Resistive reading
theydom, Militant and Moderate, Order and
Disorder, Black and White, Management and
Unions, Dries and Wets. See news values;
other. See also topic guide under language/
discourse/narrative.
Rhetoric of the image See image, rhetoric
of.
Rhetoric of numbers Phrase used by Itzhak
Roeh and Saul F. Feldman to describe how
the press, the popular press in particular, use
numbers and amounts for rhetorical rather
than factual purposes. Th e authors’ analysis of
the headlines of two Hebrew dailies, one elite,
one popular, is reported on in ‘Th e rhetoric of
numbers in front-page journalism: how numbers
contribute to the melodramatic in the popular
press’, published in Te x t 4/4 (1984). In the UK,
broadsheets and tabloids both use numbers,
statistics and charts to reinforce news texts; and
the rhetoric is extended to pictures: for example
printing whole pages of the faces of British
military personnel killed in Afghanistan, the aim
to bring home varying messages concerning the
cost of armed interventions.
Right of reply A long-established practice in
continental countries, the right of reply in the UK
press has been argued for long, hard and gener-
ally unsuccessfully. Such a right would require
newspaper editors to publish within a given time
the replies of individuals or organizations who
allege serious press misrepresentation, or to face
a special court and a fi ne if found to be in error.
It is argued that such a right would act as a deter-
rent to editorial bias and unethical practices.
Newspapers do publish apologies, but these are
usually for printing factual errors that might
land them with libel actions. See campaign for
press and broadcasting freedom; people’s
communication charter.
Rights and the media See cultural or citi-
zen rights and the media.
Riley and Riley’s model of mass commu-
nication, 1959 John W. Riley Jr and Matilda
White Riley in ‘Mass communication and the
social system’, in Sociology Today: Problems
and Prospects (Basic Books, 1959; Harper Torch
Books, vol. 2, 1965), edited by R.K. Merton,
L. Broom and L.S. Cottrell Jr, pose a model in
which the process of communication is an inte-
gral part of the social system. For Riley and Riley,
both the Communicator (C) and the Recipient
(R) are aff ected in the message process of send-
ing, receiving, reciprocating, by the three social
orders: the primary group or groups of which C
and R are members; the larger social structure,
that is the immediate community – social,Resistive reading Occurs when audience
chooses not to accept without question the
preferred reading of media messages.
Considerable research has been conducted into
the capacity of audiences, and of segments of
audiences such as women, to react indepen-
dently to dominant discourses: hence the
active-audience thesis. See audience: active
audience; dominant, subordinate, radi-
cal; empowerment.
Resonance Occurs when messages match the
expectations of the receiver, when they are in
alignment with or confirm the experiences,
perceptions, values, beliefs or attitudes of the
receiver. For example, Garth S. Jowett and Victo-
ria O’Donnell, in Propaganda and Persuasion
(Sage, 1999), note that propaganda messages
are more likely to succeed if they resonate with
the audience’s existing viewpoints. See effects
of the mass media; mainstreaming; mean
world syndrome.
Reterritorialization According to James Lull
in Media, Communication and Culture (Polity
Press, 1995), reterritorialization means ‘... fi rst
that the foundations of cultural territory – ways
of life, artefacts, symbols and contexts – are all
open to new interpretations and understandings’,
and secondly, ‘implies that culture is constantly
reconstituted through social interaction,
sometimes by creative uses of personal commu-
nications technology and the mass media’. Th us
cultural territory is potentially dynamic and
changing, so reshaping is constantly possible.
Rhetoric Traditionally, the theory and practice of
eloquence, whether spoken or written; the use
of language so as to persuade others. Th e word
is almost always used today as a term of criti-
cism: rhetoric is the style in which bare-faced
persuasion – politicking – is used. It is emotive;
it belongs to speeches; and while it is very often
resounding, it is rarely eloquent because it trades
in empty phrases and endless repetitions. It is
essentially redundant in that it tells supporters
what they already know and antagonists what
they know and don’t want to hear.
Rhetoric is the stock-in-trade of the press, and
of the popular press in particular. Practically
every front-page headline is rhetorical in that it
is soaked-through with the ideological attitudes
of the newspaper, not least the belief in what
sells newspapers, what commands attention,
what readers want to be told. Indeed it might
be said that one of the prime functions the
popular press sets itself is to translate actuality
into rhetoric: complex issues are translated
into the simplifying mode of myth, of wedom,