Rhetorical features of newscasts about the president

This study details the general verbal and visual characteristics of network news coverage of presidential speech‐making between 1969 and 1978. It is argued that a persuasion‐based model of such newscasts best accounts for the phenomena observed and that other models of media bias are less heuristic than the rhetorical approach. Forty‐five newscasts were analyzed from both a quantitative and qualitative perspective. Results indicate that presidents are required to play highly constrained roles on such newscasts and that the media themselves emphasize the institutional, the dialectical, and the dramatistic in their reportage. By means of these reporting strategies, television commentators present themselves as seers and guardians‐of‐the‐truth.