Another One Bites the Dust (3)

"There was a young woman, worked as a scientist—who are learning about the making of BTS, not the Bangtan Sonyeon K-pop, but Base Transceiver Station—whose friend was an aspiring comedian, went with her to the Stand Up Comedy annual convention, expecting to hear some fantastic stories. Instead, the featured comedian began to rattle off a series of numbers.

'93!' said the speaker, and the audience chuckled appreciatively. '999!' they laughed again. '311!' more laughter.

The scientist couldn’t stand it any longer. She nudged her friend and whispered, 'What’s going on?'

'Simple' said her friend. 'You see, every joke in the world has been catalogued and given a number. When one of us says ‘93,’ that means joke number ninety-three. So we laugh. Get it?'

'You mean,' asked the scientist dubiously, 'my boyfriend are going to crack up if I say to him, ‘Twenty-six’?'

'No, no,' said her friend, 'your delivery is wrong. Listen to this guy. He’s good and you might learn something.'

So the scientist tried to appreciate the comedian’s technique on 46, 986 and 2836. Then the comedian paused dramatically, waving his hands for silence. When he had the audience’s full attention, telling about 'interference' and 'the BTS scandals' reported by media, the he shouted, 'Ten thousand—two hundred—and three!' There was pandemonium.

People clapped and cheered. The scientist’s friend was laughing so hard that tears ran down her face and she could hardly stand.

'What happened? What happened?' she demanded. 'Why was that one so funny?'

'Well,' said her friend, 'we never heard that joke before!'"

"Let's go on," said Wulandari, "As we have seen, our character is what marks, defines, and identifies us. And we’ve been asking ourselves, 'What distinctive qualities identify me? Are they positive or negative?' Genuine character includes the following features: It is, first, fixed or set. The fixed quality of character may be illustrated by elements whose intrinsic quality is to be unchanging, or absolute. Numerals are one example of the fixed nature of character. The number 1 is always 1. It will never change to become 2. And so on, up to infinity. In nations across the globe, the properties and functions of numbers are used in exactly the same way.

Most people are familiar with the saying, 'Every man has his price.' This idea implies that every person has a point at which he will compromise his moral standards to gain something else that is a higher priority to him. Some of the usual candidates are money, fame, and power. But if we want to be leaders of character, we have to stop accepting this notion. There’s no “price” for a leader of character that will cause him to compromise his standards, because his principles are his life. All leaders of character are therefore 'set in their ways,' ethically speaking. There’s no 'price' for a leader of character that will cause him to compromise his standards.

Second, character Is predictable. To be predictable is to be consistently responsible and trustworthy. A principled leader is predictable to the point that his character speaks for him in his absence. That is to say, people know him so well that they could vouch for what he would or would not do in a given situation—and be totally accurate.

Third, character is stable. When we walk with integrity, our good character can flow evenly in all areas of our life. A principled leader does not change his values and principles, no matter the external circumstances. He is able to weather all kinds of personal and professional storms, even those that are 'hurricane strength,' while remaining calm and steadfast. We need to ask ourselves the following: 'Am I consistent, no matter where I am, what I am doing, and what time of day it is?' 'What do I do when people ‘relieve themselves’ on me—in other words, gossip about me, criticize me, attack my motivations, insult me, or even swear at me? Do I become a different person, losing my temper and lashing back?' 'What would I be like if my business collapsed and I lost everything? Regardless of how devastated I felt, would my character remain the same?' 'Am I the really the person that I project to others?' 'Do I behave in an unethical or inappropriate way when no one else is around?'

A true leader is able to take criticism and mistreatment and still retain his character. Genuine character will outlast all disagreements, disapproval, opposition, and attacks. If you believe in your ideas and your standards, you should stay with them—be stable. Even your enemies may eventually acknowledge your integrity.

In short, each of us must take some responsibility for the crisis of character in our world today. We are all part of the problem. But we can all be part of the solution by committing to follow sound principles and moral standards—to becoming 'one' in our thoughts, words, and actions.

Now, let's carry on to our subject, character assassination. In previous session, we have mentioned about agenda-setting, including priming.

Besides agenda-setting and priming, the media provide viewers with media frames, a form and context for interpreting the news. Studies on media frames examine how issues are presented in the news. News stories represent selective constructions of reality that depend on the choices made by writers, journalists, and editors. The 'framed' reality created by media may result in lasting opinions and electoral choices of the viewing and listening audience.

The process of framing refers to rhetorical strategies and techniques that enable communicators to highlight some aspects of reality while obscuring or even ignoring others. There is a clear distinction between the power to set the agenda and the power to persuade citizens about the importance or meaning of a political event. For example, information about a business executive’s private life may be available, but it may not be enough to make judgments about the merits of his character. Framing encourages making such judgments. Therefore, framing can be another effective tool of character assassination.

One of the powerful components of framing is labeling. Labels are symbols used to tag and categorize individuals. Labels and nicknames later morph into familiar phrases, jokes, or memes—which can obscure a serious discussion. Social labeling is a powerful tool of persuasion that can lead to further stigmatization. Twitter has facilitated the use of real-time framing and labeling in a political discourse. Character assassination can prove handy when it prevents the dissemination of unwanted messages and silences dissenting voices. A corporation dealing with a whistle-blower issue may elect to discredit the messenger and torpedo their credibility.

There are at least seven ways to damage or destroy a person’s reputation: allegations, name-calling, ridiculing, fearmongering, exposing, disgracing, and erasing.

