In the nation's interest: a critical discourse analysis of the issue of national security in the U.S. presidential debates of 1960 and 2000

Abstract

Months of intense political campaigning in U.S. general election years culminate in a series of live, televised debates between the major contenders for the presidency which are produced to both inform and entertain consumers in the private domain. However, scant attention has been paid to analysis of the texts which are generated by these discursive events utilizing the approaches to media discourse advanced over the past two decades by systemic linguistics and critical discourse analysts in Europe, Australia and South America. In this contrastive analysis, the four U.S. Presidential Debates which premiered in 1960 are compared to the three debates of the most recent series of 2000 with the dual objectives of investigating how genres and discourses are drawn upon, and how shifting language and discursive practices in the media could serve as indicators of social and cultural change in the U.S. since the advent of these institutionalized events. Transcripts of the two debate series were downloaded from the home page of the Commission on Presidential Debates and a 30,000-word compilation of extracts related to the issue of national security priorities in the interview segments of the debate programming were tabulated as 3,500 clauses. The material and relational processes which constitute over 70% of the clauses are the focal point of the transitivity-based text analysis, as well as the positive and negative polarizations of the participants as depicted as in-groups and out-groups at the level of clause as representation. The results suggest that the militarized discourses of Communist containment and nuclear deterrence of the Cold War era which permeate the transcripts of the 1960 debate series have been supplanted by the discourses of despotism and nation building in the 2000 series, while traces of their successive forms of knowledge, the discourses of terrorism and preemptive warfare, also were evidenced in the texts and offer opportunities for future research endeavors in critical discourse analysis of media texts.