Advertisements and the Public Discourse in a Democracy

2011 ◽  
Vol 5 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yoav Hammer

Modern advertisements contain little information and expose few arguments. They rarely describe the product and its usage or compare it to similar products. Yet, advertisements convey many messages—they attach meaning to products, suggest values, and spread a particular view of life. Advertisements create a failure in the democratic process; through advertising, commercial corporations intervene in the democratic discourse. Citizens are intensively exposed to the consumerist worldview while alternative points of view are scarcely presented in the communicative sphere.But commercial corporations are not legitimate participants in the public discourse in a democracy since they do not represent the political support of citizens. Presently, courts grant advertisements freedom of speech protection based on the importance of providing information for viewers. But by doing this, courts ignore the value suggesting messages prevalent in modern advertisements.For many years the law in the domain of campaign finance has restricted the speech of corporations in order to prevent distortion of the political discourse prior to elections. Similarly, we should allow the State to intervene to repair the failure in the public discourse created by advertisements. The law regarding informative messages and value-suggesting messages contained in advertisements should treat each separately, and advertisers should not be permitted to convey messages of the latter.

2013 ◽  
Vol 46 (1) ◽  
pp. 157-185 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Saurette ◽  
Kelly Gordon

Abstract.This article analyzes the nature of contemporary anti-abortion discourse in Canada. Based on a rigorous qualitative and quantitative analysis of the public discourse of a wide variety of influential actors, this study shows that contemporary anti-abortion discourse in Canada is quite different than the portrait offered by traditional accounts. Specifically, our analysis demonstrates that the new anti-abortion discourse aims at changing cultural values more than legislation; is explicitly framed as ‘pro-woman’; largely avoids appealing to religious grounds; and relies on a new ‘abortion-harms-women’ argument that has supplanted and transformed traditional fetal personhood arguments. The article argues that these findings are important as they provide a more accurate account of the political discourse surrounding one of the most contentious issues in politics today and because they illustrate broader ideological patterns that are increasingly characteristic of Canadian political discourse.Résumé.Cet article propose d'analyser la nature du discours contemporain sur l'anti-avortement au Canada. Fondée sur une analyse qualitative et quantitative rigoureuse du discours public d'une grande variété d'acteurs influents, cette étude démontre que le discours contemporain sur l'anti-avortement au Canada se distingue de manière caractéristique du portrait qu'il en a traditionnellement été donné. Notre analyse révèle en particulier que le nouveau discours sur l'anti-avortement vise plutôt à transformer les valeurs culturelles que la législation; qu'il est explicitement formulé comme étant « pro-femme »; qu'il évite de faire appel à des motifs religieux; et qu'il déploie un nouvel argument, « l'avortement-nuit-aux-femmes », qui évince et transforme les arguments traditionnels qui cherchaient à accorder le statut de personne au fétus. Cet article argumente alors que ces constats sont importants non seulement parce qu'ils permettent de brosser un tableau plus complet du discours politique qui touche à l'une des questions les plus controversée de la politique contemporaine, mais également parce qu'ils mettent en évidence des tendances idéologiques de plus en plus caractéristiques du discours politique au Canada.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arun Jacob

The main objective behind the parliamentary practice of Question Period is to ensure that the government is held accountable to the people. Rather than being a political accountability tool and a showcase of public discourse, these deliberations are most often displays of vitriolic political rhetoric. I will be focusing my research on the ways in which incivil political discourse permeates the political mediascape with respect to one instance in Canadian politics - the acquisition of the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter. I believe that incivility in the political discourse of Question Period must be understood within the mechanics of the contemporary public sphere. By interrogating the complexities of how political discourse is being mediatized, produced and consumed within the prevailing ideological paradigms, I identify some of the contemporary social, cultural and political practices that produce incivility in parliamentary discourse.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 205630511989122 ◽  
Author(s):  
Farzana Masroor ◽  
Qintarah N. Khan ◽  
Iman Aib ◽  
Zulfiqar Ali

The form and functions of political discourse have considerably taken a new orientation with the evolving ways of communication. Twitter is a platform that is increasingly preferred by the political elites for the purpose of gaining public acclaim and propagating political ideologies. The political discourse on Twitter requires a critical attention toward linguistic structures and strategies to uncover the relationship between language and social practices. For this purpose, tweets of two eminent Pakistani political figures are chosen for unmasking a variety of discourse strategies at work from the perspective of critical discourse analysis (CDA) through the socio-cognitive model of ideological square. The analysis uncovers the hidden ideological structures and strategies realized through a number of rhetorical moves in the selected tweets. The cognitive binary of positive self-presentation and negative other-presentation help achieving political domination and legitimization of political actions by controlling the public opinion. The underlying motives vary and are context bound such as the aims to topple a government or to restore public faith in the governance. This research is significant for political discourse analysts as well as the general public, as a means for analytical activism propagated by any CDA inquiry, and paves way for further research in the use of social media platforms for political purposes.


