Tag Archives: Liberty University

Shannon Bream makes me glad.

Posted on by
Reply

This will not be the first time on this blog that we have watched a speech from Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia. On the previous occasion Trey Gowdy was the speaker. Unsurprisingly, given Liberty’s Christian roots, that was a ringing call to the students to follow a lifelong path of Christian integrity.

In May 2013 the keynote speaker for their Commencement was Shannon Bream.

The introduction by Jerry Falwell Jr, President of the University, is suitably effusive, and concludes with a brief ceremony of conferring upon Shannon Bream a Doctorate of Communication. She begins speaking at 4:03.

As a programme anchor on TV Bream will have spoken to bigger audiences, but when you are broadcasting and can’t see your audience its size is just a number. At 4:20 we get a shot of the audience, crammed into a football stadium, and I wonder whether this is the largest live and visible audience that she has addressed.

In that same shot we see her Teleprompter screens. To me they are hugely significant.

In my work, though occasionally I and the trainee will work hard to develop new skills, the first, easiest, and commonest thing is to identify the trainee’s strengths in order to build them and play to them. Bream plays to her strengths.

She is reading from a Teleprompter, and doing it very well. Of course! That’s a skill she had to develop for her work.

The words she is reading are not in written English but in spoken English and sound spontaneous. Writing a script like that is a surprisingly difficult skill (so difficult that I find it quicker and easier to teach people to structure their material in such a way as to be able to speak spontaneously without writing it). Difficult or not, that’s also a skill she had to develop for her work.

She is speaking quickly. Most would sound less intelligible or even panicky at that pace, but again it’s an occupational skill for what she does for a living.

All this would be very difficult for nearly everyone, but she is making it seem like a walk in the park and succeeding wonderfully.

The only professional error I can identify is rather cheeky and based on the assumption that she is working to a fifteen minute slot. Starting at 4:03 and ending at 19:41 she over-runs by thirty-eight seconds. You think that’s splitting hairs? You’re right of course, though you would not have been had this been a broadcast. Airtime operates precisely to the second: under-running is manageable, over-running is not. Nevertheless, this is not broadcasting and she is playing to a window she knows to be elastic. I bet her timing is more accurate than anyone else who has done this speech.

Shannon Bream’s message is rather devout. That is appropriate in this setting, though many outside the setting would be a little uncomfortable with it. I would urge them nevertheless to pay close attention. You do not have to espouse the dogma to value the philosophy.

I’m glad I watched this.

 

Dinesh D’Souza nails The Big Lie

Posted on by
Reply

In September 2017 Dinesh D’Souza spoke at Liberty University in Virginia, USA. This is not the first time we have looked at a speech delivered there: we saw Trey Gowdy likewise. At the very beginning of this speech D’Souza makes the point that unlike far too many universities and colleges in America, indeed the West, Liberty conscientiously hosts speakers from all backgrounds and political persuasions. It is disgraceful that this requires highlighting, education surely being about challenging young minds with a variety of opinions, but it does.

This speech first caught my eye when its online posting declared it to have been an amazing speech that earned itself a standing ovation. The second thing I noticed was that it was about The Big Lie, a book I read in hardback months ago when it was first published.

There’s an interesting thing about D’Souza’s jaw-dropping assertions, namely that no one succeeds in refuting them. In his previous book, Hillary’s America which I also read, he declared that at the outset of the American Civil War all American slaves belonged to members of the Democratic Party, and defied anyone to find an exception. That was published in July 2016 since which the silence has been broken only by smears and name-calling, the halfwit’s substitute for argument.

I was highly sceptical that this speech could in thirty minutes do more than merely trail the book. I was wrong. D’Souza is such a master of structure that watching this speech may well make you want to read the whole book, but you don’t have to unless you want to probe the detail in depth. I’m sorry if this inhibits his sales, but it’s all here, and magnificently shot from the hip. D’Souza is an astonishingly good speaker, and this an astonishingly good speech.

Have you noticed how everything that can be described as reprehensible is always characterised as ‘right-wing’?  (In fact, that is essentially the BBC definition.) Has it puzzled you when told that Stalin for instance, though a Communist, suddenly adopted ‘right-wing tendencies’ when he went about killing people? Mao and Pol Pot ditto? Have you been led to believe that the political spectrum is actually circular, and that is why the extreme left emulates the extreme right in its brutal authoritarianism? Have you been told that authoritarianism is itself a right-wing thing, despite the right always calling for smaller government? Has it ever bothered you how the ‘moderate’ left will go to extreme lengths to prevent you hearing anything from the ‘extreme’ right?

Then you are a victim of The Big Lie, and you need to watch this speech. And if you are a lover of good public speaking, then you definitely need to watch this speech.