Why You Should Close those Philosophy Textbooks and Pick Up the Newspaper as a Lincoln-Douglas Debater

The News as a tool for Personal and Competitive Success

Okay, I get it. This sounds really straightforward, and there's no way you could not know how to incorporate news stories into your cases, blocks, Ks, and shells. You're all Lincoln-Douglas debaters after all. You can cite with the best of them, spread like lightning, and run circles around your opponents. You’ve got eyes for good evidence, and if you do decide to settle for something ripped out of the headlines, you know how to pick the right story. That’s fine. You may be right. But, and I’m basing this off of firsthand experience right now – you’re probably wrong. LD debaters on the circuit, for whatever reason, seem to have trouble using news stories or journalism pieces as legitimate sources of evidence.

I understand your possible trepidation. News stories are for Public Forum debaters. The NSDA even describes PFD as a style of debate that pulls its topics right from the headlines. However, the benefits of using the humble news article as your preferred source of evidence, empirical or otherwise, cannot be overlooked and cannot be overstated. This article will discuss some of those benefits, both strategic and personal. But first, allow me to begin with my own personal story.

Debating on the national circuit was always a love/hate relationship to me. Of course I appreciated the competitive aspect of it, the friendships I made, the travels to far off, exotic lands (Des Moines in December is just lovely), but I always felt kind of like an outsider. I learned to spread – I even enjoyed it sometimes – I went to camp, and debated on the national circuit with some success. One thing that never changed though, even in my junior and senior years when I began to be known at national tournaments by a few people here and there, was that in so many of my matches I felt like and was perceived as the underdog. While I got pretty fast, I was never the best at spreading. While I dabbled in some innovative ideas, I was never on the cutting edge of the newest positions. I never was great at flowing, and in elimination matches I would wind up needing more often than not to spend my opponent's constructive looking over their shoulder and flowing alongside them. Not ideal conditions for a quality debater, but I still won a lot of those matches. So what can that be credited to?

This might bug you as it bugs me, since I really like a warrant for everything. But this argument's warrant isn't very good. All I'll say is this, from personal experience: all of the debaters you face at your next bid tournament will have put in the time to become technically good at debating. Pen drills, flow drills, prepared blocks, blocks to the ATs you have, Theory shells, DIsads, the works. One debater even told me that they changed shirt color based on how they were doing in the tournament – the ideas was that red would signify power and would allow an underdog to make up some ground while blue would show humility and sagacity, allowing someone who had one a whole bunch of rounds to not seem arrogant when beating down another opponent. What these debaters often lacked though was the wisdom necessary to use those technical skills to their fullest potential. A little bit of background knowledge goes a long way to helping you win rounds, and a large, in depth picture of the topic in context will take you to the next level. Wikipedia pages and a cursory glance at the New York Times before hunting for the perfect card on JSTOR is not what I’m talking about here. Cutting news articles and using them as pieces of evidence themselves is what will do it. When you make yourself reliant on the journalists for success, you all of a sudden start listening to what they’re telling you.

Kierkegaard doesn’t tell you that the coalition of five Arab nations helping the US bomb ISIS consists of Bahrain, Qatar, Jordan, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia. Rawls never touches on the links between Eric Holder’s resignation and court developments relating to Operation Fast and Furious. And, as far as I recall, Boudrillard never even references Argentinian debt restructuring when discussing the hyper-reality. These are details that you, as a Lincoln-Douglas debater, still need to know and still need to research. These are the details that make or break a debate round. These are some of the best tools in your arsenal for staggering opponents who seem like they’re juggernauts. For the perpetual underdog, like me, journalists can be great friends, and common sense can be a great repellant to the buzzing insects of post-modern philosophy.

The News as an Offensive Weapon in Debate Rounds

So, maybe by now I’ve at least succeeded in my chief goal for this article: making you think about reading the news more. But the question still stands as to why the news should take precedence in some cases over more scholarly literature as your preferred impact or link card on the contention level offense of standard case formats. The answers are myriad and diverse, so let’s go through them one by one.

Do me a favor right now and open up the last article you read in JSTOR, and then open up an article from a newspaper. Have the two screens open side by side on your monitor. I’m doing the same thing, and here’s what I got from reading a random sentence in each:

The academic article (Kuhn, 1994) –

“We have already seen, however, that one of the things a scientific community acquires with a paradigm is a criterion for choosing problems that, while the paradigm is taken for granted, can be assumed to have solutions.”

The news article, from Kay Johnson at Reuters –

“Ghani’s first act after being sworn in was to sign a decree creating the post of chief executive.”

