Words Apart
Why do some celebs survive scandal when others end up in ruin? It’s all down to branding and soundbites explains journalist Sam Leith in his provocative new book on rhetoric in the celebrity and political realm.
Anne Sexton, 24 Nov 2011
Why did Kerry Katona get fired from Iceland after her cocaine scandal, but grainy pictures of Kate Moss hoovering up lines meant the supermodel garnered several new high-profile campaigns afterwards? As Sam Leith, author of You Talkin’ To Me: Rhetoric From Aristotle To Obama, explains, it’s all to do with ethos, or to put in it modern parlance, brand identity.
“Kerry Katona was chosen for Iceland because she was wholesome, not too posh, approachable, a mum, and she’d won I’m A Celebrity. She was the idealised version of what Iceland wanted their ‘mums’ to be like. Of course, when she was caught snorting coke, it instantly cut across the ethos appeal that Iceland were trying to project.
“In contrast with Kate Moss, it didn’t do her career any harm at all because the ethos appeal of the fashion world is not to wholesome mums. It’s an industry where eating disorder-suffering, underweight models who inject heroin into their eyeballs are regarded as edgy, so snorting cocaine wasn’t damaging to her image – she was a bad girl.
“Advertising draws on exactly the same rhetorical resources as political speech. The ethos appeal is just as important. A spokesperson is the face of a product, as a politician is the face of the party.”
Rhetoric is the art of persuasion. For 15 centuries it was a central part of education – you had to be able to recognise the techniques and have them at your command. The study of rhetoric may have fallen out of fashion but we are surrounded by it. It’s in political speeches, advertising, and yes, it’s littered across this copy of Hot Press too.
“You don’t have to look very hard to find rhetorical language in everyday life – it’s there,” says Leith, whose book includes examples from The Simpsons and Argos as well as more obvious sources, such as Shakespeare and Abraham Lincoln.
Ethos is one of the three appeals of rhetoric. Who you are is just as important as what you say. We’ll pay attention when Brian O’Driscoll gives us his thoughts on rugby, but we’d be less inclined to listen if he said he had the answers to Ireland’s economy.
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