Many character attacks take place in the form of allegations: accusatory statements, either true or false, about an individual’s flaws or shortcomings. There are three aspects of an individual that can become the focus of character attacks: their personality, their behavior, and their social identity. When people are accused of arrogance, pettiness, narcissism, stupidity, or aggressiveness, their personality is under attack, as all of these are supposed to be stable personal traits. Whether an individual’s personality traits do indeed remain stable during their lifespan is a debatable question. What matters is that many people choose to assume so.

We speak of name-calling when an attacker applies a negatively charged term to a target. Such terms can refer to the target’s personality or behavior, e.g. 'liar,' 'traitor,' 'bitch,' 'pervert,' and so on. (The distinction between personality and behavior is not always easy to make in these cases). Negative terms can also refer to the target’s status or affiliation, including digs at someone’s ideological convictions—e.g. 'communist,' 'fascist' 'atheist,' 'tree hugger'—but also ethnic or gender-based slurs. Name-calling often takes the form of labeling, which means that a negatively charged term is consistently applied to a target, so that the audience comes to strongly associate this 'label' with a particular person.

Name-calling often takes the form of labeling, which means that a negatively charged term is consistently applied to a target, so that the audience comes to strongly associate this 'label' with a particular person.

Another widespread and often very effective method of character assassination is ridicule, which is purposeful and contemptuous exaggeration or distortion in a comical context. Cartoons mocking politicians and other public figures exist to this day, but they are only one form of ridicule. Ridicule can also have more sophisticated messages to convey. This is especially true in the case of satire, where caricatures of public figures serve to make a point about their alleged hypocrisy, lying, greed, lack of awareness, or other undesirable behaviors.

Ridicule turns a person into a laughingstock, but Fearmongering—or deliberately arousing public fear or alarm about a particular individual or an issue—turns them into a threat, someone to be hated and feared. This occurs when attackers manage to create feelings of anxiety in their audience toward a target. Fearmongering is often used against ethnic or cultural groups, through a process called 'othering,' the members of these groups can be framed as outsiders who are not like 'us' in their beliefs, behavior, or even their appearance.

A target is exposed when compromising material about their private views or actions is deliberately made public. Exposing thus goes a step further than making allegations, in the sense that 'evidence' is presented. Whether that evidence is genuine or not is another matter!

Disgracing is the pursuit of a person’s loss of respect, honor, or esteem. It is the opposite of honoring. When someone is honored, they are publicly celebrated for their virtues and achievements, for instance through the reception of an award or the erection of a monument in their honor. When someone is disgraced, their good name is publicly renounced.

Erasing is systematic deleting of information from printed, recorded, and other sources. In George Orwell’s famous novel, 1984, originally published in 1949, which sketches a dystopian vision of a totalitarian state, newspapers and history books are constantly being rewritten. Individuals whose deeds and sayings damage the interests of the ruling party vanish without a trace not just from real life, but even from records of the past. 

It should be noted that Character attacks can only be counted as such if the attacker is deliberately attempting to damage the victim’s reputation. If the damage is accidental not intentionally (for instance caused by a thoughtless remark or not intended for that purpose), this does not constitute character attack.

In the previous session, we have mentioned the three pillars of character assassination. The fourth pillar is the audience: the person or group of people who the attacker intends to influence. This may be a particular person, such as a teenager assassinating the character of their teacher in front of his mom to explain a bad grade. The audience may also be a group of people such as a specific voting bloc like a conservative religious group, university students, senior citizens, or undecided voters. The audience can also be a viewing and listening population of an entire country. In effect, attackers try to sway public opinion against public figures such as celebrities or political candidates to achieve some type of gain. Yet, different audiences have different characteristics that predispose them to being persuaded by varying kinds of claims.

It is the audience responses which determines whether a character attack is successful or not. Often, character attackers frame their allegations with a particular audience in mind.

Since different audiences have different values, it is possible that one and the same character attack greatly impacts one group while leaving another largely unaffected. Character assassination is thus a relative term: usually, someone’s reputation is only destroyed in the eyes of some groups.

Character attacks can be effective if there are no laws to protect the targets of character assassination attempts, so that an attacker can act with impunity. If there are certain legal restrictions, then attacks are likely to be less effective. In many countries (such as in China, Iran, or Russia, for example) government institutions can set laws to specifically protect political leaders or parties: any online criticism could be immediately qualified as 'slander' or 'defamation' and thus legal actions are implemented against the alleged 'attacker.'

First impacts of character attacks can be insignificant. When character attacks have a moderate impact, they will noticeably affect the target’s reputation for a considerable period, but still only sway part of the audience, or only sway them to some extent. In time, the negative effects may fade away. Many of the character attacks launched against political candidates during election campaigns fall into this category. The severe impact can be equated to character assassination, or a profound, essentially irreversible demise of a person’s reputation.

Can character attacks fail? Indeed, they can flop. U.S. Senator Hillary Clinton’s character was under assault frequently and on many subjects. One kind of the attacks focused on her alleged lesbian identity and her, also alleged, sexual affairs. Yet all these rumors about Clinton were baseless; several media personalities and websites had to issue formal apologies for spreading fake stories. Most importantly, the general public was not particularly interested in the rumors. Character attacks can also backfire and cause an effect opposite to the attacker’s goals.

The last pillar is the context. Each character attack takes place in a context. This is a broad term that can refer to the political landscape, the cultural norms, the economic and technological circumstances, and any other external factors that shape and influence character attacks. It makes a big difference whether an attack takes place in a democratic or an autocratic political system.

In the next session, the last session, insha Allah, we will discuss character assassination in an authoritarian regime and in a democratic society."

Afterwards, Wulandari serenaded,

To avoid complications, she never kept the same address

In conversation, she spoke just like a baroness

Met a man from China, went down to Geisha Minah

Then again incidentally—if you're in that way—inclined *)

[Session 4]
[Session 2]

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