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Character Assassination
Theoretical Framework
Martijn Icks, Eric Shiraev, Jennifer Keohane, and Sergei A. Samoilenko
Introduction
For years, researchers and practitioners from different fields such as sociology, political science, history, management and crisis communication have been interested in issues related to character assassination (CA). Individuals, public institutions and corporations spend significant time, energy and money defending against character attacks and attempts on their reputation. Moreover, there is still no holistic picture of CA as a complex social phenomenon. Scholarly knowledge of CA is fragmented, scattered and illustrated by numerous seemingly unrelated case studies. There is very little understanding of what CA means and how it appears across disciplinary, cultural and political boundaries. This introductory chapter is a joint attempt to offer a theoretical rationale for studying character assassination as an integrative and interdisciplinary field of academic inquiry.
The contemporary media environment is conducive to incivility, especially where political communication is concerned. The prevalence of character-centred competition in political discourse legitimises the use of character assassination (Icks et al., 2017). As a result, the importance of understanding character assassination will only continue to grow. We argue, correspondingly, that a unified lexicon for discussing the hallmark features of character attacks will be necessary to push forward research into this phenomenon. While the specific aspects of character attacks that are most interesting to researchers will likely vary from discipline to discipline, our goal is to provide both a flexible lexicon and a theoretical toolbox for inquiries into character assassination. We offer the framework laid out in this chapter as only a beginning to the conversation, while the contributors to this volume expand on, challenge and confirm some of the insights that we have identified here.
To further the construction of a unifying framework for the study of CA, this chapter first defines character, then provides definitions of character assassination and distinguishes it from other, related concepts. We highlight the strategic nature of the phenomenon, then discuss five pillars that we believe are necessary to consider in a thorough analysis of a character attack, and finally introduce some of its dynamics and methods.
On Character
Before the 1920s, the terms character, personality, and temperament were used almost interchangeably in American social sciences and psychology. While temperament gradually came to be associated with biological and early formative factors such as a toddlerās activity level, early eating patterns and attention span, the term personality gradually acquired a broader meaning and is now used to indicate the totality of an individualās stable features (Danziger, 1997). The same is true for character, except that this term stresses a moral dimension, attaching value judgments to a personās behaviour and experience. Someone of āgood characterā ought to exhibit personality traits like honesty, industry, humility or other social markers that are defined as āgoodā by society. It should be noted that these positive traits are strongly dependent on time and culture, as well as on individual factors such as the class and gender of the person in question. For instance, a āgoodā medieval woman would have exhibited very different traits than a āgoodā woman in a modern Western country. Each culture and epoch develops its own ideas about the appropriate virtues and modes of behaviour for members of different social groups. Often, these ideas are contested even within a culture, for instance between progressives and conservatives.
For our purposes, we define character as āa relatively stable set of a personās traits rooted in a cultureās moral, cognitive, behavioural and emotional standards.ā Note that we explicitly include other than moral standards in our definition, since character attacks can be aimed at personal features that do not necessarily have a moral dimension, such as intellectual capacity and emotional stability.
It is important to distinguish between character and reputation. While character is mostly concerned with traits that a person actually possesses, reputation is a matter of public opinion. The perception of what is reputable is in āthe eye of the beholderā (Schreiber, 2011) and does not always reflect someoneās actual personality traits. Reputations can be constructed and then maintained by social actors themselves or by media professionals to meet the accepted norms of a certain social setting(s). Oftentimes, they can be artificially improved through impression management techniques that focus on a handful of attractive personal characteristics. Any precarious issue or risk leading to potential reputational damage is estimated in terms of declining confidence in leadership and an erosion of public trust (Coombs and Holladay, 2002).
