In the United States, the 2010s saw a significant, organized wave of public philanthropy among the very wealthy. We conducted a discourse analysis of legitimation in The Giving Pledge, a philanthropic endeavor that began in 2010 in which billionaires encourage each other to publicly pledge to give away the majority of their wealth in their life or upon their death. We approach these texts with the questions, “Why do these individuals make these public pledges?” and “What rhetorical work is being done by them?” From the perspective of legitimation theory, how do these public, rhetorical acts constitute the social and economic orders into which they are made? Our discourse analysis of the pledges finds that they constitute two parts of an economic system of wealth, both wealth acquisition and the philanthropic giving of wealth. These constitutions in The Giving Pledge reify an institutional order by appending a promise to give back.

Readers’ objectivity and bias evaluations of news texts were investigated in order to better understand the process by which readers make these kinds of judgments and the evidence on which they base them. Readers were primed to evaluate news texts for objectivity and bias, and their selections and metacommentary were analyzed. Readers detected bias in passages with stance markers, and detected objectivity in those lacking stance markers. In their metacommentary, readers tended to characterize objective texts as lacking purpose, or having a merely descriptive or expository purpose, and biased texts as exhibiting explicit interpretive or argumentative purposes. Unlike studies that locate objectivity or bias in news texts, or test it by asking about the fidelity of texts to their sources, our study examined the evaluations of readers in their interactions with texts. It shows how objectivity and bias evaluations are a multiply determined part of a communication dynamic rather than a fixed quality of a text.

Although the rhetoric of expertise stemming from the hard and social sciences has been well researched, the scholarship has not tended to focus on acts of public expertise by scholars from the humanities. This article reports a case study in the rhetorical practices of a theologian, acting as a public expert, first attempting to affect decision making in the Waco conflict in 1993 and then attempting to participate in and shape the public debates that followed it. To compare the practices of this humanities scholar to expectations from research on the rhetoric of expertise, a rhetorical analysis was conducted on the context, style, genre, and argument in the scholar’s public writings. This article discusses (a) the role of kairos in the policy cycle in determining the scholar’s bids for acceptance as an expert, (b) the use of narrative as a generic hybrid of intra- and interdisciplinary practice, and (c) the role of “understanding” asa special topic.