The prophet and the press: American civil religion and images of candidate Barack Obama

This dissertation is a semiotic and discourse analysis of images of candidate Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign. The project begins by reviewing the history of the concept of American civil religion and arguing for its value in analyzing news media coverage of the 2008 campaign of Barack Obama. The second chapter reviews semiotic and discourse analysis in the context of journalistic images and news stories, laying the methodological foundation for the analysis in the chapters that follow. The first chapter of analysis examines news photographs and editorial cartoons that drew on civil religious symbolism to portray Obama as an American savior, illuminated messiah and heir to the legacies of civil religious martyrs Abraham Lincoln, John F. and Robert F. Kennedy, and Martin Luther King Jr. The second chapter of analysis deconstructs political cartoons to show that political figures to Obama's ideological left and right were marginalized as fringe to construct Obama as the reasonable, centrist, civil religious candidate. The final chapter analyzes citizen-created YouTube video mashups and one blog to examine the ways that everyday online users constructed oppositional and negotiated readings of mainstream media's civil religious images of Obama. The conclusion offers a summary of chapters, suggestions for future directions in research on civil religious images, as well as context for understanding Obama images in the 2012 campaign.