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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...