Abstract
John Oddo’s new book examines how Colin Powell’s famous 2003 speech to the United Nations (UN) Security Council was transformed by the media in order to endorse the plans for the Iraq War. Through a fine-grained analysis of micro-modifications of the address in news narratives, Oddo adopts a micro-discursive, intertextual, and multimodal approach that uniquely combines verbal and visual aspects in multi-dimensional study using rhetoric, argumentation, and systemic-functional theories.
The book comprises an Introduction and five chapters, as well as nine appendices including the data employed and a theoretical review. In the Introduction, Oddo explains his focus on journalists’ shaping and reshaping of Powell’s UN speech and its role in garnering the support of American audiences for the Iraq War. Awareness that journalists do not just repeat Powell’s speech but strategically modify it is seen as important in arousing the general public’s critical media literacy. Chapter 1 discusses the justifications presented by the US administration for the use of force rather than inspections, leading eventually to the Iraq War, as well as responses from the American public and the international community. It also reviews the structural problems of ‘reluctance to report stories “unfriendly” to the government’ (p. 38) in Western news media and the reasons why ‘the American press tended to echo and endorse the Bush administration’s prewar rhetoric’ (p. 41).
Chapter 2 introduces the notions of ethos, which ‘encompasses character, credibility and authority’ (p. 46), and intertextual ethos, which is ‘constituted within and across texts by a range of mass-media voices’ (p. 48) and traced through the analysis of transitive chains of authority, a concept created by Oddo to examine the interaction between authorial and non-authorial voices and to align the audiences. For instance, the authorial voice ‘Iraq lies’ by a news anchor is later corroborated by Powell’s expression ‘Iraq hides/deceives’. Appraisal theory, and specifically attitude analysis, is used to investigate how ethos is constructed in these texts. The author finds that the news narratives generally build Colin Powell’s ethos but discredit that of the Iraqis. In addition, the journalists also intensify Powell’s authority through corroboration and vouching to lend credibility to the attributed voice.
Chapter 3 discusses precontextualization – a micro-level semiotic process which anticipates future discourse and provides context for it – arguing that precontextualizing semiotic events has great influence on justifying and realizing future material events. Oddo’s evidence is provided by an analysis of multimodal projections of the future of engagement resources, reviewing issues such as the media’s employment of nominalization in transforming ‘possible future events into objectified future “facts”’ (p. 82), use of modality to amplify the certainty or the social effect, and cross-temporality use to project the future as the justification of the immediate present action.
Chapter 4 shifts the focus to recontextualization, which Oddo understands as the rhetorical transformation of implications in Powell’s speech into facts through microscopic changes – such as ‘meaning deletion’, which reduces part of the information such as tense and the actor; ‘addition’, which adds information not included in Powell’s original address; ‘meaning relexicalization’, which uses different but synonymous lexical forms; and ‘meaning reordering’, which reorders the elements (p. 134) – across multimodal texts to reposition audiences and enhance credibility. However, the textual analysis conducted is not always conclusive. Oddo acknowledges that journalists’ construction of political discourse is often unconscious, and his examples show that the reporting verbs used by a single journalist vary from distancing verbs to enhancement ones, so it seems doubtful that we can be confident in concluding that the journalist gives a positive evaluation of Powell’s assertions.
The concluding chapter discusses that the main contribution of the research is its micro-discursive, intertextual, and multimodal method, but its limitation lies in not considering the textual production process and its inapplicability to larger corpora of texts. As to the implications of the research, Oddo emphasizes that ‘mainstream reporters must significantly alter norms of news production’ (p. 182) and include more varied reliable voices. The author also hints at directions for further studies in researching into other news outlets, considering ‘antiwar rhetoric’ and the ‘historical relationship between journalistic discourse and call-to-arms discourse’ (p. 193). Finally, Oddo offers some reflections for the public that they should develop the awareness to examine the content and structure of news narratives.
Oddo’s volume is a highly readable book for those who are interested in rhetoric, media, and historical studies. While the analyses offered still require confirmation through empirical engagement with journalists and the audiences of the news narratives, the combination of both verbal and visual data as well as an introduction to intertextual ethos, precontextualization, and recontextualization makes the approach distinctive, and the language is lucid and accessible with detailed and large quantities of textual analysis. The book is doubtlessly of interest to historians, rhetorical critics, and media scholars who are interested in investigating how minor and seemingly innocuous variations can have cumulative effects to alter an argument’s persuasive forces.