Another One Bites the Dust (2)

"An unknown person wrote a letter to Attorney General's Office, 'I have been unable to sleep knowing that I've been cheated about my income. I've hide my income and have enclosed a check for 27 billion. If I still can’t sleep, I will send the rest.'"

"Let's move on," said Wulandari. "According to Icks, Shiraev, Keohane and Samoilenko, character assassination is the deliberate destruction of a person’s reputation or credibility, through character attacks. Its meaning is twofold: on the one hand, it can refer to the process of attacking someone’s character; on the other, to the result of such attacks, if they are successful.

There are several points to touch upon. First, character assassination is always deliberate, which means it is done with the intention to damage another person. In practice, it is not always possible to establish the intentions of character attackers with rock-hard certainty. They may frame their attacks as legitimate concerns or constructive criticisms. They may say that they were merely joking and did not really mean to harm anyone. They may hide their identity altogether. Nevertheless, when we consider their expressions in context, their intention is often clear enough. When a campaign ad is criticizing the clothing and hairstyle of a female politician, its aim is probably not to make a fashion statement. When a right-wing newspaper keeps publishing scandalous stories about the private lives of left-wing political candidates in the months leading up to an election, they are probably engaged in more than objective reporting on a need-to-know-basis.

Second, character assassination is always public in nature. If somebody says to you privately that your behavior after the party last night was embarrassing and it is great that nobody else saw you behaving like that—is this talk a character attack? Not at all. While criticisms and insults can be traded in private and are meant to hurt the feelings of the insulted party, character attacks are meant to be seen, heard, or read by an audience or at least another person. If they fail to reach that audience, they cannot do any damage.

This ties in to a third point, namely that character assassination is all about perception. The goal of the attacker is to influence the way others see a particular person. Strictly speaking, character assassination is a somewhat ambiguous term, because it is not character as such that is damaged or destroyed. After all, questioning someone’s honesty, toughness, or courage does not make them any less honest, tough, or brave. Their actual character is unaffected. The only thing that potentially changes is other people’s perception of that character. If they come to believe that an honest man is actually a liar, or that a strong, courageous woman is really a weak coward, the attacker has reached his goal. It would thus be more accurate to speak of reputation assassination, but that term is not commonly used, and we are aware of this.

This ties in to a third point, namely that character assassination is all about perception. The goal of the attacker is to influence the way others see a particular person. Strictly speaking, character assassination is a somewhat ambiguous term, because it is not character as such that is damaged or destroyed. After all, questioning someone’s honesty, toughness, or courage does not make them any less honest, tough, or brave. Their actual character is unaffected. The only thing that potentially changes is other people’s perception of that character. If they come to believe that an honest man is actually a liar, or that a strong, courageous woman is really a weak coward, the attacker has reached his goal. It would thus be more accurate to speak of reputation assassination, but that term is not commonly used.

When discussing character assassination, people often use related terms such as slander, smear, and defamation. Smearing or mudslinging have a very negative ring because they tend to refer to unfair, malicious character attack and related undignified practices of disinformation, gross exaggeration, or lies. The term vilification is often used too; literally, it means that someone is described as a villain. Vilification concerns attacks that aim to highlight a person’s moral defects (as opposed to incompetence, unattractiveness, etc.). If those moral defects are portrayed as particularly grave and shocking, we can say that a person is demonized (literally, turned into a demon).

Defamation is the communication, usually intentional, of a statement about individuals that harms their reputation. Defamation and calumny are mostly synonymous with character assassination, except that they can also refer to attacks on companies, social groups, and other collective entities. In many countries, calumny and defamation constitute punishable offenses under the law, but usually only if it can be proved that the allegations are intentionally false. In common law, two types of defamation are distinguished: slander, which refers to defamation in spoken form, and libel, which refers to defamation in written form. In colloquial speech, however, slander is often used to refer to many forms of character assassination.

The term invective is also used in relation to character assassination. This is a form of rhetoric involving rude or abusive language that aims to cast someone in a negative light. The ancient Romans considered invective and its opposite, praise, as important rhetorical tools and engaged in them frequently. They even wrote handbooks explaining how best to attack one’s opponent in a speech. Finally, the term ad hominem or argumentum ad hominem (literally 'argument to the man') also refers to character attacks in a rhetorical context. It describes an argument in a debate that constitutes a personal attack on another participant, for instance by questioning their motives or credibility.

Although character assassination occurs in many forms and can be studied from many viewpoints, five elements are the most essential. Icks, Shiraev, Keohane and Samoilenko call them as the five pillars of character assassination. They are the attacker, the target, the medium, the audience, and the context.

