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Cosmic Kitten

(3,498 posts)
3. Know the opposition, Frank Luntz
Thu Dec 18, 2014, 11:40 AM
Dec 2014

Populists should get familiar with the players
and their playbooks if they hope to defend themselves
against the coming onslaught of propaganda in the next election.

Frank Luntz is a Kochtopus' hired gun/wordsmith.
He's been bashing Democrats for several election cycles
with various levels of success.

Read how he twists language to fit the right-wing Orwellian POV.

Use of language

Luntz frequently tests word and phrase choices using focus groups and interviews. His stated purpose in this is the goal of causing audiences to react based on emotion. "80 percent of our life is emotion, and only 20 percent is intellect. I am much more interested in how you feel than how you think." "If I respond to you quietly, the viewer at home is going to have a different reaction than if I respond to you with emotion and with passion and I wave my arms around. Somebody like this is an intellectual; somebody like this is a freak."

In an article in The New Yorker Luntz is quoted as saying, "The way my words are created is by taking the words of others.... I've moderated an average of a hundred plus focus groups a year over five years... I show them language that I've created. Then I leave a line for them to create language for me."

In a January 9, 2007, interview on Fresh Air with Terry Gross, Luntz redefined the term "Orwellian" in a positive sense, saying that if one reads Orwell's Essay On Language (presumably referring to Politics and the English Language), "To be 'Orwellian' is to speak with absolute clarity, to be succinct, to explain what the event is, to talk about what triggers something happening… and to do so without any pejorative whatsoever."

Luntz's description of "Orwellian" is considered to contradict both its popularly-defined meaning as well as that defined by George Orwell. Luntz believes that Orwell would not have approved of many of the uses to which his pseudonym is applied by quoting Orwell's essay "Politics and the English Language", where Luntz focuses on how Orwell derides the use of cliché and dying metaphors.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frank_Luntz#Use_of_language

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