Much has been made recently of the concept of the “Big Lie,” or repeating a falsehood so many times that it becomes plausible to many. Cognitive psychologists refer to this phenomenon as the “illusory truth effect,” and President Joe Biden weighed in on the phenomenon himself when condemning senators who supported Donald Trump’s assertion that he (Trump) won the 2020 election by a landslide. Biden declared, “You keep repeating the lie … the degree to which it becomes corrosive is in direct proportion to the number of people who say it.”
Repeating a lie can certainly be a powerful technique in the public sphere, particularly when the utterance is made by people in power, but it’s hardly the only method of deception. Sometimes it’s necessary to undertake what’s called a “close reading” (or “close listening”) of misleading speech in order to recognize other potent techniques. A speaker can mislead by omission or innuendo. Or he can frame, or contextualize, a speech in such a way that it mis-leads (leads in the wrong direction) by virtue of the effects it brings about.