An Exercise in Ethical Criticism: Celebrex© on TV

Paul Dombrowski
University of Central Florida

Ethics can seem a subtle abstraction to some students, but the topic can be made more vivid, clear, and real through examples.  The example I provide here, a televised Celebrex© commercial, is one I have used in my technical communication classes. The commercial provides an egregious example of visual rhetoric used in technical medical information that is misleading, incomplete, and masked in a communication to the general public.  Reaching farther back in time to Plato, who linked ethics with rhetoric, it is an example of bad or ignoble rhetoric on the basis of its ethics.