Combined Tactics of Communication Strategy: Discrediting Biden’s Administration in Tucker Carlson Tonight

Abstract

The speech-behavioral strategy of discrediting is a manipulative form of information aggression exerted on the consciousness of the mass audience. Since it is inherent in modern media, it affects politics and society and thus needs to be resisted. The article introduces an analysis of combined discrediting tactics that implement the communication strategy of discrediting against the President Biden’s administration. The corpus came from the Tucker Carlson Tonight show and included 563 contexts of combined discrediting tactics. Standard, statistical, and linguistic methods made it possible to classify the discrediting tactics into accusations, insults, negative predictions, deceived expectations, irony, polarization, and comparison. The resulting classification of combined tactics of discrediting included five quantitative groups and 51 content subgroups. The accusation tactics proved to be the most popular combined tactic (260 cases; 60 % of the corpus). Two-component tactics were the most representative (337; 60 %) whereas the subgroup of irony + insult was the most frequent in other subgroups (45; 8 %). Combined tactics had a more significant discrediting effect and a more intensive impact on the target audience.