Honestly, What is Public Discourse?

Our current model of public discourse fosters bad faith argumentation. Though our examples of public discourse are appealing and extremely popular, their effectiveness in presenting quality ethical rhetoric is poor. The bad quality of public discourse stems from the media and the coverage of the public debates or interviews, etc. Instead of attempting to relay and find honest, important news, the media ask biased questions, attack celebrities and twist the things they are told in order to further there news, whether it is important and prevalent or not.

A key example of public discourse that foster bad faith argumentation are the popular presidential debates. First of all, the debates in actuality aren’t debates, but rather a staged question and answer that are generally presidents reaffirming their political, social or economic opinions. These debates are meant to compel political moderates to join a political side within the presidential race. They ineffectively do so as the only thing the debates do is reaffirm why democrats or republicans choose a particular side, and identify with those respective opinions.  The candidates themselves are also to blame for the lack of honest, ethical discourse due to their ability to approve or disapprove what is to be talked about and ultimately stage the debates. There is so much public attention given to such interviews or debates that the quality of them is more important than the quantity of what is spoken about.

Interviews of high profile people, or celebrities, athletes etc. are also examples of public discourse that foster bad faith argumentation. The media sets up interviews that don’t give honest news, but rather stage a story that is more appealing to viewers. Along with the poor coverage of public discourse, we as the audience also foster bad faith argumentation due to the fact that we like hearing such news and lies. Depending on the news, certain viewer ratings increase. It is the news that is falsely covered so that it is more appealing to the audiences. There are many factors that play into the fact that our model of public discourse fosters bad faith argumentation. And this model fails at presenting ethical rhetoric.