Linguist and media critic Noam Chomsky has listed 10 strategies used by politicians to manipulate the people. Chomsky a professor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology might as well have been talking about the United States and how it manipulates the media. But could they also apply to Zimbabwe.
Here is the fifth strategy:
Go to the public as a little child
“Most of the advertising to the general public uses speech, argument, people and particularly children’s intonation, often close to the weakness, as if the viewer were a little child or a mentally deficient.
“The harder one tries to deceive the viewer look, the more it tends to adopt a tone infantilizing.
“Why?
“If one goes to a person as if she had the age of 12 years or less, then, because of suggestion, she tends with a certain probability that a response or reaction also devoid of a critical sense as a person 12 years or younger.”
Are we all including senior government officials not being treated like children?
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