The attacker is the person or group that launches the character attack. They can have various reasons for doing so. For instance, a candidate in an election tries to damage the reputation of her opponent. An entrepreneur smears the good name of a business rival to eliminate the competition. In other cases, the attackers may just need a convenient scapegoat to direct public ire away from themselves. Tabloids, websites, or social media often publish scandalous stories about celebrities to increase sales or viewership. In some cases, attackers act out of sheer malice or are inspired by revenge against somebody

When we use the term attacker, we are referring to the person who has instigated the character attack. Attackers are often specific people, or can also be groups of people. In many cases, character attacks are anonymous, so that the public cannot determine exactly who the attacker is. Attacks that come via social media like Twitter are tied to a specific username, but it is not always possible to determine who is actually behind that account.

The target is the person whose reputation the attacker aims to damage. If the attack is successful, the target becomes a victim of character assassination. However, character attacks can also have a backlash effect, causing the public to view the attacker in a less favorable light. In some cases, they may even have the opposite effect of what was intended, creating sympathy for the target and resentment toward the attacker. Targets are usually living persons, but people can also come under attack posthumously—sometimes even centuries after their death. This usually happens if they are seen as the symbol or representative of a larger movement, religion, or ideology. For instance, posthumous character attacks are still targeted against the Prophet Muhammad (ﷺ), prophet of Islam and Karl Marx, 'father' of communism. In times of revolution and political upheaval, political leaders that have been overthrown may suffer posthumous character assassination at the hands of the new regime.

History teaches us that character assassination has distinct historical-specific features or characteristics deeply rooted in the concrete historical and cultural aspects of the time. Culture is connected to politics: political changes often require changes in cultural norms. Similarly, cultural changes in society deeply affect the political and legal systems rooted in it.

Historical changes are inseparable from technological advancements. Although earlier we argued that character assassination has many consistent features across centuries, the technological means by which information is spread have definitely played a major role in character assassination methods and strategies There are at least two types of mistaken assumptions or cognitive fallacies people frequently make when they read and talk about history. One is their overwhelming reliance on history and the tendency to bring historical analogies to each and every case related to current affairs. No doubt, analogies borrowed from the past may work today. Yet they may completely fail. Attacking a medieval king in a written pamphlet is only remotely compatible to a tweet attacking a political leader in a modern democratic country. For one, the odds of being prosecuted for this action are vastly different. The other cognitive fallacy is the total denial of historical lessons under the infamous and flashy assumption that 'the lesson of history is no one learns.' As this assumption suggests, history can be easily dismissed. Our position is somewhere in between these extremes. Of course, cases from history are not exact replicas of what is happening today. As Mark Twain reportedly put it, 'History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes.' Historical parallels are powerful, but they are not 100 percent accurate. However, what we learn from history helps us navigate in the turbulent waters of today’s facts and opinions. 

Akhenaten died at a relatively young age, in the seventeenth year of his reign. We have no idea what caused his death. Could it be that some angry priests or traditionalists who spurned his heretical views removed him? We can only speculate. What we do know is that Akhenaten’s son, Tutankhamun, soon distanced himself from his father’s religious policies. He abandoned the new capital of Akhet-Aten and allowed the other gods to be worshipped again. Things returned to normal. As for Akhenaten, his memory was not treated kindly. At some stage the dead pharaoh’s tomb was desecrated, his images vandalized, and his buildings destroyed. His name was removed from the official list of kings, as were the names of his immediate successors on the throne. If he was referenced in official texts at all, it was as 'that criminal of Akhet-Aten.'

Whatever really happened, we can certainly regard Akhenaten’s posthumous disgrace as a case of character assassination. Through his building projects, magnificent statues, and boastful inscriptions the man had tried to establish his reputation as a powerful, wise, and pious ruler. His enemies, whoever they were, tried to destroy his status and rejected his place in the line of pharaohs. We consider such actions as character attacks because they are about memory erasing or attempts to diminish or even eliminate an individual existence from the collective memory of future generations. The attempt was by no means unique. In fact, many pharaohs suffered posthumous attacks

on their memory.

Was this type of character attack unique to ancient Egypt? Not at all. As history shows, erasing from memory, which involves a systematic deleting of information about a person from printed and other sources, has been documented in other cultures and in other times. Deleting from memory was also combined with silencing, which—in the context of character assassination—is about preventing a living person from defending his or her character, after it has been attacked or erased from printed or other sources. As a result of erasing and silencing, an individual no longer occupies people’s attention or even 'disappears' from people’s collective memory.

