ABSTRACT
The George W. Bush presidency began under exceptionally inauspicious circumstances. The late 1990s, the years just before George W. Bush's election, had been very good to Fox News, an upstart cable news outlet that began broadcasting its conservative media voice in the midst of the 1996 presidential campaign. Fox News started drawing larger audiences than Cable News Network (CNN) by 2002, as its strategy of building a loyal, conservative audience began to pay off. The Bush campaign's decision to emphasize character rather than policy clearly played to Bush's strengths and minimized his weaknesses. Global views regarding George W. Bush were consistently more critical than US views about Bush's capacity to "do the right thing regarding world affairs". For Bush and for many Americans, the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union reduced the attention devoted to international concerns.
