The Discourse of Propaganda (Case Studies from the Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror)

"Using case studies from recent American military interventions, examines propaganda as an intertextual process, one in which discourse is recontextualized faithfully by multiple parties over time. Explores how messages are constructed, performed, and recontextualized in new and diverse situations"--Provided by publisher. In the early 1990s, false reports of Iraqi soldiers in Kuwait allowing premature infants to die by removing them from their incubators helped to justify the Persian Gulf War, just as spurious reports of weapons of mass destruction later undergirded support for the Iraq War in 2003. In The Discourse of Propaganda , John Oddo examines these and other such cases to show how successful wartime propaganda functions as a discursive process. Oddo argues that propaganda is more than just misleading rhetoric generated by one person or group; it is an elaborate process that relies on recontextualization, ideally on a massive scale, to keep it alive and effective. In a series of case studies, he analyzes both textual and visual rhetoric as well as the social and material conditions that allow them to circulate, tracing how instances of propaganda are constructed, performed, and repeated in diverse contexts, such as speeches, news reports, and popular, everyday discourse. By revealing the agents, (inter)texts, and cultural practices involved in propaganda campaigns, The Discourse of Propaganda shines much-needed light on the topic and challenges its readers to consider the complicated processes that allow propaganda to flourish. This book will appeal not only to scholars of rhetoric and propaganda but also to those interested in unfolding the machinations motivating Americas recent military interventions. Introduction : approaching propaganda with a critical eye -- Defining propaganda and historicizing America's wars in the Middle East. Theorizing propaganda : intertextuality, manipulation, and power ; The Persian Gulf War and the War on Terror : a brief history -- Manufacturing an atrocity. How the incubator story became news : the power of performative semiotics ; Keep war fever alive : the circulation of the uncubator story -- Infiltrating network news. Message force multipliers : rewarding recontextualization ; Enacting and entextualizing the voice of the expert ; The evolution of a talking point -- The art of the slogan. "Support our troops" as portable text and cultural tradition ; "Support our troops" as vertical and horizontal propaganda -- Conclusion : war propaganda and the prospects for resistance