E86: Discourse & Manipulation (Part 2)

re:verb

On today’s show, Alex and Calvin continue to break down the concept of “Manipulation” in rhetoric and political discourse, recapping part one of this series, demonstrating strategies for identifying and critiquing manipulation, and discussing how this kind of large-scale “mind control” is affecting contemporary foreign policy discourse in the US.

The term manipulation, as we define it, comes from a school of linguistic and discourse analysis known as Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), which is primarily concerned with the ways language is used to reinforce inequality and power differentials in society. We walk through how the term is defined by CDS scholar Teun van Dijk, from his landmark 2006 article “Discourse and Manipulation.” In it, van Dijk gives us a toolkit for understanding 3 different levels of manipulation: (1) social, which designates the human relationships, power positions, and organizational and political resources required to effect manipulation at scale; (2) cognitive, which designates how manipulative language forms mental models that influence people’s thoughts and actions in the world; and (3) discursive, which captures the various linguistic, stylistic, and rhetorical strategies that tend to recur in manipulation.

This time, to put this term in context, we analyze an example of discourse manipulation surrounding US foreign policy, specifically as it relates to Israel’s ongoing war on Gaza: President Joe Biden’s November 18 opinion article in the Washington Post, entitled “The U.S. won’t back down from the challenge of Putin and Hamas.” We closely analyze how President Biden uses manipulation strategies straight out of Van Dijk to persuade WaPo-reading liberals to ignore both the US’s constant and substantial material support for Israel’s war and its own military’s history of bloody and destructive imperialism throughout the Middle East, North Africa, and elsewhere in the world. We also note various tactics that the president deploys to naturalize inequality and normalize bigotry, all while touting the US’s role as the “essential” peace-loving, freedom-spreading nation.

“The U.S. won’t back down from the challenge of Putin and Hamas” - Joe Biden

Link to Part One of this Series

Works and Concepts Cited in this Episode:

Azoulay, A., & Ophir, A. (2012). The one-state condition: occupation and democracy in Israel/Palestine. Stanford University Press.

Fairclough, N. (2003). Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. Psychology Press.

Fifield, A. (19 March 2013). “Contractors reap $138B from Iraq war.” CNN.com.

McGee, M. C. (1980). The “ideograph”: A link between rhetoric and ideology. Quarterly journal of speech, 66(1), 1-16. [Our 2018 re:blurb on Ideographs can be found here.]

Oddo, J. (2019). The discourse of propaganda: Case studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror. Penn State University Press. [Our September 2021 episode with CDS scholar John Oddo can be found here.]

Perelman, C. & Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1969). The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. Trans. John Wilkinson and Purcell Weaver. University of Notre Dame Press.

Schneider, T. (8 Oct 2023). “For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces.” The Times of Israel.

Van Dijk, T. A. (2006). Discourse and manipulation. Discourse & society, 17(3), 359-383.

An accessible transcript of this episode is available upon request. Please reach out to us via email (reverbcontent[AT]gmail.com), social media, or our website contact form to request a transcript.