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The idea that the public is swayed by the rationales for war that circulate throughout the media environment is well established in popular discourse. Research on the determinants of support for war, however, has largely ignored the role that such rationales might play. This study is the first to directly test the possibility that rationales for war present in news coverage influence public support for war. Pairing a detailed computer-assisted content analysis with measures of public support for the Iraq War, this study shows that, contrary to popular wisdom, rationales for war present in television news have only a limited impact on public attitudes about U.S. military action.

Freedom is the most familiar symbol in American political culture, but little is known about how presidents have employed this symbol in their discourse. This study uses quantitative and qualitative analysis to examine the language of freedom in more than seventy years worth of presidential speeches. The findings reveal a presidential narrative of freedom that has been remarkably constant over time. However, within this broad narrative, presidents' political ideology and the context in which they spoke led to significant differences in the way they defined freedom and in the way they used the term to define the nation. Adapted from the source document.

Research that undertakes longitudinal analysis of presidential discourse inevitably wrestles with a difficult issue: which presidential speeches should be analyzed? Surprisingly, there has been essentially no interrogation of this issue. Studies vary in the speeches they analyze: some focus on inaugural addresses, others on State of the Union addresses, yet others focus on some broader body of speeches, often with limited discussion of the criteria used for selection. The result is that when scholars set out to study broad trends in the rhetoric of America's most important political figure, they have little guidance in determining what speeches they should analyze. This article offers a detailed conception of major presidential addresses, argues that such addresses provide an ideal corpus of texts for longitudinal content analysis of modern presidential speeches, and briefly describes the contours of a data set consisting of 406 such speeches. This data set serves as a resource for scholars to rely upon when studying presidential discourse, one that might standardize future analyses so that more meaningful generalizations can be made and more precise replications can be undertaken.