Leni-Riefenstahlization of US Politics? The Visual Legacy of the Bush Administration - A View From Abroad.

The suggested interactive paper is exploratory in nature, aiming at a typology of visual strategies of the Bush administration's first term of office (2001-2005). Drawing on the theoretical framework of media events developed by Dayan and Katz (1992) this paper adds a "view from abroad" by fusing the Dayan and Katz methodology with the typology of US-presidential visual strategies developed by a German author (Müller 1997). The paper aims at developing a theoretical and methodological framework to analyze orchestrated media events of the Bush administration, thereby developing a chronology of media events, both choreographed and non-choreographed, and discussing the question whether the Bush administration followed a strategic propagandistic 'script', or whether "Mission Accomplished" rather follows the tradition of choreographed "pseudo-events" as defined by Boorstin in 1961. In the actual poster, the key question that will be answered is "what is the visual legacy of the Bush administration?" ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]