Abstract
The focus of this book is the address of former US Secretary of State, Colin Powell to the UN General Assembly on 5 February 2003 to argue in support of the US invasion of Iraq, and the related news coverage by various national media outlets (television, newspaper, and Internet) during the 24 hours preceding and following the address. Although most Americans did not watch Powell’s televised address (CNN/USA Today/Gallup, 2003), around 90% of those polled the day prior to his speech reported that it would be a key factor in determining their views about a war with Iraq (Moore, 2003). In the days following the speech, national polls indicated that the majority of US citizens thought that the evidence presented by Powell was a strong argument in favor of war (Rennie, 2003). Through a careful analysis of media content, Oddo reveals how journalists pre-contextualized and re-contextualized the content of Powell’s address in order to shape public opinion on this controversial foreign policy issue. With its systematic integration of rhetorical analysis and multimodal discourse analysis (applying Baldry and Thibault, 2005; Kress and Van Leeuwen, 1996), this outstanding study is an eclectic model for further research on the subject of public discourse mediation.
Following an overview of the chapters that follow, Chapter 1 explores in general how media journalism frames public discourse and influences public opinion, and specifically, how television and newspaper reporting prior to and immediately following Powell’s address framed the meaning of his speech and in turn influenced public opinion at this critical crossroads in modern American history. Using a micro-discursive approach, the author analyzes a corpus of one day of pre- and post-speech news reports that were broadcast or published by three mainstream American media outlets that devoted a lot of coverage to Powell’s address: the ‘lead story’ published online by the New York Times and CNN before and after the speech, and the live ‘Special Report’ leading up to Powell’s presentation, as well as the ‘Nightly News’ before and after the speech on NBC.
In Chapter 2, Oddo introduces the concept of ‘intertextual ethos’ (p. 48) to explain how public perception of a public figure’s credibility or ethical appeal is negotiated within and across texts by various mass-media sources. In this context, and based on Bakhtin’s (1984) concept of the polyphony of voices and Martin and White’s (2005) framework for appraisal analysis, the author reveals that a chorus of authorial voices of journalists and other public figures in the US political arena constructed a positive ethos for Powell’s pro-war position and a negative ethos for those voicing anti-war positions by rearticulating a certain evaluative vocabulary and endorsing the validity of specific voices.
Chapter 3 illuminates that, on the evening prior to Powell’s UN address, using the strategies of nominalization, metaphor, vocal emphasis, and emotionally evocative images, NBC television news positively pre-contextualized and pre-confirmed the arguments that he would present on the following day, which would depict Saddam Hussein as a deceptive figure and Iraq as an imminent threat to national security. It also discusses how the recurrence of jointly enacted, verbal/visual thematic formations makes the positive ethos of Colin Powell (i.e. the United States) and the negative ethos of Saddam Hussein (i.e. Iraq) more salient to the audience.
In Chapter 4, Oddo writes that American media journalists used verbal/visual micro-transformations to enhance the persuasive power of Powell’s pro-war arguments in four ways: by re-crafting meanings, incorporating new meanings, re-lexicalizing expressed meanings, and re-ordering meanings to create new meanings. For instance, in one NBC News report, a video clip showing several UN inspectors (presumably on-site in Iraq) was broadcast together with an unrelated audio track of Powell’s voice stating that the Iraqi government had actively been deceiving UN inspectors all along – thereby re-crafting the meaning of the video for audience consumption. While a single such micro-transformation might have little overall effect on public opinion, Oddo argues that the cumulative effect of these subtle transformations of meaning in mass-media reporting on Powell’s address to the UN was significant in convincing Americans to support the call for war with Iraq.
Chapter 5 presents the conclusions and implications of the study, suggests directions for future research, and outlines the strengths and limitations of the integrated framework used to analyze the data. Oddo reiterates his position that the combination of institutional weaknesses in mainstream journalistic practices and a patriotic media climate helped to ensure the success of Colin Powell’s call-to-arms rhetoric, and that the microscopic alterations of prior discourses by the American mass-media enhanced the persuasiveness of Powell’s address – eventually leading the US Congress and public to support the war against Saddam Hussein.
The author made this book very approachable for lay readers by avoiding technical jargon in the main sections and by placing information on more specialized topics such as multimodal discourse analysis and systemic-functional grammar into nine appendices. Oddo’s chronological presentation and analysis of news reporting before and after Powell’s address, as well as the sensational nature of this US policy debate, provides a fascinating narrative of the rhetorical transformations of meaning that occurred within and across media texts during this 24-hour news cycle, which successfully (re)positioned the American audience to adopt a pro-war stance.
The strength of this book lies in the fine granularity of Oddo’s analysis and in his well-researched and well-documented examples of how the US mainstream media acted to transform meanings associated with Colin Powell’s ethos in order to influence the direction of public discourse at this historical crossroads. The author demonstrates how intertextual analysis can provide deep insights into the study of mass-media texts. In Chapter 5, he also discusses the processes of text production, reception, and consumption in relation to political discourse, press journalism, and formation of public opinion. However, as Oddo himself admits (p. 177), this research could be improved by the incorporation of a detailed analysis of newsroom processes and the inclusion of data on how audiences consume (react to) media texts.
All in all, this study provides readers with a real-world example of how the US media construct the ethos of public figures, pre-contextualize and re-contextualize texts, and orchestrate sequences of intertextual alterations of meaning in order to influence public opinion within the course of a single 24-hour news cycle. Its main significance, however, may be in its revelation of how American media and political elites colluded to manipulate public opinion in the run-up to the United States–Iraq war, which began in March of 2003. Its findings serve to remind readers that a well-informed public must learn and exercise critical media literacy if they hope to distinguish between the facts and the often biased and sensational rhetoric of mass-media reporting. At the end of his book, Oddo calls for ‘a better government and a better media’ (p. 197); the furtherance of this worthy endeavor is, we think, the underlying motivation and purpose of this outstanding work.