/ld.00064.kay

Lin, Carolyn A. “A Year like No Other: A Call to Curb the Infodemic and Depoliticize a

Pandemic Crisis.” Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, vol. 64, no. 5, Dec. 2020,

pp. 661–671. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/08838151.2020.1871185.

Mbembe, Achille. Necropolitics. Translated by Steve Corcoran, Duke University Press, 2019.

McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media : The Extensions of Man. Routledge, 2008

Schmierbach, Mike. “Media Theory and the 2016 Election.” Mass Communication & Society,

vol. 21, no. 6, Nov. 2018, pp. 665–670. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1080/15205436.2018.1514827.

Smith, J.Scott, et al. “Tweet to the Primaries: A Narrative Analysis of Presidential Candidates’

2016 Iowa Caucus Tweets.” Journal of the Communication, Speech & Theatre Association of

North Dakota, vol. 31, Jan. 2018, pp. 11–26. EBSCOhost,

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Sze, Julie. Environmental Justice in a Moment of Danger. University of California Press, 2020

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Zompetti, Joseph P. “Rhetorical Incivility in the Twittersphere: A Comparative Thematic

Analysis of Clinton and Trump’s Tweets During and After the 2016 Presidential Election.”

Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric, vol. 9, no. 1/2, Jan. 2019, pp. 29–54. EBSCOhost,

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I have acted with Honesty and Integrity in producing this work and am unaware of anyone who is not /s/ Claire Misfeldt

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