American mass media’s relation with the US government in foreign policy
decision-making has been the subject of numerous studies in the interdisciplinary
field of political communication. This paper reexamines the interaction between
the media and the government in the US foreign policy decision-making process,
analyzing the possible congruity and/or incongruity between The Washington
Post’s commentaries and former US President Barack Obama’s anti-terrorism
campaign. A Critical Discourse Analysis of two Obama statements on
counterterrorism, one Washington Post Op-Ed and one editorial suggest that
there is an agreement between Obama’s speeches and the corresponding
newspaper articles in topics such as choosing defense over offense, changing the
conventional war trend, deploying troops, closing down GTMO, avoiding torture
and the violation of American citizens' privacy, freedom of press, avoiding
giving too much importance to terrorists, and increasing air marshals on flights.
Hence, this study confirms the theory of Robinson, which argues that the mediastate
relation, i.e. the relationship between The Washington Post’s commentaries
and President Barack Obama’s statements, is a bidirectional process in which
both American elite media and the US government are involved in attempting to
influence the other party under certain conditions.
