by Roger D’Aprix

One of the saddest things about political campaigns is the abuse of language and intelligent dialogue—the tendency to make words connote something other than their real meaning and to mask intent. Or worse, to disseminate outright lies. At this phase of the presidential campaign there’s plenty of both.

For anyone interested in truthful communication, this is the season when you can engage your own communication intelligence to uncover the nature of the abuses. In the end it’s an insult to our collective intelligence for our politicians to use such tired techniques as guilt by association, name-calling and omission of pertinent facts to distort the truth. But that’s the hard currency of negative campaigning as well as an affront to the democratic process.

Regardless of our politics, we should all be on guard for these obvious abuses and respond accordingly. Watch the presidential debates as well as the political ads and analyze each attempt to propagandize rather than inform. I guarantee you that it will be an interesting and enlightening lesson in Propaganda 101 as you score each kind of subtle or not so subtle abuse.

Aside from deliberate language abuse to confuse and deceive, another less obvious abuse is careless or misleading labeling. A great example is the recent effort to stabilize the credit markets, an effort unfortunately labeled as ‘a bailout of Wall Street’ rather than ‘an attempt to rescue Main Street’ from an economic disaster. Anyone with the most basic understanding of public relations would avoid this incendiary and elementary gaff.

If it weren’t so important to our collective futures, this behavior could entertain and titillate those of us who value the power of forthright communication. Instead it’s more than a little depressing.