18 Nov What motivations do you see for the character assassination?

Order Instructions

Character assassination is the attempt to damage someone’s reputation or credibility. Sometimes these attacks use true information about the person’s character, other times they are misleading, exaggerated, or even false. As we’ve learned in the past few weeks character assassination of those running for political office has been commonplace throughout our history, dating back to the earliest presidential elections.

You will submit a journal entry that compares a recent example of political character assassination with what you learned this week about Rachel and Andrew Jackson. Begin by choosing an instance of political character assassination from the past 50 years, then analyze it using what you’ve learned from the Rachel Jackson incident, considering the following questions as jumping-off points:

What motivations do you see for the character assassination?

Was there a reason this one was particularly virulent?

Was it strictly political or was it motivated by some other concern?

What does it tell you about the larger context of society and politics in that era and how does it compare to the larger context in Jackson’s era?

Were the attacks based in truth? What affect did the political assassination have?