1980s saw the lifting up of the Martial Law in Taiwan, and hence a drastic change in the political environment. While large-scare election campaigning plays significant roles for domestic parties, negative strategies and lip-service attacks has inscribed into the core of political campaigning and illuminating the nature of prevalent political cultural phenomena. Due to cut-throat competition among candidates for limited posts in the election, bazaar gimmicks and absurd propagandas were widely utilized and have been strongly criticized. The central concern of this thesis, while focusing on exploring various motivations behind the media discourses, aims at upgrading the constituents’ level of media literacy when encountering diversified operations and maneuvering during political campaigning in Taiwan.
Negative campaigns, such as smearing, personality attack, scandalizing, rumoring, become increasingly penetrating and visible. Such significant social events hence lead to more discussion in the field of political communication. As more prevalent in the post-modernist cultural conditions, diversified political identities connote different power positions. A media-laid performance politics equalizes certain cynicism to control election, in a populist fashion. This research project, applying a more microcosmic analytical perspective from above, will cover texts taken from Taiwan’s elections during 1998-2009 and helps further certify political smearing in election campaigns.
