Wooing Willing Dupes: The Bush Administration’s Use of Emotional Language in the Drive Toward War with Iraq

Abstract

            Publicly available texts of the George W. Bush administration from September 11, 2001, to March 19, 2003, as presented in The Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States, were analyzed for word frequency and the words themselves analyzed for emotional weight using the NRC Emotion Intensity Lexicon.  Transcripts of six television news agencies (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, FOX, and PBS) were likewise analyzed to determine the extent to which these agencies may have repeated and consequently amplified the rhetoric of the administration. Public opinion polling for this same period was examined in an attempt to gauge the effect the government’s rhetoric.