Feature Article

Barack Obama: The Power of Words

By Sarah Kane

Looking back on this past year’s election, one word comes immediately to mind: CHANGE.  Surely, with the end of one administration and the beginning of another, change is inevitable.  President Barack Obama adopted this word as his campaign slogan during the 2008 elections. Domestically, he linked change with the idea of hope. Internationally, change was linked to peace.  “America must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace,” said Obama in his inaugural speech. Whatever foreign policy stance the administration ultimately takes, Obama’s campaign rhetoric of change through peace and diplomacy reached war weary audiences across the nation in part because the media seemed to be ready for change themselves.

While media have the capability to cover absolutely anything and everything, they tend to keep their focus quite narrow and repetitious. The result, according to journalism professor W. Phillips Davison, is that by focusing attention on certain subjects or soundbites, the media create a mood or a frame of mind for the public. This is the essence of media power.

Barack Obama was undoubtedly the candidate of choice for the media during last year’s election.  He was heralded as the “anti-Bush” or “peace” candidate; the one man who could bring hope and change to a nation that was facing troubled times.  By readily repeating the campaign’s rhetoric the media positioned Obama to be the one that would end the war, bring peace to our country, and reach out in friendship to the world around us.  In other words, the media helped deliver the Obama message by circulating, over and over, its key words: “change,” “peace,” and “hope.”

One might argue that the idea of peace has never been so prominent in our society since the antiwar movement of the Sixties.  With our country engaged in two wars – one of which over half of all Americans oppose -- it comes as no surprise that peace is the sought after mood of the media.  Throughout his campaign, Obama was linked with encouraging stories of peace and change, which, as Davison writes, set the tone for a more hopeful mood.  It looks as if the media have found their ideal peace candidate in Obama.

A white dove perches on the ledge of an apartment building as thousands of mourners take part in a funeral procession for Palestinians killed during an incursion by Israeli troops in the northern Gaza Strip. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)