How does the media manipulate its audience? : exploring linguistic creativity in political speeches

Abstract

Throughout history political and civic leaders have used speeches and storytelling to motivate, inspire and manipulate their audiences to both positive and negative ends. In recent years technological advancements have allowed for these leaders to reach larger audiences. However, despite this long history of persuasion, research has yet to understand how audiences are persuaded. The broad focus of this dissertation is to explore the question: How does the media manipulate its audiences? but since this is a very extensive question, I specifically focus on the creative devices used by political orators in their speeches, as these were all broadcast via the mass media. Three interlinking research questions were devised in order to extract all the information needed to answer the main research question: What is the prevalence and effect of creative linguistic devices? How did second orality effect the development of political discourse? and Can a common trend, pattern or formula be found in the use of creative language? In order to answer each of the three questions, 14 historically famous speeches which were effective at persuading a large audience were chosen, then summative content analysis was used to extract data on a diverse range of elements common between them namely; creativity, dark-creativity, creative linguistic devices and their different frequencies of use throughout the eras of research and technological advancements. The findings suggest that both malevolent and benevolent creativity were present in the speeches, second orality did effect the use of linguistic devices, and a common creative fonnula can be found throughout all the speeches. While this study is a qualitative study and therefore the results cannot be generalized, the results indicate that the Psychological Behavior Theory is most likely to be reflective of how people are manipulated.