Going Public, Crisis after Crisis: The Bush Administration and the Press from September 11 to Saddam

Political leaders craft public communications in a strategic manner and attempt to use mass media as a political resource. With this in mind, we argue that during summer and autumn 2002 President George W. Bush extended the September 11 crisis through emphasis in public communications on internal "homeland" security and an external "war on terror"—discourses into which Iraq was carefully inserted over time. These strategic communications allowed the president to significantly shape U.S. news coverage, helped Republicans gain control of Congress, and propelled the United States toward war with Iraq. Our analysis shows that Bush's emphasis on three themes in combination with a particular sequence of discourse facilitated a subtle shift from a focus solely on homeland security legislation to one that emphasized the dangers of Saddam Hussein's Iraq without substantive changes in the accompanying arguments. Further, analysis of U.S. news coverage during the same dates indicates that news media often followed the president's messages about these topics.