The Information Reputation

People, the national ethos, rely on reputation as a measure of authority.

If someone has a reputation for honesty, you trust them to tell the truth. If someone has a reputation for greed, you suspect them of trying to swindle you. If you are the President, your reputation carries a lot of authority and the actions you take/speeches you give greatly impact the lives of the national audience.

This power, like all power, can be ultimately beneficial or harmful. As a President or a celebrity, what you say and do makes the magazines: people read about you, judge you and your message, and behave according to their conclusions about your rhetoric.

If this means Oprah raises a million dollars for breast cancer because people trust her three-decade-long campaign for human betterment, maybe reputation is a good thing. After all, authority encourages us to behave well, be civilized, model ourselves after people we have high opinions of, etc. However, reputations are slandered every day, both for real and false reasons. Scandals, secrets, bad photos, and rumors—these are not just the crafts of grocery store magazines. These things happen to nearly every man and woman in the spotlight.

In this way reputation is double-edged; a good man with a great idea may be written off as a scoundrel and a bad man with egocentric goals may be seducing the masses. Reputation should be considered along with his rhetoric because an ungenerous tax cheat is not a good authority to listen to about something like balancing a state budget or fighting for funding.

But take it with a grain of salt.

Manipulation, which is very related to publicity (and therefore to reputation as well), is also an aspect of rhetoric that can serve to persuade. Pathos is easily interpreted as manipulation—showing commercials of the children with flies on their faces both shows us someone else’s true reality and manipulates our worldview with the goal of loosening our purse strings. But audience is also manipulated by public opinion. Is that a good thing? In the case of the Africa commercials it saves lives (whether it is ethical or not is temporarily irrelevant). The point is that reputation is also a form of manipulating the ethos of the audience, which means that reputation can also lead to good or bad ultimate ends. Manipulating an audience’s frame of mind is observed on almost every liveTV show (women crying on the Tyra Banks show, laughing on Ellen, raising their hands and giving money on the late-night Christian revival channels). The important judgment call the audience must make is whether the orator is someone who’s opinion is worthy of listening to/”taking to heart.”

The rhetoric is as important as the rhetorical situation and the credibility of the speaker. As a society, the majority of us measure the credibility of speakers by their reputations (are they leftwing or rightwing? do they give to charity? do they tell the truth on their shows? are they informed? is their show/text/speech believable? does it matter to me? do I admire that? and so on…). And many times it is accurate—we know that Jerry Springer’s opinion is not something we put stock in, and we know that Courtney Love’s views are about as helpful as Lindsay Lohan’s.

Why? Because we see these people at their moral worst. They are in rehab, they are in it for the money, their million dollar donations do not dent their multimillion-dollar bank accounts or even pass through their own hands. Other people handle these celebrities, these celebrities’ accounts, and these celebrities’ reputations. Publicity, which is very related to reputation, can expose or distort a truth.

We need to be informed of people’s lives and lifestyles in order to decided if their example is one that we respect and support. If they succeed in winning our approval, they become a legitimate authority. Even in class, we saw John Stuart use satire and comedy to sucessfully gain public sympathy and put an end to “Crossfire.” As he challenged the real newspeople in an intelligent, pragmatic way he earned/strengthened his reputation as a man who gives his honest opinion and a man who represents the national voting mass.

Information is power, right? It has the power to build or destroy, inspire or dishearten, improve lives or damage lives. Reputation is simply information about a person’s character and status, which is powerful. The bigger the reputation (the more well-known someone is), the more power they accumulate. For good or bad, this information gives the reader a lens through which to judge these celebrities’ rhetoric.

It is up to the audience to be wary of motive and thoughtful of the future, and for this the audience should judge a speaker’s reputation. Unfortunately the message itself is inadequate proof of a good, logical message or a poor, weak message. Who says it is nearly as important as what is being said. We may be sometimes blinded in judging a celebrity, but we would be even more blind to judge the message without knowing the context, source, or end of any rhetoric.