The 2004 election did not take place: Bush, spectacle, and the media nonevent

It is arguable that the George W. Bush regime has made a more systematically intensive strategic effort to mobilize the management and control of media images as a primary mode of governance than any other U.S. presidency we have yet seen. This article explores the Bush White House's media imagineering and draws on notions of media spectacle, along with Baudrillard's widely misunderstood analysis of the 1991 Gulf War and often overlooked theory of media nonevents, to examine the 2004 U.S. presidential election in particular. It also identifies and draws on what we might see as image insurgencies emerging from the internet, the alternative press, and the mainstream media to raise the prospect that the more fully a regime of power seeks to exert control over and through images, the more vulnerable it becomes to the generation of counterimages, counternarratives, and counterspectacles.