Direct tactics and their linguistic means to discredit the Biden administration (based on “Tucker Carlson Tonight”)

Various communication strategies and tactics are implemented in modern political media to conduct information warfare. Moreover, they are used to govern the public opinion. A discrediting strategy and its tactics is one of the most frequently used strategy in political media. The article focuses on two direct tactics implementing a discrediting strategy: the tactics of negative forecasting, the tactics of deceived expectations. The purpose of the article is to investigate the means of performing the tactics of negative forecasting and the tactics of deceived expectations, which discredit the D. Biden administration directly. The corpus drawn upon is 229 scripts of “Tucker Carlson Tonight”, 743 pages in total. The empirical material of the study is 554 contexts, where both the tactics are performed. To analyze the material, we used a descriptive and comparative method along with contextual analysis techniques, as well as definition, semantic, lexical-stylistic and quantitative analysis. Most of the empirical data comprises contexts that implement the tactics of negative forecasting. In addition, there are some cases when both the tactics perform simultaneously. A set of linguistic means is used to implement the tactics of negative forecasting and of deceived expectations. These means include morphological, syntactic, lexical, and stylistic ones. To perform the tactics of negative forecasting and deceived expectations, the common language tools are: modal verbs can (could), may (might), will (would), the zero conditional and the first conditional, idioms, metaphors and epithets. The Future simple is used to perform the tactics of negative forecasting, whereas the tactics of deceived expectations is implemented by the Past simple. The peculiar stylistic means for the tactics of negative forecasting are euphemism, dysphemism, litote, extenuation. Stylistic contrast is common for the tactics of deceived expectations. The Biden administration is discredited by the tactics of negative forecasting more often than by the tactics of deceived expectations. The discrediting effect is maximized when these tactics are used simultaneously.

English language, discrediting strategy, direct tactics, tactics of negative forecasting, tactics of deceived expectations, linguistic means, talk show