In some contexts, ambiguous messages are definitely unethical. I don’t consider ambiguity in personal relationships to be severely unethical, because minor noise disruption in the transactional model and homonym usage, language disparity, etc. is normally expected. However, when looking at communications on an international scale, ambiguity can lead to disastrous results in foreign relations and the trust placed in governments by their country’s people. The novelist George Orwell, who wrote about opposition to totalitarianism, shared opinions of political messages about war:
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible… Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and …show more content…
Politicians use unclear messages regularly, and many of them flip flop on their positions, occasionally when they are speaking directly to voters at a rally (vocal channel). This is unethical because the trust in the democratic constituents and other government members is reduced. In extreme cases, not following the rules for proper government communication violates federal law can lead to criminal charges, as the Benghazi email server committee shows. If these problems reduce people’s trust in government, negative perceptions are shown in polls. Only 19% of those polled by Gallup in 2009 said they regularly trusted the government, compared to 60% in 2002 (Trust in Government, 2016). This could be caused by dissatisfaction in communication after major incidents like the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, especially if the government releases new information about questionable practices. Some authors have commented about the effect on miscommunication in major wars like WWII and Vietnam. According to Fisher et. al:
The message did not give the North Vietnamese a clear understanding of what they should do in order for the bombing to stop. They realized that if they stopped all the supplies, the US would stop the bombing. However, they also knew that "this was more than the situation required," but they did not know "how much more…the way the message was formulated, made it sound to North Vietnamese that they would be bombed anyway" (Understand the Message as They Hear it, p. 47,
In our time, political speech and writing are largely the defense of the indefensible… Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and …show more content…
Politicians use unclear messages regularly, and many of them flip flop on their positions, occasionally when they are speaking directly to voters at a rally (vocal channel). This is unethical because the trust in the democratic constituents and other government members is reduced. In extreme cases, not following the rules for proper government communication violates federal law can lead to criminal charges, as the Benghazi email server committee shows. If these problems reduce people’s trust in government, negative perceptions are shown in polls. Only 19% of those polled by Gallup in 2009 said they regularly trusted the government, compared to 60% in 2002 (Trust in Government, 2016). This could be caused by dissatisfaction in communication after major incidents like the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan, especially if the government releases new information about questionable practices. Some authors have commented about the effect on miscommunication in major wars like WWII and Vietnam. According to Fisher et. al:
The message did not give the North Vietnamese a clear understanding of what they should do in order for the bombing to stop. They realized that if they stopped all the supplies, the US would stop the bombing. However, they also knew that "this was more than the situation required," but they did not know "how much more…the way the message was formulated, made it sound to North Vietnamese that they would be bombed anyway" (Understand the Message as They Hear it, p. 47,