A Rhetorical Analysis Of Lead Poisoning By John Oliver

In “Lead Poisoning,” hosted by John Oliver, of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, a comedian, who brings to light many dangerous and controversial issue. His targeted audience are mainly socially and politically liberal Americans concerned about cultural, economic and prominent social issues. In this essay, Oliver appeals to his audience by using humorous tones, diction and fallacies. He presents his argument in forms of factual data and some statistics generated by TV broadcast, lawmakers, psychologist, and government agencies to build his credibility and trustworthiness with his audience. Although, how Oliver presents his argument doesn’t appeal to every audience for instance, a scholar audience. In order, for a scholar audience to adhere

For example, throughout his broadcast, Oliver gets overly excited and uses profanity words like “hell…fuck”. He uses ambiguous language such as, “if we were signing personality traits to metal.” Also, Oliver presents his audience with numerous fallacy for instance, the Led Zeppelin. His audience appeals to this format because throughout Oliver’s broadcast, they continue to laugh when in fact, lead poisoning is no laughing matter however, I do believe that Oliver made his point that we have a problem and it’s lead poisoning which, inadvertently, is affecting children today. Therefore, every kind of audience would want to know about lead poisoning and its effect on everyone. However, a scholar audience, professors and professionals, would want to know more detailed

For instance, a scholar would want to know where the 2,000 contaminated pipes across the U.S. are and how we can stop the contamination of lead pipes. A scholar audience would accept the lawmakers’ sadness over lead found in children however, a scholar would want to know why they’re not lobbing for more funding to prevent lead poisoning and how are they going to solve this issue. A scholar audience would frown upon the misleading information and faulty logic that Elizabeth Mc Dade presented in Oliver’s broadcast because we all know that water in surrounding areas come from the same water district and how can children in Flint have contaminated water at home and not at school. Therefore, a scholar audience would want more information on the where the school receives their water from because as it stands, Mc Dade is presenting misleading information. Also, this audience would want to know how lead affects adults. Most scholar audiences would not adhere to any type of fallacies because the information would be irrelevant to lead poisoning. For instance, Led Zeppelin has nothing to do with lead