The Rumour Bomb: Theorising the Convergence of New and Old Trends in Mediated US Politics

Abstract

This paper examines several key transformations in mediated American politics that both encourage the use of rumour as a privileged communication strategy and promise its efficacy. Changing institutional news values, communication technologies, and political public relations (PR) strategies have converged to produce a profoundly vexing relationship between rumour and verification, which is exploited by politicians with anti-deliberative aims of managing belief. Further, the paper argues that these developments are usefully viewed through Paul Virilio's theory of Pure War, in which rumour can be seen as part of a larger propaganda strategy to eliminate deliberative politics and manage a population for the purposes of consumerism and war.