The expression of otherness in fake news as a strategy for the manipulation of emotion and stance (original) (raw)

2020

Abstract

In this talk I focus on the way in which the stance and emotions of the readers of fake news are manipulated by means of discourse strategies which express and/or invoke negative emotions towards “the other”. These strategies (e.g. the skillful manipulation of the three main Appraisal subsystems, (Martin & White 2005), the use of hedges, the triggering of fallacious presuppositions and implicatures, or the display of misleading images) help in the construction of the in-group identity, in contrast with that of the out-group, which is often dehumanized and marked as ‘alien’ (Hegel 1807, 1967, Crang, 1998; Brons 2015). These feelings of superiority (of the in-group) and inferiority (of the out-group) are very frequently conveyed by means of inferences such as emotional implicatures (e-implicatures, Schwarz-Friesel 2010, 2015) which emphasize the distance between the self/in-group and ‘the other’. In order to show the above I will carry out a qualitative sociopragmatic analysis of some samples of fake news in which the readers’ emotions are manipulated not only by the use of prototypical lies (i.e. assertions whose content the speaker believes to be false, uttered with the intention to deceive the hearer), but also and mainly by means of complex discourse-pragmatic strategies which cannot be classified as total lies but which nevertheless distort reality in subtle ways, playing with the scalarity of lying (Meibauer 2018) and enhancing the idea of (negative) otherness. The results show that a very frequent otherness strategy used in fake news is what Brons (2015) calls ‘sophisticated othering’, a kind of othering that differs from ‘crude othering’ in that it is especially persuasive due to its apparent reasonableness and can therefore “be accepted without much critical reflection” (Brons, 2015: 71-72). This in turn leads us to some significant conclusions having to do with the concepts of bullshit (Frankfurt 2005) and post-truth (Harsin 2018): Readers often choose to accept a good story even if it is deceiving, provided that it touches their emotions and confirms their own convictions, because among other things, it helps them to construct their (personal, social, political, cultural, etc.) identity by distinguishing and distancing themselves from ‘the other’.

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