ABSTRACT
To many people, political communication ethics sounds like an oxymoron.1 Over the past several years, politicians rank near the bottom of professions in terms of the public view of their ethics and trustworthiness. When we look again at the early classical writings of Plato and Aristotle, we see the connection that they made among politics, ethics, and communication (rhetoric). Plato reflected the modern attitude-that rhetors (the equivalent of politicians in classical Athens) practiced a rhetorical sleight of hand in making the worst seem to be the better case. Recall that in the famous Platonic dialogue, The Gorgias (Chapter 2), Plato, in the voice of Socrates, made political rhetoric seem to be like cookery or the art of cosmetics in dressing up the distasteful or the unlovely to appear better than they were: an early application of the concept of spin.