Remember, we need to utilize historic cases with a grain of salt, so to speak. Unlike modern cases, most of which contain factual and verifiable evidence, the stories of Akhenaten and other rulers from the distant past pose many challenges to historians. Because our documented sources are limited, and historic cultures are often so very different from our own, there is much we do not know or understand. Nevertheless, there is much we can learn from such ancient cases of character assassination. For one thing, they draw our attention to the deep psychological and behavioral roots of this phenomenon in human culture.

So, the target is the person who is having their character assassinated. Targets can be anybody from the popular girl in high school to the president of a country or a prospective presidential candidate. Often, targets are high-profile people. This is because the attacker stands to gain a lot by making such people appear vulnerable in the eyes of the public.

Each character attack requires a medium, whether it is an interview, a speech, a campaign ad, a tweet, a cartoon, or a pamphlet. This pillar also includes 'the media—talking about this, does not mean to make the media have a negative connotation, but we remain optimistic that the media will continue to play its role as one of the pillars of democracy, such as news channels, radio broadcasts, and websites. These media possess an agency of their own and can decide to run certain stories while ignoring others. More than that: they can create stories of their own or decide to frame them in ways that make a particular person look good or bad. The media, then, are active agents in the game of character assassination.

As we know, projecting a positive image has always been important to public figures. Egyptian pharaohs and Roman emperors had impressive statues of themselves put up around their realms. After the 15th century, monarchs and popes in Europe and later in other parts of the world began to use print media for promulgating official directives. They also used pamphlets and periodicals to spread information and increase their public exposure in distant locales. At the same time, people personally attacked rulers and public figures in pamphlets and other printed materials.

The development of radio and television in the 20th century provided public figures and their opponents with new opportunities for exposure and criticism. Authoritarian political regimes mobilized media to promote and defend government policies as well as government leaders. In democracies, multiple public relations agencies and political consultants found new business by zooming in on appealing personal characteristics of their clients while downplaying some unattractive pages from their biographies. In the age of television, especially after the 1960s, when a TV set became affordable to almost every family in developed countries, impression management became a crucial skill for political contenders, celebrities, and government officials.

As a result, television has personalized politics and facilitated the rise of the society of self-disclosure, in which political leaders use the media to create intimate forms of self-presentation and lay bare some aspects of their personal life. The ability to project a credible image on television and protect it from attacks remains crucial: prominent public figures become convenient targets of character attacks, especially during election campaigns.

For many, the Internet has increased the amount of public exposure and visibility. To be positively regarded, many public figures are increasingly expected to maintain an active online profile and constantly invest in their media presence. Politicians often have to use a more personal tone of communication with their supporters and their electorate via direct messaging and feedback. Former U.S. President Barack Obama was among the first world leaders to use social media to bypass traditional journalists and connect directly with his supporters. During the 2016 and 2020 U.S. presidential campaigns, both parties actively used social media. A similar trend has been observed in many other countries.

This tendency associated with an increasing exposure of public officials has in turn multiplied reputational risks for politicians, celebrities, company managers, and average citizens. Reputational risk refers to the degree of a threat to character-based reputations that can potentially develop into a crisis.

Editors and journalists often exercise their control over determining what becomes news and what does not. This process is called agenda-setting and because of it, the media can choose the topics based on their perceived importance. Therefore, the media have power to set agendas and communicate the importance of specific issues to the public by suggesting what they should focus on or think about. The media can also take issues off the public agenda by not covering them.

Priming is an extension of the agenda-setting process. It is about the influence of some preceding information on how the audience reacts to other news. Media messages can 'prime' the audience to trust some information more and accept some other information less. The more prominent an issue in the news stream, the greater the impact of that issue on political attitudes. For example, during elections, watching television news coverage of violent crime causes people to weigh a candidate’s views on the death penalty more heavily compared to before they watched the crime news. How does priming work? When a certain idea is primed by a message, it tends to, it tends to activate a chain of associations in memory related to the message. Thus, certain media messages can prompt various schemas of interpretations, stereotypes, and prejudices capable of influencing the ways individuals make judgements of other people.

Priming of a message is one of the mechanisms of misinformation and character assassination. In the context of character assassination, priming often works because it suggests audiences follow quick and easy thinking and labeling instead of exerting cognitive effort. As in many other cases, the less knowledgeable are a desirable audience for character attackers.

"On the next session," said Wulandari, "we will discuss about framing and labeling as well as the last two of the five pillars of character assassination, bi'idznillah."

Wulandari then singing,

She keeps her Moët et Chandon in her pretty cabinet

'Let them eat cake,' she says, just like Marie Antoinette

A built-in remedy for Khrushchev and Kennedy

At anytime, an invitation you can't decline *)

[Session 3]
[Session 1]

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