Ideas and government policies, whatever they are, are ventilated on step-motherly ration and fanned as ‘gossip', sometimes, to test their popularity or otherwise before they are implemented. Employing deduction from observation, and using longitudinal approach and literature, findings of this investigation reveal that governments in the Global South adopt this communication strategy as an inverted feedback mechanism for policies they are not certain will enjoy public acceptability. The exploratory study stretches the parameters of the usage of the tactics by interrogating earlier theories like grapevine, propaganda. The study lays a foundation of the operational principles and applicability of a new political communication theory, structured-deliberative gossip theory (or grapevine info-filter theory), especially on matters of plebiscites in the Global South.
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Uncertainty drives anxiety and desperation sometimes in people as well as Governments. In the later, the tangle comes off as a neck-breaking exercise; much of the time attempting alchemy with self-imposed private ideas intended to impress and sedate society to tow authority’s path and line of reasoning, in most climes. The means of doing that is often sheath in lots of indecipherable ornaments of spins, free-flying, in the shape of rumor; either as convenient construct of ‘truths’, or emotive lies and shiny actions and even inactions that model a discretize reality (Gallup, 2016; Serota, Levine, & Boster, 2010; Daza, Vilca, Salinas, Pomereda and Quico, 2021) that people barely remember to question the inner drive of the anticipated goal of the dispatched gossip, which looks a bit like grey propaganda (Baran and Davis, 2006) or the rat bite-and-blow tactics (Onobe, 2012).
Therefore, many of the theatricals that go with subterranean policies are clearly outside the parameters of morality for many ethicists. Hence, George Orwell (1946/2001) says, “Politics itself is a mass of lies, evasions, folly, hatred, and schizophrenia.” Oftentimes executive fabrications come off masquerading first as indecisiveness and released later in piecemeal as gossips. However, Meibauer (2018) thinks there are existential benefits of even lies, (white lies) in many pro-social contexts, permissible under certain cultural settings in the broader definition of politeness and manipulation (McGinn 2008; Leech, 2014; Coons & Weber 2014; Stanley 2015). However, to many, truth has not only become complex (Ku ̈nne2003), but appears to have slipped into being a victim and casualty of subversion for the longest. Rogues of truth, because of the exigencies of emerging technologies, earn newer respect and could be autographing as admirable stuntmen, instituting a novel order of elitist game of conquest for most states and actors of guarded thrones.
Latching on available media, many politicians explore the complacency (Carson 2006, 2010; Saul 2012) of society’s humanistic tendency in what Levine (2014) describes in his Truth-default Theory as a condescending assumption, actively or passively, that another person’s communication is benched on honesty; independent of actual honesty (Clementson, 2017), though. For example, when ideological nurseries are prepared to launch seed plans either by unsettling the statuesque with a mute question or a statement indicating imperatives, a lie may have been cutely adorned to appeal in a manner that violates sincerity conditions; which makes lying independent of declarative sentences (Onobe, 2012) as the prototypical bearers of assertions.
By contrast, Dynel (2015, 2016) applies a Gricean framework and holds that even deceptive irony, metaphor, hyperbole, and meiosis should be acknowledged as genuine cases of lying (Meibauer 2018, p.360). It is the preponderance of this tradition on the political landscape that makes many like Keane (2018, p.1) to surmise that politics is characterized by a symphony of the “art of evasion, befuddlement”; often steep in crass dishonesty.