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Chapter 5 draws on large samples of opinion data from The New York Times, USA Today, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Face the Nation, Crossfire, and Hannity & Colmes to analyze communicative conditions and speech norms in the contemporary space of U.S. opinion. Comparing length of speech, number of conversational turns, and average length of conversational turn, it finds that opinion format strongly shapes the nature of opinionated speech. The social characteristics of speakers (e.g., occupational and sex) are associated with different levels of complexity and deliberative styles, but this variation operates within the parameters created by the overall opinion format.

Chapter 7 is an in-depth case-study of opinion narratives of the Enron scandal, beginning December 2001. It finds that while narratives of elite corruption dominated commentary about the scandal, print opinion focused on economic corruption and the need for financial regulation, while television opinion overwhelmingly focused on political corruption and the need for campaign finance reform, honing closely to the party positions of the political field. Surprisingly, the two narratives were not often linked together.

Chapter 8 is an in-depth case-study of the opinion narratives in the War on Terror. It analyzes the complex, contradictory ways in which specific speakers, opinion styles and claims to authority combined in particular formats to shape the narratives that developed. Older formats in print and television were more likely to display traditional forms of journalistic autonomy, but this did not always produce the most complex, nuanced or critical opinion. Similarly, while the newer opinion formats of cable television were deeply contentious, often reductive and politically polarizing, they were nonetheless capable of accomplishing complex forms of argument. Social characteristics of guests and rhetorical styles associated with different formats also independently shaped the deliberative quality of opinion, with politicians tending to reduce autonomy and complexity of deliberation, and academics tending to encourage historical complexity and cultural sensitivity.

This chapter offers an account of the emerging centrality of celebrities in public culture. Studying celebrity and religion in concert requires parsing the multiple ways these terms have become increasingly interactive, overlapping, and co-constitutive in modern America. This chapter explores how this has transpired by looking at both the forms of news reporting that have succeeded in recent years and the changed way that religion is publicly discussed. Its focus is the national daily newspaper USA Today, which provides an excellent archive for the relationship between religion and celebrity in the news via its own oft-touted (and oft-satirized) synthetic style, including short articles, cheery cartoon graphics, and intentionally “easy to read” copy. This chapter analyzes the way that entertainment news deploys religious idiom to express something inexpressibly potent in its subject and to translate democratic moral agency in an increasingly privatized corporate media structure. First, it offers a short history of the emergence of infotainment reportage and its corollary, celebrification. It then discusses news coverage of religion and celebrity in three separate periods: 1989–1996, 1997–2003, and 2004–2010.

Chapter 6 draws on large samples of opinion texts from The New York Times, USA Today, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Face the Nation, Crossfire, and Hannity & Colmes to describe and compare the rhetorical features of opinionated speech in the contemporary U.S. space of opinion. In a close analysis of performative styles (argumentative, informative, reframing, asking questions), imagined audiences (elites or wider publics), and claims to authority (direct claims of experience or expertise, indirect evocations of scientific or historical authority, and a wide range of intertextual claims to authority), it shows that there are complex associations between the social characteristics of speakers, the communicative organization of opinion formats, and the rhetorical features of specific opinion texts. It is not so much whether a particular commentary or format is objective or non-objective, or if an opinion style is inclusive or elitist. Rather, on particular issues different opinion styles shape the opinion narrative in different ways.

Chapter 2 traces the history of the space of opinion and analyzes the rise of the special class of media pundits who dominate it. It chronicles the rise to influence of the newspaper columnist in the early 20^th century, focusing on the career of Walter Lippmann. With the development of television in the 1950s and the subsequent rise of talk formats, televised political talk increasingly came to dominate public political discussions. In both print and television, different formats provided distinct strategies for dealing with two challenges: (1) the tensions between autonomy and influence, and (2) the need to present complex issues to mass publics. These different strategies have clear implications for how we think about media, opinion formation, and processes of democratic deliberation.

This introductory chapter examines various models for popularizing and democratizing news that have been influential in the United States over the past several decades. It argues that the U.S. news industry has undergone a philosophical paradigm shift, moving away from an ideal of professional autonomy and into a “postprofessional” period characterized by an affirmation that consumers' preferences should drive news production. The chapter also describes several attempts made by key groups of news producers to shift control over the news agenda away from professional expertise and put it in the hands of ordinary news consumers: the market-centered newspaper movement epitomized by Gannett's USA Today, the creation of a genre of news amid competition among the major U.S. cable news channels, and the growth of online social news sites tapping into collaborative filtering as a mechanism for democratizing the news agenda.

Seldom has the arc of a neologism been so visible. On the afternoon of August 18, 2007, standing at the PodCamp Pittsburgh registration desk, Tommy Vallier, Andy Quale, Ann Turiano, Jesse Hambley, and Val and Jason Head—all participants in the city’s annual social media conference—were having a conversation about Canadian bacon. Vallier informed the group that peameal bacon was an alternate name for the breakfast meat, leading others to comment that peameal sounded like email. This coincidence in turn reminded them of a prior discussion about all the automatic email notifications they received daily, from Google news alerts to Facebook updates, which were becoming almost as distracting as spam. They decided it was a problem, and their banter about peameal and pork suggested a name. Since the notifications were a cut above spam—after all, these updates had been requested—they dubbed this “middle class” of email bacn. The following day the six PodCampers held a spontaneous group session with several dozen of their fellow social media mavens, who were swiftly won over by the jokey name and ironic spelling (a play on sites such as Flickr and Socializr then popular). The web address bacn2.com was acquired—bacn.com was already taken by a bacon distributor and bacn.org belonged to the Bay Area Consciousness Network—and a droll public service announcement explaining the time-wasting dangers of bacn was promptly posted on YouTube. What happened next was best explained by PodCamp’s cofounder Chris Brogan to the Chicago Tribune five days later. “The PodCamp event was about creating personal media,” he said, “so 200-something reporters, so to speak, launched that story as soon as they heard it.” The term was written up on hundreds of personal blogs, bringing it into Technorati’s top fifteen search terms and leading Erik Schark to muse on BoingBoing that the spread of bacn showed “the ridiculous power of the internet.” Schark also listed the mainstream media that had covered it, including CNET, Wired , and the Washington Post, where Rob Pegoraro complained about the name: “Bacon is good,” he opined.