Ideological Polarization as a Deception Strategy in the Discourse of American Think Tanks: A Critical Discourse Analysis

Ali Hamzah Lafta,Sabah S Mustafa

doi:10.36586/jcl.2.2022.0.45.0001

Ali Hamzah Lafta, Sabah S Mustafa

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.36586/jcl.2.2022.0.45.0001

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Abstract

Deception is an inseparable facet of political discourse in attaining strategic political gains though compromising public opinion. However, the employment of discursive deception strategies by the policy-making institutions of think tanks has not received due attention in the literature. The current study aims at exploring how the ideologizing deception strategies are utilized by the conservative American think tank of the Washington Institute to reproduce socio-political realities and re-shape public opinion. To fulfill this task, van Dijk’s (2000) notion of ideological polarization which shows positive self-representation and negative other representation is adopted to conduct a critical discourse analysis of four Arabic texts released with the main focus on four different political topics. Results reveal the centrality of employing deception strategies for the sake of realizing political wins for establishing an ideological hegemony while simultaneously polarizing an Us against Them extreme.

Highlights

Deception is a communicative process initiated by the intention to lead recipients to harbor false information (Galasinski, 2000, pp. 19-20)
The statistics below reflect the quantitative aspect of the deception strategies in the data analyzed and in the discourse of the Washington Institute
These numbers are not intended to provide comparisons between the different strategies to materialize the four political topics since such a task lies beyond the scope of the present study

Summary

Introduction

Deception is a communicative process initiated by the intention to lead recipients to harbor false information (Galasinski, 2000, pp. 19-20). The present study aims at pinpointing and explicating the discursively wrought deception strategies in the discourse of the conservative American think tank of The Washington Institute based on a CDA model for unveiling the underlying encoded ideologies. To this end, four Arabic texts produced by The Washington Institute are analyzed in terms of (a) the ideologically polarized positive self-description and negative otherdescription, and (b) the way reality is altered so the recipients are led to (re)weigh their perception towards social and political realities.

Results and discussion

Fallacies

Conclusion