Poisoning the Well

Poisoning the Well discredits opponents before the audience receives their argument. Essentially the opponents are given a bad reputation and are consistently fighting an uphill battle to convince the audience of their argument.

An example would be, “Frank’s got terrible taste in music; I saw that he had Linkin Park on his iPod.” So every time Frank talks about music with people they won’t listen to him because he likes Linkin Park and they are trash.