As I have been progressing on my project, here are some interesting things that I have been considering regarding the “rhetoric of the war on terror:”
At first, when I got the idea to do this project, I was considering only verbal rhetoric (and print, I suppose). However, our recent reading on the rhetoric of the image has gotten me thinking about the rhetoric of the war on terror in terms of imagery — which opens up so many more possibilities in my project.
I’ve done some research, and a couple of particular ways in which rhetoric was employed through the images perpetuated in the media regarding the war are as follows:
- zooming in on the image of the crowd around the statue of Saddam Hussein being pulled down so that it looked like the square was packed, when in reality it was not (thus, this image tells us that the U.S. is being greeted as liberators throughout the country)
- eliminating images with rhetoric that would potentially be damaging to the American people’s perception of the war (no photos were allowed to be taken, put in the news of the dead, caskets, etc. until much later in the war)
I’d love to hear if anyone can think of any other examples of this kind of rhetoric, but I feel like I’ve finally found something to grab onto that will give my project some momentum.
