Photo by Lynne Sladky
On January 27, 2019, the Washington Post published a “Politics” article titled, “Trump advisors lied over and over again, Mueller says. The question is, why?” written by Rosalind S. Helderman, Josh Dawsey and Matt Zapotosky. The first three lines of the article struck me:
They lied to the public for months before Donald Trump was elected — and then repeatedly after he took office.
They lied to Congress as lawmakers sought to investigate Russia’s attack on American democracy in 2016.
And they lied to the FBI, even when they knew lying was a crime.
A few lines down the article, the same rhetorical pattern was used:
Did the president’s men lie to protect a still-hidden dark secret about the campaign’s interaction with Russia, engaging in a broad effort to obstruct the probe — one that included perhaps even Trump?
Did they lie to avoid diminishing Trump’s victory by acknowledging Russia played a role in his election?
Did they each lie for their own reasons, taking their cue from the president — who has told many whoppers of his own, including about Russia?
In both passages, each sentence is its own line. What struck me about this writing was its extreme resemblance to the verbal devices explained by Walter J. Ong that are unique to oral culture and speech, and in essence, the oral route taken here serves to effect a one-sided political view rooted in sensationalism. I propose a visual orality, in which the authors essentially provoke the reader into siding against Trump and his advisors, that promote the idea that they are indeed liers up to no good.
Both passages use repetition, in terms of the repeated sentence structure and the very obvious repeated variation of the word “lie.” In fact, this word was repeated for a total of 25 times throughout the entire article, to the point of being “redundant” and “copious” (Ong, 39). These (formulaic) repetitions “help implement rhythmic discourse and also act as mnemonic aids in their own right, as set expressions circulating” not “through the mouths and ears” (Ong, 35) as is possible only in oral speech, but made possible through the “I” of each individual reader’s visual consciousness.
According to Ong, “Sight isolates, sound incorporates” (Ong, 71). He believes that sound has a “centering effect” upon its reception, in which sound is gathered “from every direction at once” and establishes a “kind of core of sensation and existence (Ong, 71). This sensation takes over the individual consciousness:
The consciousness of each human person is totally interiorized, known to the person from the inside and inaccessible to any other person directly from the inside. (Ong, 71)
In other words, the oral devices expounded by the authors are targeting none other than the consciousness of the reader unit, for they are more concerned about determining your interior perception of the political situation for you than about giving you the objective truth.
What contributes to the sensational effect is that the two passages are “agonistically toned” (Ong, 43), another characteristic of oral culture. Although Ong claims that writing “fosters abstractions that disengage knowledge from the arena where human beings struggle with one another” (Ong, 43), the use of oral devices here grounds the text in a concreteness, that, although may not be the truth, is still sensational and felt. Ong further notes that oral forms such as proverbs and riddles are “not used simply to store knowledge but to engage others in verbal and intellectual combat” (Ong, 43). This idea resonates well with the text and effectively relays the goal of the article: to make the reader view the Trump administration as the corrupt.
An important point is that Ong contrasts oral culture from writing based upon objectivity:
For an oral culture learning or knowing means achieving close, empathetic [and participatory], communal identification with the known…Writing separates the knower from the known and thus sets up conditions for ‘objectivity’, in the sense of personal disengagement or distancing. (Ong, 45)
It is now reasonable to say that by using oral devices in journalistic writing, the authors are not striving for objectivity, for they are very much seeking to engage the reader. The first quoted passages are statements of affirmation, as if saying, these are the facts and you as the reader should believe it. The latter are questionings, which first provoke the reader into thinking about potential answers but later are merely “confirmed” by more affirmative statements that yes, these advisors did lie. Towards the end of the article, the authors choose very generalized statements quoted from politicians who supposedly witnessed these truths.
Paradoxically, writing emerged out of orality (Ong, 76), thus it is justifiable to mimic oral culture with writing to meet certain ends, especially for politically charged articles as these, but perhaps it is also important to think about reading the writing. In our day and age, we stress the present, which flees with time. Consumers are inundated with visual and aural information, and we consume content at the same rate, if not faster, than the rate at which media outlets produce it. For news reporting channels, sometimes videos are incorporated in articles (as in this one) or even replacing them.
Would we really re-read news articles updated by the second? The majority would just skim through them, thus the use of oral devices in writing seems to be effective in affecting the reading. Ong believes that sound “exists only when it is going out of existence” (Ong, 32). Then, perhaps the evanescence of reading words is analogous to the evanescence of listening to sound. In this article, words—which sway between the conservative rhetoric and the visually oral—seek to lean towards the latter to gather attention within the transient amount of time you allot to its viewing.
Works Cited
- Helderman, Rosalind S. et al. “Trump advisors lied over and over again, Mueller says. The question is, why?” The Washington Post, 27 Jan. 2019.
- Ong, Walter J. “Some Psychodynamics of Orality.” Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the World. London, Methuen & Co. Ltd, 2002.
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