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Abstract
This study uses fantasy theme analysis to examine reader comments on news articles at foxnews.com in an attempt to unravel the rhetorical vision that Fox readers construct to help them make political and personal sense of Barack Obama's presidency. Results describe the dramatic forms that readers envision and re-enact when articles about the president—favorable, unfavorable, or tangential—are presented.
Notes
1. These occasionally include such clear and present dangers as the president's alleged attempt to insert an Islamic crescent into the logo of the Missile Defense Agency (Miller, Citation2010a).
2. Roosevelt, for his part, brought a German Iron Cross to a press conference for the correspondent of a Tribune-affiliated New York paper (Adams, Citation1942).
3. Bormann cites Hofstadter in describing “rhetorical visions so out of joint with the common-sense and everyday experience of the majority … that their appeal is very limited” (1972, p. 400).
4. Hoffa, of course, was from Detroit, not Chicago; an unusually subtle comment from March 2010 suggests that one of Obama's alleged union cronies should visit the restaurant at which Hoffa was last seen.
5. Ray was the assassin of Martin Luther King Jr.
6. The “You lie!” theme originates in South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson's outburst during an address to Congress in September 2009.