Topic: proposed "study"

Given my conflicted position amidst humanities and social sciences (and their different definitions of what counts as scholarship, etc.), this may be a risky idea, but I'll try it. As I envision the "study" I would do for a dissertation (what would generally exist in a traditional social science endeavor—i.e., the whole "lab write-up" idea of an experiment), it would go something like this: take a "representative" sample of news items, identify the tropes I see being used throughout them, describe the frames those tropes work within/call into being/whathaveyou, discuss the underpinnings of those frames, and how those ideological underpinnings argue for /against certain policies. Come up with the "ergo: media (as currently practiced) incline certain policies to succeed".

The question I've always had is, "Is that enough?" In terms of length, etc., I suspect it is; however, in terms of answering the "So what?", I don't think it is. Basically I feel like I'd be replicating common sense in academic jargon—exactly what I think is why we're so ineffective at actually getting to solutions. I don't think there are too many people (who have enough of a passing interest in the subject that they'd be willing to read through whatever I'd write) that wouldn't be able to come to the same conclusions—and more importantly—haven't already. They won't have dotted all the "i"s and crossed all the "t"s, but there'd be a lot of "duh" going on. Maybe that means that it doesn't represent "new developments in the field" or "original scholarship" or whatever, but I think a heck of a lot of scholarship (in a ton of fields) that I've read has met the same fate, so I don't think I'm in too much danger there. [Unless I'm so fabulously smart that I instinctively operate at the highest levels of several different disciplines—but I doubt that.]

The real question of the "so what" test is, "so what do you do with this knowledge?" Granted, that would be some obligatory last chapter entitled "directions for further research" or some crap,...and maybe that's what it should justifiably be—just leave it at that, get the letters after my name and be done with it. Worry about doing that "further research" after jumping this hurdle rather than trying to make it the high bar to jump on my first run up. But the "crap" feeling I get with that approach is that I'll do all that work to not even get to the point where I think the actual work starts, so if I'm going to spend all this time to do work on a dissertation, and if that whole study points to fulfilling only "the law of duh", then why not start at the next point—given that the media isn't giving us the conversation about education that we need—what conversation should we be having about education (and how can we have it in the media)?

The problem there is that I feel like I'm no longer on safe ground. I feel like at that point it's just me spouting what I think is cool—not backed up by what I could call scholarship, or research or whathaveyou, and I'd instead by simply advocating what I think is right. And I can quote other people who I think are right as well, who have said things that I think are right about what schools should be teaching, and arguably I could point out [from my perspective] why, when they've said it, it hasn't gained traction (in keeping with the whole "we need a new rhetoric" idea of the first "study"). But I'm much less sure of what a "study" like that would look like, or how to do it (especially in a way to pass academic muster).