Because character assassination is carried out in persuasive communicative acts, it is important to address how scholars of communication have talked about character. In his fundamental treatise On Rhetoric, Aristotle identified ethos as one of the three modes of persuasion, and one that is based in the speakerās credibility. āIn its simplest form,ā writes S. Michael Halloran (1982), āethos is what we might call the argument from authority, the argument that says in effect, believe me because I am the sort of person whose word you can believeā (p. 60). Tied up in this complex concept, then, are questions of character and credibility ā what Aristotle talked about as good will, good sense, and moral character (Kennedy, 1991). Classical theorists of rhetoric have wavered about whether ethos refers to the actual character of the orator or the impression that the speaker leaves on the audience. While the Roman rhetorician Quintilian famously declared that the orator was āthe good man speaking well,ā others have spoken of ethos as akin to the credibility the speaker builds within the speech. In sum, though, understanding character assassination requires understanding how the speaker creates a credible appearance before and after they launch an attack. Demonstrating good will and character often entails providing careful evidence for oneās claims, abiding by the norms of good discourse, and responsibly and ethically using persuasive appeals. One uses public communication to display the relatively stable set of traits that encompasses character.
On Character Assassination
Character assassination is the deliberate destruction of an individualās reputation or credibility. Strictly speaking, therefore, it is not harming character per se,1 but altering the way character is perceived and judged by others. The character assassination of an individual dramatically affects her reputation.
CA is an inclusive concept that can be addressed from various academic perspectives, such as rhetoric, political science, psychology, and media and propaganda studies, among others. It refers to both the process (e.g., a smear campaign) and the outcome of this process (e.g., a damaged reputation). A single CA event or a long-term campaign may be composed of various communication acts, a series of efforts and assaults, traditionally referred to as character attacks. These attacks may come in different shapes and forms, from an op-ed in a mainstream newspaper to a conspiracy theory circulating within an online community, and use different framing techniques.
In an exclusive definition, character attacks are aimed at individuals. They often include assumptions and facts related to personal traits, social and professional affiliation, and individual decisions and actions (Icks and Shiraev, 2014, p. 4). However, a case could be made that corporations, institutions or even social groups and countries possess a form of ācharacterā as well. Moreover, it should be noted that the individual and the collective are often intertwined, because the reputation of organisations, nations and social groups can be affected by CA campaigns aimed at their leaders or prominent figures. Some character attacks on individuals and groups overlap when individuals are targeted because they seem to represent an ideology, a practice, or an advocacy cause. Likewise, negative stereotypes about religious or group practices, political orientation or adversarial regimes (e.g., communism, fascism) can be applied to an individual in order to undermine his character. For the purposes of this chapter, we will focus on character attacks against individuals, but some of our contributors will employ a broader definition and examine attacks against non-individual entities.
A CA campaign is defined by the following characteristics:
- It is intentional. Character attacks are by definition meant to damage someoneās reputation. This means that accidental reputation damage ā for instance caused by a microphone inadvertently left switched on, a Freudian slip or a thoughtless remark ā falls outside the scope of our study. Evidently, it is not always possible to establish someoneās intention to cause damage with absolute certainty, especially since character attackers often disguise their actual motives or launch their attacks anonymously. However, the intention of the attacker is usually clear enough from the context and contents of the attack. We will discuss various possible motives for character assassination in a later paragraph.
- It is public. CA campaigns are intended for audiences. The target of an attack is usually an individual who has a recognised social status or good reputation. Indeed, āone needs a socially approved character before it can be damagedā (Shiraev, 2014, p. 17). When someoneās reputation comes under attack in the public sphere, audiences may negatively change their opinion about her. This can happen regardless of whether the allegations happen to be true or false. All that matters for a character attack to be effective is that enough people are persuaded.
We should not take the term āassassinationā too literally. After all, character assassination is about the perception of character. A character that is completely and utterly dead to one person may be fully alive in the eyes of another. Moreover, even a ādeadā character can be revived when faith in the person is restored, although this is quite a hard feat to achieve.
