On Calling Bullshit

A few weeks ago I chastised the news media for not calling bullshit sooner on the “death panel” canard, which drew a question from a long-time Rhetorica reader: “How does ‘a poor job of calling bullshit’ and ‘call[ing] bullshit inconsistently’ relate back to a ‘rhetoric beat‘?” Here’s my original post on the concept of a rhetoric beat.

I believe that the rhetorical features of public messages (politics...