How does the television persuade? What is its communicative potential? This volume takes a completely new rhetoric-theoretical view of the television medium, which does not inquire into the persuasiveness of individual programs or institutions, but rather the communicative structure of the medium. Rhetoricians Joachim Knape and Anne Ulrich take up central concepts out of television science, discuss these from a rhetorical perspective, and construct a performance profile of the medium, which makes it possible to identify promising display and presentation techniques on TV. This allows at once a new concept of the medium and an overview of the theoretical concepts central to television.