CA can overlap, but is not completely identical with, the following forms of negative communication:
- Ad hominem. The CA process may involve various kinds of defamation attacks that are similar to the abusive argumentum ad hominem (literally an āargument to the manā) used in adversarial contexts to steer attention away from the debated issue to the opponentās personal traits or reputation. However, unlike ad hominem attacks, character attacks do not have to take place in the context of an open discussion or debate. Unlike CA, the use of an ad hominem argument is often perceived as justified (as suggested by Walton, 1987) when the claims made about a personās character or actions are relevant to the conclusions being drawn. A supporter might argue that a politicianās private life is not directly relevant to his or her ability to govern. At the same time, a politicianās inability to adhere to the truth when answering questions about his or her personal life could call into question the veracity of his or her statements on other subjects.
- Libel and slander aimed at corporate brands and products. CA practices such as smear campaigns during corporate or political competition can be discussed in the context of image studies and political marketing when organisations and leaders find their legitimacy questioned. At the same time, the proposed CA framework is different from studies in marketing that view corporate character as brand imagery affecting employee and customer satisfaction (Chun and Davies, 2006). Specifically, most assaults on brands, such as brandjacking (Langley, 2014), may not necessarily target individuals, even when the brand is personified by a telegenic CEO. In addition, marketing is concerned with creating and promoting products and services almost exclusively to a brandās consumers. Thus, an attack on brands becomes the topic of interest of a limited audience of invested stakeholders and brand followers. A newsworthy CA event is a substantive matter on the public agenda that may resonate across societies and nations. For example, the āWeinstein Effectā rippled across the world as the #MeToo hashtag, originally created to denounce the misogynist behaviour of a handful of individuals, became a global movement.
- Insults. Individual and spontaneous insults (āyou are an idiot!ā) often occur in a private context and intend to hurt someoneās self-esteem and affect her emotional stability, whereas CA primarily aims at causing maximum public damage. However, deliberate insults conveyed to a wider audience via speeches, memes or tweets can be a part of a CA campaign.
- Other forms of incivility in the political and media arenas, including rudeness, hostility, threats and sporadic emotional behaviour, such as refusing to shake hands, gesturing and refusing to interact. The term also refers to non-substantive forms of incivility such as disruption of speech (Spary, 2010). There is a debate as to whether this framework should include examples of demagoguery, āsabre rattlingā and populist rhetoric (such as Donald Trumpās 2016 election campaign in the US or the 2017 Marine Le Pen campaign in France), which are not necessarily intended to undermine an opponentās social base or cause reputational harm, but merely to conjure political polls, media ratings and public opinion. Herbst (2010) considers incivility to be a strategic tool that is frequently exploited by political actors for personal gain.
- Enemy images and othering. An important distinction needs to be made between character assassination and the construction of enemy images (Keen, 1986). The latter refers to the creation of a negative perception of a person or group of people as hostile outsiders, possessing values and characteristics foreign and threatening to members of an in-group. In a process called āothering,ā unwanted features ā weakness, irrationality, barbarity, etc. ā are projected onto outsiders, who are represented in a simplified and stereotypical way, providing a counter-image to the virtuous āself.ā It should be stressed that āimageā does not necessarily imply that the hostility is not real, but that the focus is on the way in which the real or perceived āenemyā is constructed and cultivated in the public imagination. This allows people to treat āenemiesā in a way that would normally be considered inhumane, but which is cognitively restructured as worthy and moral because they deserve such treatment (Bandura, 1999).
- Unlike a character attack on an individual, the propagation of an enemy image is usually directed against a group of people. However, a particular person can also be portrayed as the āenemy,ā especially if he is the leader of an adversarial and allegedly hostile regime or a popular opposition leader who represents dissenting voices against the ruling government. Notable examples include Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein and Kim Jong Un, all of whom have been depicted numerous times as āenemiesā and āterroristsā in Western media. In these cases, there is indeed overlap between character assassination and the construct...
