This article presents an intertextual analysis of legitimation in four 'call-to-arms' speeches by Franklin D. Roosevelt and George W. Bush. Drawing on Thibault's (1991) account of critical intertextual analysis, I identify key legitimation strategies and thematic formations that underlie the rhetoric of both speakers. In addition, I (re)situate the speeches in their wider social and historical context to demonstrate how both presidents manipulated the public. In the analysis, I first examine how both speakers use polarizing lexical resources to constitute 'Us' and 'Them' as superordinate thematic categories that covertly legitimate war. Next, I analyze how representations of the past and future also function to legitimate violence across the four speeches. Finally, I examine how both presidents demarcate group membership to discredit opponents of war at home, and legitimate violence against non-aggressors abroad. I conclude that, in spite of popular mythology, Bush is not an aberrant American president; he is one of many to have misled the public into war.

As the scope of rhetorical inquiry broadens to cover intersemiotic and intertextual phenomena, scholars are increasingly in need of new, defensible analytic procedures. Several scholars have suggested that methods of discourse analysis could enhance rhetorical criticism. Here, I introduce a discourse-based method that is empirical, delicate, and adaptive to the complexities of intertextual and multimodal rhetoric. Specifically, I argue that rhetorical scholars can productively integrate systemic-functional linguistics, multimodal text analysis, and micro-intertextual comparison. I illustrate how this micro-rhetorical toolkit can be employed to investigate the recontextualization of written political discourse in video journalism.

This article examines precontextualization: the rhetorical act of previewing and contextualizing a future discursive event. I examine how an NBC News broadcast selected verbal-visual representations of the past in order to enact a context for an upcoming discourse moment: Colin Powell's 2003 United Nations (UN) address. The article draws on appraisal analysis (Martin and White, 2005), multimodal video analysis (Baldry and Thibault, 2005) and scholarship on the rhetoric of futurity (e.g. Dunmire, 2011). I show that the NBC journalists who precontextualized Powell's address on the night before its delivery presented viewers with a supportive context for understanding Powell's argument. By representing Saddam Hussein as deceptive and even deserving of future violence, the journalists essentially pre-confirmed arguments that Powell employed the next day. More importantly, because the news representations were presented as factual, they allowed viewers little space to consider alternative viewpoints -and little reason to question or resist the seemingly inexorable push for war.

Propaganda was first identified as a public crisis following World War I, as citizens discovered that their own governments had subjected them to deception and emotional manipulation. Today, it seems no less disturbing. Accusations swirl decrying fake news, spin, active measures, and, again, propaganda. But with nearly every accusation there is also a denial and, more important, a counteraccusation: that propaganda is merely a label applied to messages one dislikes, a slippery word that says more about the accuser’s politics than it does about supposed defects in communication. The slipperiness surrounding propaganda has fascinated scholars for over a century, as they have grappled with whether and how it can be distinguished from other kinds of rhetoric. One crucial sticking point concerns propaganda’s means of persuasion. It is commonly supposed that propaganda relies on falsity, emotion, and irrational appeals. However, adjudicating what is true and reasonable is not as clear-cut as it may seem, and much work attempts to differentiate manipulation from legitimate persuasion. Another key concern is the morality of propaganda. Some theorize that it is intrinsically wrong because it seeks its own partisan agenda. But others argue that partisanship is characteristic of all advocacy, and they wonder whether propaganda can and should be employed for worthy democratic purposes. Finally, scholars propose different models for how propaganda works. One model features a propagandist who deliberately targets a passive audience and attempts to move them for selfish ends. But other models see propaganda as a more collective activity, something that audiences pass around to each other, either purposefully or without any design. Difficult as it is to define propaganda, however, scholars do agree on two things: It is enormously powerful, and it shows no signs of slowing down.

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