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Mouna Ez-Zouaq (LCS) Week6 Report

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17 views

Mouna Ez-Zouaq (LCS) Week6 Report

Uploaded by

Ez-zouaq Mouna
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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UNIVERSITY SIDI MOHAMED BEN

ABDELLAH (USMBA), FES


FACULTY OF LETTERS DHAR LMEHRAZ
(FLDM)
DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LANGUAGE
AND LITERATURE

Fall: 2024/2025
Abdelaaziz
Professor El Bekkali Module Language and Media Studies Semester 3

Crisis Communication and the Ethical Line in Political Communication: The New

Communications Landscape in Demystifying media globalization

Political communication can be defined as that public outreach from political parties. It
also includes feedback from the public aiming to influence decisions. However, it can also
refined as the art of persuasion. Persuasion is about persuading an intended audience using
different types of argument. In that, in that the fine-line between persuasion and manipulation is
blurred. Thus for a more neutral and objective political communication, politicians must bare in
minds the limits of ethical persuasion or political communication. Considering these limits alone
can help political communicator not to fall in the propaganda trap.

George Orwell wrote, “Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and
murder respectable.” in his darkness view of political communication, Orwell highlighted how
political communication shares many commonalities with dark persuasion techniques and
propaganda. Though all political messages are mainly designed to persuade potential voters and
to attract more supporters, some dark techniques might turn political communication to a whole
propaganda. Spinning is one of the techniques used by political leaders to hide the negative part
of the story while only accentuating the positive side of it. In other words, spinning is about
portraying a biased representation of an event or situation.

In the world of competition, where winning is the ultimate goal and no one questions the
trajectories to winning, the use of spinning is higher among politicians. In every politician’s
attempts to market his party as the best and immaculate party, there exist spinning. This goes to
the extent that it becomes difficult to imagine a political communication without spinning, which
work as the opium that motivates voters and build them convictions.

Another dark persuasion technique is propaganda. This big term bring to mind all cruel,
oppressive, and injustice moments that took place thorough the human history as well as the
most totalitarian and autocratic regimes from the past to the present. Propaganda is about
controlling the masses_it seeks to change the way people understand an issue or
situation to suit a particular situation. In the Republic Plato argues myth-making is
essential to the existence of the state. In his argument, Plato highlights the important role
propaganda play in maintaining government through manipulating how people understand
events and situations. He went even a step further and consider propaganda as a «white lie» that
might have some benefits inside for the state and its people.

However, propaganda can be used by autocratic regimes to kill people and oppress
nations. Particularly, with the omnipresent media platform nowadays, where the widespread of
lies and misinformation is as easy as it had never been before. A comprehensible example of
propaganda is the War on Iraq and how the whole news and coverage was controlled and staged.
Starting from the widespread of false news and lies about Hussein_stocking weapons of mass-
distraction and enjoying close relationships with Al-Qaeda. To making false associations and
framing vial labeling the accused as ‘dectator’ or ‘evil dectator’. and lastly to framing a
centralized message “Iraq is the central battleground in the war on terror.” that was
percieved as a common sense. Propaganda, in this sense, has led to the invasion of
Iraq in 9/11 via the use of different manipulation techniques through media channel.

To conclude, thanks to media literacy, people nowadays are more aware of the
manipulative nature of political communication and messages. However, still hundreds of people
still consume media content and news blindly and perceive everything they get exposed to on
media as spotless. In fact, the propaganda of the War on Iraq is repeating itself today in the War
on Gaza. The same story with the same techniques and different actors.

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