Notice anything? The second article’s syntax was far more concise and to the point. In writing to a popular audience, journalists are forced to cut down their word count and edit out unnecessary words and phrases. This means that when cutting journalistic articles in LD form, you need to worry less about making the author’s words coherent and more about simply finding the argument and reading it as evidence.

News articles also give you the edge if you have a split panel of lay judges and tech judges. While the flow judges won’t care what your evidence is from as long as it’s coherent. Being able to just take a moment and give a famous columnist or news reporter’s name as well as where they’re from can bring lay judges along for the ride even if you’ve made the decision to go for the majority by spreading to the panel. Counterintuitive as it may seem, the mother or father sitting on your octo-finals panel is much more likely to want to trust Tom Brokaw than Derrida77 or whatever else you scrounged up from your policy back file.

Then there are those judges in between. The ones that theoretically have a grasp of the topic because they’re lawyers or PhDs or have experience in the field, but who don’t have much experience keeping up with the technical aspects of a debate round. These are the judges that you’re most likely to win over with that array of background knowledge I talked about earlier. I don’t know how many times I’ve been in a round where this type of judge has grilled my opponent afterward about patently false information that they tried to pass off as the truth in a debate round. If you know the truth, and the judge knows the truth, but the judge is trying to adjudicate with some semblance of a tabula rasa framework, then you calling your opponent out on their falsehoods will be enough to shift the vote in your favor. Of course, you have to know what you're talking about first. This also helps when you're trying to lay on multi-point blocks to offense your opponent tries to put forward in a round. If for example, you read multiple cards against a contention and have a few seconds to spare, lay on an ad-libbed argument you remember reading or hearing in the news, one that you probably have somewhere but don't have out at the moment. The fact is that with this kind of judge, you can pass it off as common knowledge because the knowledge is, in fact, common. At least between two people in the room.

Finally, and this is a big one. If you’re going into a debate round as an underdog, like I did many times in my debate career. You want to play that up. Using news articles achieves this. It lets the opponent underestimate you. Whether it’s an element of irony or just strangeness, there’s simply something comically off about spreading popular news headlines with the same speed as your policy disad. If the type of argument you’re reading distracts your opponent from the quality of the context and your personal level of skill, you’ve already shifted the playing field to your advantage, and you’re already one step closer to winning the round.

Conclusions

Judges and students often reference debate as a game of strategy. I’ve heard the term verbal chess thrown about more than once on the circuit, and the fact is that these games of strategy have tactical as well as psychological aspects to winning. You have to know yourself, know your opponent, and know your judge in a debate round, and part of knowing yourself is feeling confident in your ability to generate offense without your prepared cards if need be, to improvise on the fly and to find cracks in your opponent’s logic based on a real world contextualization of evidence. Once you have a solid knowledge base on a topic, it becomes very easy to tell if your opponent has the same base of knowledge through during cross-examination. Finally, for any kind of judge, having a large array of tools is always important because you never know how you’ll need to react in a debate round to secure a victory until you’re in the thick of it. So go on and give the news a chance. Cutting the New York Times, the Washington Post, and even local papers in your region (shout out to the Sun Sentinel) give you the proper base of knowledge befitting a debater. After all, while you’ll retain the skills you learned in debate rounds for years to come, what’s more useful for your lives outside of the circuit bubble is the knowledge you gain and the research experience you perfect. And, for you underdogs out there going into your next out round at a national tournament, good luck. We're kindred spirits, you and me.

References

Cloud, David S. “5 Arab nations support U.S. in strikes inside Syria.” Los Angeles Times. September 23, 2014. http://www.latimes.com/world/middleeast/la-white-house-allies-syria-isis-20140923-story.html

Edwards, Richard E. Competitive Debate: The Official Guide. “Public Forum Debate.” Penguin, 2008. Print.

Howerton, Jason. “Critics Are Claiming This Could Be the Real Reason behind Attorney General Eric Holder’s Resignation.” The Blaze. September 25, 2014. http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/09/25/critics-are-claiming-this-could-be-the-real-reason-behind-attorney-general-eric-holders-resignation/

Johnson, Kay. “Historic, anxious handover as Afghanistan swears in new leader.” Reuters. September 29, 2014. Edited by Birsel, Robert and Maria Golovnina. http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/29/us-afghanistan-politics-idUSKCN0HN0XA20140929

Kuhn, Thomas S. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Fourth Edition. University of Chicago Press. Chicago, USA, 1962. Print.

Thomas Jr., Landon. “Argentine Economist Says Bond Holdouts Should Be Paid.” The New York Times DealBook. September 3, 2014. http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/09/03/argentine-economic-figure-urges-payments-to-bond-holdouts/