Catchword: dog whistle politics

Filed under: English, Politics

Part of speech: n.

Quotation: The Americans call this “dog-whistle politics.” Blow a dog whistle, and you won’t hear much to get excited about. But the target of the whistle…the dogs—will detect a sound beyond the audible range of the rest of us, and will react to it. Two quite different messages are contained within the one action of blowing the whistle: the one benign, the other designed to be heard and heeded only by the ears tuned to it.

Article or Document Title:
“The Dog Whistler”

Author:
Tony Wright

Article, document, publication, web site:
The Age

Publishing location:
Australia

Date of publication:
Apr. 8, 2000

This cite belongs to a full entry for dog-whistle politics.