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Tapping Into Our Emotions

One would be hard pressed to find a Canadian news source this week that isn’t saturated with news about the trucker convoy. Ottawa, the nation’s capital, has been flooded with tractor trailers and their drivers, protesting newly implemented vaccine mandates that would require unvaccinated drivers to quarantine for two weeks upon returning to Canada. The ‘Freedom Convoy’ is dividing the country and adding fuel to an already raging debate about health, rights, and freedom.


THE CANADIAN PRESS/Adrian Wyld


Examining the articles I came across for rhetorical strategies, I am immediately drawn to the headlines and photographs. “Trucker Convoy Needs to Lose Extreme Rhetoric,” one headline reads. "We're seeing signs calling our government communists and Nazis and comparing [the mandate] to the Holocaust,” the article continues. Some articles written in this tone display photos of angry extremist protesters wielding Nazi flags. But the media portrays the other side as well. In an article that includes embedded recordings of friendly and civilized walkie-talkie conversations between the protesters, a photo of a clean cut, smiling trucker is shown standing atop his truck, fist-bumping supporters. In both instances, journalists are relying on pathos, or, in other words, appealing to the reader’s emotions. In these cases, the use of vivid imagery in the photographs and emotional vocabulary in the headlines are intended to evoke an emotional response from the reader, in an effort to convince or persuade.


How does one apply a critical lens to these articles and read through the authors' attempts at persuasion? The first step is to understand how we are being manipulated. A helpful guide that I stumbled upon online to help in the analysis of rhetorical strategies can be found here:



[1 imagine, 1 link, 1 quote, 281 words]

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