Abstract
Today, the reaction of the masses towards the lies of the politicians brings together a new process rather than the politicians lying to the masses. In the post-trust era, the insignificance of the truth, politicians reflecting the lies as if they were the truth, and the masses believing in such reflections represent such a process. In this era, politicians render excuses to cover up the truth without having any feeling of guilt. There are spin doctors that work to enable the politicians to realize these purposes. The purpose of spin doctors is to manipulate the media and the public opinion and to reveal the aspects of events to benefit their own political targets rather than as these events are. In this study, the Our Brand Is Crisis movie will be considered in the context of spin doctor tactics usage in the post-truth era. The purpose of this study is to reveal the cinema representation of the spin doctor tactics in the post-truth era and to discuss the spin doctor concept and tactics with sample scenes.
TopGeneral Overview Of Post-Truth Concept
The term “post-truth” is the combination of the words “post” which means after and “truth” which means reality. The “post-truth” word was selected as the word of the year by the Oxford dictionary in 2016 and this term is related to the reactions of individuals according to emotions and beliefs rather than the truth itself (Oxford Learner’s Dictionaries, 2016). The Arabic word “hakikat” (truth) comes from the word “hakk”. The truth word which is the opposite of the superstitious word signifies reality, trueness, fixity and absolute. The truth which does not merely signify reality explains a measure and judgement related to the reality (Zabcı, 2021, p. 15). When we talk about the post-truth era, the “post” preposition is not used to refer to an era beyond the truth in temporal terms. In the post-truth era, the “post” preposition is used to express the decreased importance of truth rather than going beyond the truth. This concept that explains the start of a post-truth era states that what individuals are expected to believe is not the scientific data but the emotions, ideologies and political prejudices (Bezembinder, 2018, p. 45). The post-truth concept was commonly used during the Brexit process which represents the United Kingdom leaving the European Union and the US presidential elections which Donald Trump won and the increased usage of this concept played a significant role in this term being accepted as the term of the year (Kocabay Şener, 2019, p. 394). September 2016 issue of The Economist magazine declared that the world entered to “post-truth politics” era. One of the important events that laid the ground for this explanation was the disputed election period of Donald Trump. Donald Trump commonly adopted a propaganda strategy with unfounded news during the election campaign period. The development that made the post-truth concept and Donald Trump’s election campaign important was the fact that Trump won the election (The Economist, 2016).
Key Terms in this Chapter
Public Relations: Strategic communication tries to provide mutual communication and understanding between the institution and the target group.
Spin: Spin is to distort the facts until they come out.
Content Analysis: It is one of the essential social science research methods. Generally, themes are determined and used to identify and analyze the parts among these themes whose content is considered essential.
Post-Truth: It is used to describe an era in which the importance of truth is lost.
Spin Doctor: They are experts who aim to deceive the target audience instead of communicating honestly.