Courses

Professor Samoilenko teaches Comm386: Special Topics in Political Communication/Govt339. He teaches this as a seminar in character assassination and reputation management.

This course is crosslisted and offered for both communication and government Mason students who are interested in learning  the principles and practices of public relations related to political competition, crisis communication, image repair, and ethics. Specifically, this course studies deliberate attempts to seriously damage the reputation, character, social status, or achievements of public figures. By attacking an individual's personal life, biographical facts, and specific individual features, attackers try to remove their victims from a polical contest, sway public opinion, or achieve other goals.

This course helps students:

• better understand the nature of unethical persuasion practices in public relations and public policy;
• address challenges that character attack pose to public relations specialists, campaign managers, publicists, and private individuals regardless of their status, age, gender, and social background.
• critically review a variety of historical case-studies of character attacks;
• conduct a risk assessment of  character attacks and the methods to defend from them;
• learn about the nature of character assassination in social media

To find out when Professor Samoilenko is next teaching this course, check out his Mason webpage.