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During the 1980s and the 1990s, scholars in the field of rhetorical studies presented presidential war rhetoric as a genre of public discourse. More recently, some have questioned the genre's continued relevance given the current challenges of U.S. warfare. This essay examines whether preemption conducted in the context of the war on terror alters or reinforces the conventional substantive and stylistic expectations of war rhetoric. Analyzing the public communication strategies of the Bush administration on Iraq and the Reagan administration on the bombing of Libya, it demonstrates that despite changes in the situational exigencies, the nation's leadership uses a heavy reliance on strategic misrepresentation to maintain compliance with the genre's expectations.

Images of death and dying in the media around the globe have a symbiotic relationship with nation states as they can bolster state control by defining who has the right to take lives in the interests of the community, by identifying enemies of the state, by demonstrating dominance over enemies, and by lending a moral posture to the state’s war efforts. Previously, the growing corpus of research on media’s display of death and about to die images has focused almost exclusively on media outlets that bolster established states on the global stage. By analyzing 1965 death and about to die images displayed in Dabiq, ISIS’s English-language magazine, and al-Naba’, the same group’s Arabic-language newspaper, this study adds an understanding of the messaging strategies deployed by groups striving to challenge, rather than reinforce, existing national boundaries. The findings suggest that while ISIS adopts some standard media practices, it also utilizes unique and audience targeted approaches regarding the frequency of image use, the identify of the corpses, the display of dead bodies, and the presentation of those responsible for the pictured dead bodies in its media campaign.

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