Letter To The Woman's National Press Club Analysis

In the letter to the Woman’s National Press Club, written in 1960 criticizing the tendency of the American press to sacrifice journalistic integrity in favor of the perceived public demand for sensationalist stories, American journalist and politician Clare Boothe Luce exhibits an accusatory tone through her use of syntax, employs ethos in the fact that she is also a journalist just like her audience, and arouses pathos through directly attacking journalism but also incorporates the positives with the mentality that this will cause her audience to take action. She does this in order to show the audience how corrupt the journalistic industry, their industry, has become, ultimately to persuade the audience to observe and assess the quality of work they’re producing.
Claire Booth Luce illustrates an accusatory tone in order to extend her argument that The American Press has caused journalism to become a joke of a profession and fellow journalists should be infuriated with the abuse of their skills. When Luce states “[b]ut you are an audience of journalists. There is no audience anywhere who should be more bored- indeed, more revolted- by a speaker who tried to fawn on it, butter it …show more content…
She manifests a shameful but optimistic reaction by stating “if there is much that is wrong with the American press, there is also much that is right with it,” and “if I ask you to accept some of the good with the bad-even though it may not make such good copy for your newspaper.” The comparison between the good and the bad aspects of the American press expanding on accepting the good with the bad demonstrates to the audience that the good can outweigh the bad but it comes at the cost of not fluffing up stories to create a more interesting story. She gets the audience to see that these things are worth the change, ultimately causing them to take action and change the way things have