Editing Rumor (section)

== Political Communication Strategy ==
Rumor has always played a major role in politics, with negative rumors about an opponent typically more effective than positive rumors about one's own side.<ref>David Coast and Jo Fox, "Rumour and Politics" ''History Compass'' (2015), 13#5 pp 222–234.</ref>
{{Quote box|width=50%|align=right|quote="[[Propaganda]] is neutrally defined as a systematic form of purposeful persuasion that attempts to influence the emotions, attitudes, opinions, and actions of specified target audiences for ideological, political or commercial purposes through the controlled transmission of one-sided messages (which may or may not be factual) via mass and direct media channels. A propaganda organization employs propagandists who engage in propagandism—the applied creation and distribution of such forms of persuasion."|source=Richard Alan Nelson, ''A Chronology and Glossary of Propaganda in the United States'', 1996|}}
 
In the past, much research on rumor came from psychological approaches (as the discussion of Allport and DiFonzio demonstrates above). The focus was especially on how statements of questionable veracity (absolutely false to the ears of some listeners) circulated orally from person to person. Scholarly attention to political rumors is at least as old as Aristotle's ''Rhetoric''; however, not until recently has any sustained attention and conceptual development been directed at political uses of rumor, outside of its role in war situations. Almost no work had been done until recently on how different forms of media and particular cultural-historical conditions may facilitate a rumor's diffusion.<ref name="propagandacritic.com">See the historical discussion by Dr. Aaron Delwiche at http://www.propagandacritic.com/articles/about.html</ref>

The Internet's recent appearance as a new media technology has shown ever new possibilities for the fast diffusion of rumor, as the debunking sites such as snopes.com, urbanlegend.com, and factcheck.org demonstrate. Nor had previous research taken into consideration the particular form or style of deliberately chosen rumors for political purposes in particular circumstances (even though significant attention to the power of rumor for mass-media-diffused war propaganda has been in vogue since World War I; see Lasswell 1927).<ref name="propagandacritic.com"/> In the early part of the 21st century, some legal scholars have attended to political uses of rumor, though their conceptualization of it remains social psychological and their solutions to it as public problem are from a legal scholarly perspective, largely having to do with [[libel]] and privacy laws and the damage to personal reputations.<ref>Sunstein, Cass. 2009. "On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done". New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; Solove, Daniel J. "The Future of Reputation". New Haven: Yale University Press.Stowe, 2007.</ref>