Abstract
Journalism is the representation of social life in print, on air, and online. As such, it is a natural topic for visual communication research. The book under review is a case in point: Oddo’s Intertextuality and the 24-Hour News Cycle is a topical, engaging, and accessible case study of political journalists’ representational practices. As the book’s title suggests, the author analyses the historical and conceptual links between pre factum and post factum news coverage of US Secretary of State Colin Powell’s address to the United Nations at the Security Council in New York City in 2003: to be sure, a memorable and historically significant critical discourse moment that helped shape public opinion of the desirability for the US invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq.
Central to Intertextuality and the 24-Hour News Cycle is a micro-rhetorical analysis of pre-war mediatization through the bifocal lens of future-oriented and past-oriented intertextuality. Anticipatory or future-oriented intertextuality precontextualizes future rhetorical events, thus priming news audiences to see Powell’s future speech as justifiable, while retrospective or past-oriented intertextuality recontextualizes prior texts, thereby remaking the speech and (re)positioning audience uptake of Powell’s call to arms. Drawing on multimodal transcripts of television news coverage, Oddo shows how linguistic and visual resources were (i) deployed to legitimate Powell’s upcoming speech; and (ii) transformed in subsequent news reports to cumulatively position audiences. The result is a revealing – and damning – picture of political journalism serving the interests of the state.
The book is organized around an introduction and five chapters, and comes with acknowledgments, endnotes, references, an index, and no fewer than nine appendices. At 170 pages, the appendices make up roughly half of the book. Of particular interest to readers of this journal, appendices B, D, and I detail Oddo’s methodological approach and analytical apparatus. Following an introduction outlining what was at stake for whom and why, Oddo provides a compelling modern history of the US campaign for war in Iraq (ch. 1) before moving on to a multimodal analysis of evaluative news discourse of Colin Powell and the Iraqi leaders as political creatures (ch. 2). The author then turns to expressions of futurity in previews of Powell’s address (ch. 3), and to rhetorical transformations in news discourse about Powell’s speech (ch. 4). Implications and avenues for further research conclude the book (ch. 5).
The book comes into its own when the multimodal transcripts of television news items are creatively paired with sophisticated micro-analyses of engagement, attribution, temporality, modality, and rhetorical transformations, usefully visualized in Toulmin diagrams and parallel analysis tables. Oddo drills deep in the verbal–visual ensembles of meaning in television news reports but never loses control. Even though the lexicogrammatical analysis of the intertextuality of pre-war news discourse outweighs the visual analyses and, despite the rather demanding multilayered analytical approach, Oddo convincingly argues that ‘the [Bush] administration’s “path to war” was illuminated by reporters, while possible avenues to peace were concealed or ignored’ (p. 125).
In line with current thinking about the role and significance of mediated language in society (Androutsopoulos, 2014; Lundby, 2014), this book attributes a great deal of power to the press – power, which has, no doubt, only multiplied since the days of the Bush administration. Mediatization can be broadly defined as ‘a high-level societal metaprocess concerned with the historical adjustment to or appropriation of media logics by institutions and cultural practices across diverse domains of society’ (Lunt and Livingstone, 2016: 466). Oddo’s book can be read as an empirical contribution to mediatization research, illustrating in multimodal detail how audiences based their opinions of Powell’s speech on mediated rather than direct social action; and how communicative processes are spatially and temporally extended, and infused with ideological frames that position audiences and silence alternative viewpoints.
There is irony in the intertextual transformations that Oddo lays bare because his book does precisely what he blames journalists for: to prime audiences through an intertextual process of data representation, necessary for analytical and rhetorical purposes. On the whole, Intertextuality and the 24-Hour News Cycle is a well-executed and well-written study that delivers on its promises and deserves shelf space for anyone with an interest in political communication, media discourse, and war rhetoric.