Today we watched a segment from Michael Moore's television show "The Awful Truth." The story was about how an HMO wouldn't pay for a life-saving pancreas transplant for Chris.
Moore does a number of things to get the HMO to change its mind: he invites the head honchos and the employees to Chris's funeral and then holds a funeral rehearsal outside the HMO's headquarters. The HMO finally agrees to pay for Chris's transplant.
As we watched this show we noted how Michael Moore used logos, ethos and pathos to persuade us.
He established his ethos immediately by showing us that a real person's life was on the line. Not only that, but a real person with a wife and two young daughters. He gave us every reason to believe that anything that could be done to save this guy's life was worth it.
Next, Moore went on to solidify our commitment to him by showing Chris giving his two daughters a push on the swing set and then cutting to an interview where Chris says, "I have two daughters. They need a dad," and then breaks down. This is how Moore used pathos to appeal to us.
To appeal to the logical (logos) side of us Moore gave us facts and figures about how much money Humana makes, how much its corporate officers make , and how many pancreas transplants that kind of money translates into.
Moore also makes excellent use of story structure to invest us in Chris's plight. He casts Chris as the underdog, unjustly oppressed by a rich, heartless corporation. We know from earlier in this class that the more opposition a hero has to overcome, the more we invest in that hero. It also really helped that the PR guy Moore and Chris took on came across as being so callous.
We did notice, however, that Humana was never given a chance to represent itself. Did Humana have a really good reason why it wasn't willing to pay for the transplant? We will never know. Perhaps Humana's reason was so good that Moore's case would have been destroyed.
On the other hand, a sure way to boost your ethos is to let the other side have its say and then show how their reasons don't hold up. Then the audience says to itself, "Hah. Even when given a chance, the opposition cannot defend its decisions." You'll have the audience totally on your side if you are able to do that.
