If Words Could Kill: Rhetorical Methodology in Media Depictions of Serial Killers
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This thesis explores how the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), a trusted national broadcaster, engages in implicit and particularly damaging rhetoric in The Fifth Estate’s “Karla Homolka” documentary to influence audiences into adopting a misleading impression of its conveyed message. Originally aired on November 25, 1997, the hour-long episode of CBC’s flagship television program, The Fifth Estate is dedicated to examining the Ontario Crown prosecutors’ plea bargain with Karla Homolka. The Fifth Estate’s “Karla Homolka” from the CBC will serve as the primary rhetorical artefact with Geraldo’s “Manson: Psycho” from a syndicated network acting as a secondary rhetorical artefact and comparison point. \n\nTo understand the rhetorical processes in the respective episodes of The Fifth Estate and Geraldo, this thesis will conduct an analysis using (1) leadership theory by John P. Kotter and James MacGregor Burns, and (2) rhetorical criticism rooted in concepts provided by Lloyd Bitzer, Edwin Black, and Kenneth Burke. The leadership and rhetorical theories offer insight into identifying the context, motives, and patterns to critically analyze Geraldo’s “Manson: Psycho” as a baseline of defining sensationalism to contextualize with the sensational tactics in The Fifth Estate’s “Karla Homolka” episode.\n\nTo conclude, this thesis reveals how the leadership and rhetorical strategies enacted by the CBC undermine its own integrity in the documentary by inviting an audience to indulge in salacious entertainment, motivated less by a desire to understand a complex legal process than to be titillated by sensationalistic and fantastical narratives. The CBC manipulates and misdirects the audiences’ attitudes, flirting with societal harm and public moral panic over a supposed threat that was disparate to its potential harm or actual danger.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".