Meta: possible method?

I just read Marlia Banning's "Truth floats: Reflexivity in the shifting public and epistemological terrain" Rhetoric Society Quarterly (35) 3, Summer 2005. pp. 75-99. I'm not thrilled with the article; it seems to claim that self-awareness about the creation of texts erodes publics' confidence in texts. It seems to cling a little too tightly to the myth of objective reporting. For example, she says: "As shifts in information increasingly obscure the purpose, source, and status of any given communication, and reflexive representations highlight the constructed nature of any account, however, the information and common reference world so central to the possibilities of conversation in public life is diminishing" (p. 92). I would argue instead of "obscuring" communication, they're simply upending our previous ways of understanding communication. I would also argue that the "common reference world" was always a convenient fiction; recognizing that not every public was the object of address in the past forces us to realize the need to (and difficulties of ) address(ing) them now.

I'd argue that it doesn't erode publics' confidence, so much as educate publics to the fact that objectivity is a myth to be resisted and interrogated. It educates publics to be smarter about the information they're consuming. And I don't feel the "natural risks" section is particularly convincing (i.e., there's nothing particularly enlightening about 'natural risks' than about any other type of story--it seems that she's generalizing 'natural risks' as a way to highlight the controversy over the science behind global warming--but without ever saying that. While it might serve as a relevant example, one could also point to the administration's parsing of the definition of "torture" as another example where the arguments over definition define the debate and divide the public).

I have to say that I do love the method she uses: "My method catalogues events across media and genres. As Michael McGee has delineated, any 'apparently finished discourse is in fact a dense reconstruction of all the bits of other discourses from which it is made.' ('Text, Context, and the Fragmentation of Contemporary Culture' 279). Thus one of the primary jobs for rhetoricians in a fragmented cultural context, is 'inventing a text suitable for criticism' (288). I watched, read, or listened to public news just as anyone of my socioeconomic status and rhetorical training might do and then actively selected and catalogued the 'scraps and pieces of evidence' that I present here (279). That I catalog events in this manner is significant; it is this kind of cataloguing that eventually produces the density and compression of facts in daily living that form the information necessary for deliberation of public affairs. My methodology in this article--aside from my training and particular expertise--is a rhetoric of the everyday. It is a public method available to all, though circumscribed by the degree to which various publics are aware of the representation practices of the media and the state, and the kind of cataloging that is involved in producing the information that they use in their deliberation on public matters" (p. 79).

However, does the method of "I collected a bunch of stories I thought were relevant" have sufficient legitimacy? Is there a richer tradition that this is drawing on that can build enough to make a dissertation from? Or is it legitimate enough to go with based on just this article's reading of an article?