Framing of Elite Corruption and Rhetorical Containment of Reform in the Boeing-Air Force Tanker Controversy

Abstract

Controversy surrounding a proposed lease deal between Boeing and the Air Force for one hundred 767 aircraft tankers unveiled the most serious case of crime at the Pentagon in recent history. After emerging publicly in 2003, the 23 billion-dollar plan led to the imprisonment of two top officials. Through an institutionally grounded rhetorical approach to news framing of the ordeal from 2003–2008, this essay confronts the tragic impulse of issue containment rhetoric, placing emphasis on Burke's (1969a) “scapegoat mechanism.” I critique the popular convention of episodically constructing temporary, isolated, and accessible causes for elite corruption and American greed. Moreover, I show that historical and systemic distortions prevent recognition of the limits of liberal ideology on collective social change under the hegemony of capitalism. In addition to offering a novel framework for future study, the investigation calls for further inquiry on the contested nature of discourses of nonpolitical consensus that prevent certain meanings from surviving mainstream storylines. The study also contributes to practice by examining opportunities for fracturing homogeneous coverage and constraints on meaningful policy reform in military-industrial contracting.

Notes

On scapegoating and tragic form in popular trials, see Brummett (1980, 1984), Ott and Aoki (2002), and Wilkie (1981).

Burke (1984b) borrows and broadens the concept from Veblen, though with no specific source citation, and suggests it is “interchangeable” with Dewey's notion of “occupational psychosis” (p. 49). Wais (2005) traces Burke's expansion of Veblen's concept and locates Veblen's first use of it in The Instinct of Workmanship and the State of the Industrial Arts in 1914.

I used Lexis-Nexis database to obtain all archived coverage from this period. Given the possibility that a broader sample would produce a wider array of curious framing patterns, it would be interesting to compare other news sources such as television coverage, the international press, or armed forces news services. Although political slant could produce differences across studied sources, following empirical arguments in past media scholarship, I work from the assumption that national news media as a whole is a more or less homogeneous entity in position to privilege mainstream, accepted cultural norms (Bagdikian, 2004; Bennett, 2006; Entman, 2004; Graber, 2005). From this view, broad similarity across national news coverage is more striking than the differences.

Sambur was Assistant Secretary of the USAF, Aldridge was DOD Undersecretary of Defense Acquisition, and Wynne was DOD Principal Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics. As noted earlier, Roche was Secretary of the USAF.

Given Aldridge's former position as the Pentagon's top official for weapon purchases and that he was Druyun's direct superior, it is puzzling that he was not implicated before the DOD report's release. At the time Aldridge stepped down, neither controversy nor Druyun's name had emerged in the media.

Elite news media organizations participate rigorously in the hierarchical cycle of guilt and trained incapacity of liberal and capitalist ideologies. As Entman (2004) notes, a select class of top editors, editorialists, and correspondents “may exercise more sway over the spread of ideas than all but the most powerful public officials” (p. 11). The counterclaim that journalists simply reflect power by following procedure falters when considering that “it is not always easy to determine where the line between ‘elite’ and ‘journalist’ should be drawn or who influences whom” (Entman, 2004, p. 11).

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Notes on contributors

Ross Singer

Ross Singer, Department of Speech Communication, Southern Illinois University.