To celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday for at least the last twenty years, the President of the United States has hosted a press conference where he uses his executive powers to pardon the life of a turkey gifted to him from the National Turkey Federation, an agribusiness industry group. Considering the reality that the President (and millions of Americans) will indeed eat a turkey as the traditional centerpiece of their Thanksgiving meal, this utopian spectacle of a life-saving public pardon for one bird reveals an antagonism – a discursive rupture disclosing an opening between the hegemonic advertising rhetoric of the meat industry and the counter-hegemonic vegan rhetoric of animal rights. We wondered what this hypocritical ritual – this animal sacrifice in reverse – implies regarding American attitudes and anxieties about killing nonhuman animals for food. In examining the legitimizing institutional discourses of the government and the news media, we discuss the results of our critical discourse analysis on White House press transcripts of the turkey-pardoning ceremony as well as its news media coverage, starting with President Bush, Sr. in 1989 to President Obama in 2010. As the highest elected leader, how does the U.S. President treat the pardoning, turkeys, and the practice of eating animals? And as the watchdog of government and agenda-setters of public policy, how do the news media cover this pardon? Is it largely a whimsical human-interest story or do they view it as a hard news opportunity to investigate factory farming or the ethics of eating animals? How seriously do they take this pardoning ceremony, and how is the turkey and his/her interests represented? What does their discourse reveal about America’s identity as a meat-eating public?