(Manipulation; 10-03; p.3)

Rhetoric

Beside this common behaviour political sales-men use rhetoric to present themselves or their policies. Three always favoured methods shall be mentioned in the following: the surprise packet, the wrong track and the expert’s report.

 

The surprise packet

A popular means to react on questions about one’s own concepts is the offering of the surprise packet.
Wordful, the concept of the political adversary becomes condemned, while the impression of polemic is carefully avoided and seriousness suggested. One’s own concept – in case the programme script still allows time for questions – is presented in more general terms and at any rate it is stated that oneself will do better.

Not quite that successful were that tactics for A Merkel, leader of the main opposition parties in Germany on 16/07/03. In the news programme “tagesthemen” – an equivalent of the BBC’s newsnight – she was asked three times by presenter U Wickert about her parties’ concept for financing a tax reduction brought forward by a year: she could not or did not want to answer, but simultaneously stressed the need for it.

 

The wrong track

Also one of the favoured means is the laying of wrong tracks that should disguise the real motivation for a measure.
So, an argument will be used of which one thinks that it is agreed on. At the same time, the indeed relevant argument is dropped, since one thinks of it as fraught with opposition.

B Hombach, one of the four managing directors of the WAZ media business – the company is for the German newspaper market that, what the Bertelsmann company is for the book, music and television market: a mighty oligopolist – used this technique successfully on 12/10/03 in the NDR’s programme “Zapp”.
He countered the critique of Germany’s official competition watchdog, the “Bundeskartellamt” on a possible take-over of a Berlin daily by the Holtzbrinck newspaper company by indicating that their publishers had no intention to limit the freedom of the press or the variety of opinions.
– What B Hombach forgot to mention is the fact that the Bundeskartellamt had pure competition based reasons for opposing the take-over: it feared a dominant market position of the company in Berlin. (read on here)