News Norms, Indexing and a Unified Government
2
campaign, seem to give validity to what Maltese (1992) and Cook (1998) have termed the
administration “line of the day,” or the ability to control a message, keep it simple and
consistently repeat it (p 135).
These elite communications, manifesting themselves within six distinct themes, are
notable in that they seemed to be a part of a larger executive level strategy to engender
post-September 11 confidence in the administration's wartime leadership and to assuage
potential concerns that the United States and its military was headed toward an
historically unwinnable “quagmire” (e.g. France/U.S. in Vietnam, U.S.S.R. in
Afghanistan) This trend could be called an example of what Manheim (1991, 1994)
termed “strategic political communication;” a practice in which leaders craft their public
language and communications with the goal to create, control, distribute, and use
mediated messages as a political resource. In particular, political elites have become
adept at management of political and news environments (see Domke, Watts, Shah, &
Fan, 1999; Herman, 1993; Pfetsch, 1998; Protess et al., 1991; Watts, Domke, Shah, &
Fan, 1999; Zaller, 1992), a process which seems likely during a national crisis such as the
events and aftermath of September 11, when political leaders expect citizens to look to
them for guidance and vision. This U.S. government's strategic management of the
information was recognized at the height of the Afghanistan military campaign in a
November, 2001 New York Times article:
It is not just information that the Pentagon leadership is keeping under tight control. It is
also expectations…The desire to keep information and expectations at a minimum stems
directly from the experience of the Vietnam War, longtime military reporters and military
historians say. The Johnson administration "oversold greatly the degree of success" of
the war before the Tet offensive in 1968, said Don Oberdorfer, a former diplomatic and
military correspondent for The Washington Post. The unrealistic expectations turned the
Tet battles -- arguably a United States military victory -- into a massive public relations
defeat.
Convention