2019 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 558-562
Author(s):  
Sandipto Dasgupta

Abstract The central paradox of corruption in the political life of the global South is how such a widely despised phenomenon persists so untroubled by allthe negative attention. The two books under discussion—Steven Pierce's Moral Economies of Corruption and Milan Vaishnav's When Crime Pays—demonstrate that to make sense of that paradox, one needs to go beyond the dominant legal/technocratic understanding of corruption as either private acts of illegality or failures of the civic democratic process. Thinking further with the insights offered by those books, the article sugg ests that the phenomenon of corruption can only be made sense of when placed within the matrix of political and social power relations in the global South democracies. Corruptions appear not as distortions in an idealized democratic marketplace, but in the context of maneuvers of counter-democratic power to maintain existing hierarchies of dominations against tides of democratic mobilization, not merely as a subversion of the public good, but in reaction to attempts to make goods public.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-197
Author(s):  
Stefan Wallaschek

The article analyses the discursive appeal to solidarity in the mass media during the unfolding of Europe’s migration crisis. Solidarity was claimed by numerous actors in the public discourse to legitimise political decisions and mobilise public opinion. While it seems that the call for solidarity was shared by many actors, media studies show the ‘partisan journalism’ of media outlets. Thus, the political orientation of media outlets influences their coverage of public debates. Hence, to what extent do different quality newspapers cover the same solidarity claims in times of crisis? In order to answer this question, the crisis coverage of two German and two Irish newspapers with centre-left and centre-right political orientations is examined via the discourse network methodology. Germany is selected due to high political parallelism and a strong affectedness by the crisis, while Ireland is selected because of low political parallelism and a weak affectedness by the migration crisis. The findings demonstrate that partisan journalism persists during Europe’s migration crisis. Especially German party actors are present in both countries, underpinning the central position of Germany. Regarding the appeal to solidarity, political solidarity claims prevail in all four newspapers, indicating the political-institutional asymmetry in the Common European Asylum System. The study contributes to the strategic framing of concepts in public debates and demonstrates that the left-right distinction of media outlets is hardly affected by the migration crisis.


2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 203-217
Author(s):  
Dewi Ratnasari Rustam

Dissenting opinion is the difference of opinion between the Tribunal judges who handle certain a matter with other judges of the Tribunal dealing with certain cases. Dissenting opinion does not have the force of law because it cannot be the Foundation for the inception of the award. Dissenting opinion itself is an aspect of the law that need to be examined in order to prevent the formation of false opinion among the public. So, nowadays have started to formed the perception that dissenting opinion was an engineering law, instead of enforcing the rule of law but rather media that gave the opportunity for the defendant in corruption regardless of criminal trapping; but on the other hand is a form of difference of opinion and the independence of the judges as the metre is guaranteed by the provisions of the law; that the importance of dissenting opinion in the Court ruling was the judge's opinion be weighted, in an attempt of law appeal or cassation; as an indicator to determine the career judge, as an attempt to avoid the practice of corruption, Collusion and Nepotism (KKN) and the judicial mafia; as a real step towards the transparency of judicial democratization; the judiciary; and kemandiarian the judge require the freedom of speech.


Author(s):  
Andrew Altman

Freedom of speech and religion are among the central values of modern constitutional democracies. Efforts to understand what these freedoms mean and why they are important, and to translate them into enduring institutional arrangements, constitute a major part of the history of such democracies. As the twenty-first century begins, the political and theoretical debates over these values are not the same as they were in the past. Although centuries of philosophical controversy and institutional experimentation have settled some issues, others have been raised, with some surprising twists. Constitutional democracies rest on the principle that all citizens are to be treated as free and equal persons under the law. The principle is the settled starting point for all reasonable debate about freedom of speech and religion, and it entails that the law must secure for each citizen an equal and extensive scheme of basic liberties, including the liberties of speech and religion.


2020 ◽  
Vol 114 (4) ◽  
pp. 1280-1296
Author(s):  
ANDREW STARK

Wedges and frames, two much-studied strategies of American political combat, are generally thought to be partisan weapons, meant to manipulate voters into making trade-offs that favor the political actor wielding them. My inquiry here explores whether there exists anything comparably schematic to wedges and frames at work in attempts by American politicians not to polarize but to find consensus, not to cater to extremes but moderate them. Despite the seeming paucity of such efforts in American public discourse, there is one such common and as-yet untheorized scheme, which uses the two issue positions involved in wedges to overcome the ill effects of reframing and the two value dimensions involved in reframing to overcome the ill effects of wedges. I elaborate this discursive structure by examining its presence in a number of American political debates, showing how it differs from other contemporary normative-theoretic frameworks for understanding compromise in American politics.


Author(s):  
Antonio Bar Cendón ◽  
Francesc de Carreras Serra ◽  
Marc Carrillo López ◽  
Enric Fossas Espadaller ◽  
José Antonio Montilla Martos ◽  
...  

Se aborda en esta encuesta el proceso e implicaciones de la aprobación por el Parlamento Vasco, en junio de 2007, de la Ley 9/2008, de convocatoria y regulación de una consulta popular al objeto de recabar la opinión ciudadana en la Comunidad Autónoma del País Vasco sobre la apertura de un proceso de negociación para alcanzarla paz y la normalización política.This paper analyses the process and implications of the Law 9/2008, approved by the basque parliament in june of 2007, about summons and regulation of a popular consultation in order to obtain the public opinion in the Autonomous Community of the Baeque Country about the decision of openning a negotiation process to reach the peace and the political normalization.


Author(s):  
Evgenii Koloskov

The article is devoted to the formation of the contemporary Vidovdan tradition in the Socialist Republic of Serbia in 1985-1991. Beings the key date in modern Serbian national history, 28 June was used to provide commemorative practices by various Serbian forces during the decomposition of centralised power in Yugoslavia in that period. The process of codifying of a new national mythology precipitated by the disintegration processes in the SFRY after the death of Tito, is examined on the background of the political discourse in Serbia. The research uses sources such as the public speeches and writings of leading political figures (above all Slobodan Milosevic), which are openly available, for example the Memorandum of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts, and which were published in the three most popular newspapers in the Socialist Republic of Serbia: Борба (Struggle), Политика (Politics) and Вечерње новости (Evening News) and the two main newspapers of the Autonomous Province of Kosovo: Rilindja (Revival) and Jeдинство (Unity). The research concludes that it is obvious that the establishing of a tradition of celebrating the anniversary of the Kosovo Battle as an annual public holiday is directly related to the interests of the political forces in SR Serbia.


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