Bush's War: Media Bias and Justifications for War in a Terrorist Age.

Farnsworth, Stephen J.

Bush's War: Media Bias and Justifications for War in a Terrorist Age. By Jim A. Kuypers. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2006. 197 pp.

As President George W. Bush continues to suffer from a particularly bad case of the second-term public opinion blues, along comes an important new book to examine how powerfully the president's fortunes depend not only on what the administration says but also what the media say the White House said.

Jim Kuypers, an assistant professor of political communication at Virginia Tech, examines this contrast with a particularly intense focus on five crucial presidential speeches relating to the War on Terror: Bush's November 2001 speech to the United Nations, the 2002 State of the Union (the first after 9/11), his May 2003 speech aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln (famous for the president's fighter jet arrival and a "Mission Accomplished" banner), Bush's September 2003 speech to the United Nations, and the president's November 2005 Veteran's Day speech.

Each of these key addresses--and the accompanying news reports--receives chapter-length examination, and the text discusses other less significant speeches more briefly. These five textual analysis chapters--which dissect both the president's remarks and those of the reporters and commentators who wrote about the speeches--are framed by helpful general chapters that examine past research on presidential rhetoric and news coverage and summarize the new findings collected here.

Bush's War adds to the growing body of scholarly evidence that faults reporters for distorting and otherwise misreporting the news. It is written in a lively, accessible style that can generate thoughtful undergraduate discussion in classes on rhetoric, the presidency, and the news media.

This work is far more sympathetic to Bush than to the reporters who cover him. Although some scholars blame the media's focus on the trivial and shrinking news holes for coverage shortcomings, Kuypers provides evidence of a more deliberate process: ideologically slanted mainstream media that repeatedly fail to convey, fully and accurately, the president's key messages. "Fueled by cherry-picked examples and ignored evidence, the press placed the yoke of a bad economy squarely on Bush's shoulders," Kuypers writes about the Lincoln speech (p. 146). In news coverage of the 2002 State of the Union, "Democratic efforts to undermine Bush administration credibility found a ready ally in press reports" (pp. 145-46).

Although there are some differences among the news sources examined here--ABC, CBS, NBC, the New York Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post--all consistently provided distorted information about the president's remarks, according to Kuypers.

The close textual analyses of these speeches and the reports on them allow for the richness of detail found via the case study method. But that depth comes at a price. For example, some readers might question whether the speeches selected were the best choices. (I would have liked to see the 2003 State of the Union address, delivered only weeks before the start of the Iraq War, analyzed with the same intensity as the year-earlier speech.)

At some points, Kuypers does not distinguish news from commentary. By not being explicit about the nature of every article examined, casual readers not familiar with the roster of op-ed columnists at the Times might confuse explicitly labeled opinion writings with news reports. (And for those familiar with such names, Bush's War contains a lot more discussion of the opinions of Frank Rich, a consistent Bush critic, than the commentaries of the more conservative David Brooks.)

By themselves, the news reports on these speeches create an effective indictment of mainstream news. The book's main arguments would have been more convincing had the commentary pages been considered separately and labeled explicitly as the work of opinion writers in all cases. Or the commentators could have been ignored entirely, as they are by many readers.

Finally, this important work could have linked its own findings more extensively to content analysis studies that examined months and even years of news coverage of the White House. Although academic studies based on content analysis sometimes lack the fascinating detail found in case studies, a discussion that combines the richness of the qualitative and the comprehensiveness of the quantitative can produce an even more convincing examination of the differences between what the president actually said and what the media report the president said.

--Stephen J. Farnsworth

University of Mary Washington