On the morning of 5 February 2003—a Wednesday—Secretary of State Colin Powell addressed the United Nations Security Council in New York City. In a nearly 90-minute PowerPoint presentation, Powell argued that Iraq was hiding weapons of mass destruction from inspectors in direct violation of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1441. These weapons posed a significant threat to world peace, Powell suggested, not only because Iraq had its own history of violent aggression, but also because Iraq had ties to the al-Qaeda terrorist network—a group that might use such weapons without compunction. Powell concluded that the Security Council had...

On February 24, 2001, Colin Powell indicated to reporters that economic sanctions against Iraq had worked: Saddam Hussein posed no significant threat to the Gulf region, let alone to the United States. As Powell put it, “[Saddam Hussein] has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbors” (quoted in “Briefing” 2001). Roughly two years later at the United Nations, however, Powell had changed his tune considerably. Now Powell portrayed Saddam Hussein as a monumental threat, a leader who “hides weapons of mass destruction,” “provides haven and...

Several sources have suggested that George W. Bush deliberately chose Colin Powell to deliver the U.N. address because Powell, unlike other members of the Bush team, had a sterling public reputation. As Isikoff and Corn (2006) put it: “The idea—not a subtle one—was to attach Powell’s credibility to the case for war” (174). Similarly, Unger (2007) argues that the lack of evidence in Powell’s presentation was compensated for by the fact that “the presentation was being made by a man who had … become the most admired and respected person in America” (285). Unger reports that, at the...

Recontextualization involves extracting elements from one context and relocating them in another (Bauman & Briggs 1990; Linell 1998). Thus, a journalist reporting Colin Powell’s speech necessarily recontextualizes that speech—extracting Powell’s words from his address and relocating them in a given news narrative. Importantly, this kind of reporting is oriented towards the past. However, as Bakhtin (1981) notes, discourse is not only “oriented toward the ‘already uttered’” (279), but also toward subsequent utterances: every utterance anticipates an answer, a future response (280). In this chapter, I examine such “prospective intertextuality” (Lemke 1991, 35), the ways texts link to and anticipate subsequent...

Chapter 3 focused on how journalists projected a future rhetorical event and pre-positioned audiences to adopt certain attitudes toward Powell and his rhetoric. I termed this type of anticipatory intertextuality “precontextualization.” In a sense, journalists pre-formed Colin Powell’s address—construing it as a “real thing” even before it took place. The present chapter shifts focus to how journalistsre-represent a rhetorical event that has already occurred. This type of past-oriented intertextuality is known as recontextualization. In essence, recontextualization involves extracting elements from one communicative event and relocating those elements in a new discursive context (Bauman & Briggs 1990). However, as Linell...

This book has examined twenty-four hours in the extended rhetorical life of Colin Powell’s U.N. address. Specifically, I have investigated how Powell’s multimodal presentation was transformed as it was pre- and recontextualized in various mainstream news narratives. At the same time, I have studied how, as a consequence of these journalistic transformations, public audiences were pre- and repositioned to respond to Powell’s argument. In this concluding chapter, I will discuss the contributions of this study, identify directions for future research, and consider the implications of my project both for scholars and for the general public.

I begin by reviewing the...