Facts, Fancies, and Frames : Crafted Talk and the Limits of Threat Inflation

The apparent success of the Bush administration’s aggressive campaign in 2002-2003 to build public support for an invasion of Iraq has reheated fears about the president’s ability to manipulate the public. Scholars have offered three types of explanation for why threat inflation was successful in changing public attitudes in the case of Iraq. The dominant explanation, what I call the “facts” model of threat inflation, focused on the Bush administration’s use of misinformation and exaggeration to lead the public into believing the Iraq WMD threat was greater and more urgent than it really was. The public, in turn, used that misinformation to make an instrumental calculation about the costs and benefits of war, resulting in greater support for the war than would have been the case had the public received more accurate information. A second explanation, the “frames” model, argues that the key to successful threat inflation was the administration’s ability to frame the invasion of Iraq as part of the war on terror. By framing Iraq in that way the administration was both able to play on fears of terrorism to accentuate the threat of Iraqi WMD and also to justify the war morally as self-defense.A final explanation suggested that a critical element of threat inflation was the president’s effort to play on nationalist and moral biases of the American public. By making repeated mention of Iraq’s “rape rooms,” Saddam Hussein’s use of torture and chemical weapons against his own people, and the oppressive nature of the Iraqi “regime,” for example, Bush was able to evoke emotional rather than logical responses. The result was that many Americans felt both a heightened sense of threat from Iraq and a heightened desire to punish Iraq for its evil crimes. This paper investigates the methods by which the president might use crafted talk to build public support for an attack against Iran. Drawing on these three theoretical perspectives and building on extant poll data regarding Iran, I create a series of experimental crafted talk stimuli (in the form of newspaper stories) that seek to maximize public support the use of force against Iran. This approach complements the existing literature on crafted talk and threat inflation, much of which is historical and case study based. An experimental approach allows us to compare explicitly the impact of different approaches to public support and to examine the interactive effects of facts, fancies, and frames. From a more practical perspective, the experiments are not very different from the process the White House goes through when trying to create a winning communication strategy. As such this work gives us a sense of what to expect with respect to potential support for a war with Iran