As I listened to coverage of events in Cairo (mostly on Democracy Now!--theirs was the best), I heard experts from a variety of fields share their opinions: historians, political scientists, philosophers, comparative literature people etc. Our discipline was conspicuously not represented among the scholarly types media tapped to help breakdown the revolution. MSM would much rather interview a "professional" pundit than bother to engage a academic rhetorician. Nothing new there. A couple of years ago Richard Vatz noted thatThe reason that rhetoricians have never preponderantly been the primary sources that media go after is that we are just one of many competitors interpreting reality, and often we are looked at as purveyors of ‘‘mere rhetoric”
Fair enough. After all, our experts don't just rely on MSM to disseminate their opinions on current affairs. That's what blogs are for right? That's what I thought.
Late last week I trolled around the "rhetorical blogosphere" (the
RSA Blogora has a decent blogroll)
wanting to see