Controversial Communication

Abstract

Although neutral about ethics and ideologies, RT acknowledges that while claiming to be optimally relevant to their envisaged audiences, communicators may not be entirely truthful—or may shamelessly lie through their teeth—by accommodating the issue of trust in its model. More specifically, RT distinguishes between addressees believing (1) that a communicator is both competent and benevolent; (2) that the communicator is benevolent but not necessarily competent; or (3) that the communicator may be less than benevolent. This chapter examines a number of misleading mass-communicative visual and multimodal messages and shows how their contentious nature can be accounted for in RT terms. It further argues that the RT concept of “echoic mention,” developed to theorize irony, can be extended to other types of transformative use of original messages, and thereby is a cognate of what in other paradigms is called “intertextuality.”