When Senators and Publics Meet at the Environmental Protection Subcommittee

Abstract

The hearings of the Senate Environmental Protection Subcommittee on reauthorizing the Clean Air Act of 1987 are analyzed and contrasted with Senate hearings of other committees to show how these hearings fit into the societal debate on clean air. The discourse of the hearings is analyzed by examining the language of the talk and by analyzing the style of argument. The discourse in these hearings is shown to be distinctive by comparing it with other hearings. The argument of the paper is that this distinctiveness is the result of the type of communication possible in electronic/mass media communication.