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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Brumar89 who wrote (207754)	11/6/2006 2:09:06 AM
From: RMF	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

The LATEST anecdotal evidence seems to be showing that rightwingers and hardliner evangelical "gaybashers" may actually be repressed homosexuals...LOL Isn't everybody really curious about what "fellow" Rush was looking forward to when he bought that viagra??

To: Brumar89 who wrote (207754)	11/6/2006 3:08:17 AM
From: geode00	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 281500

Dems, Race and Katrina assistance, the original story which has to do with what he studies all the time: the media. "...Racial cues can be conveyed within two distinct genres of news coverage. "Thematic" news reports cover events in general terms providing information about background and context. In contrast, "episodic" news personalizes events by focusing on the experiences of specific individuals. We presented participants with two different thematic frames for Katrina; one, completely lacking in race-related references, focused on the scope of the flooding and destruction in different areas of New Orleans. The second added implicit racial cues to the coverage by focusing on the breakdown of law and order in the immediate aftermath of Katrina. We anticipated that people who read the former news report would favor more energetic government relief efforts than those exposed to the report on lawlessness. In fact, this is exactly what we found. Our manipulation of race was more explicit in the case of episodic news coverage. We presented study participants (those who were not assigned to either of the two thematic reports) with a typical story about a displaced Katrina victim. By varying the victim's ethnicity we could observe whether the audience responded differently to efforts to help the entire class of Katrina victims when they were presented with a specific case of an African-American, Hispanic, Asian, or white victim. Here our results suggest that the race-ethnicity of the person showcased by the news report was relevant: participants responded more generously (in the sense of recommending higher levels of government assistance to hurricane victims) when they encountered a victim who was white. The study design was as follows. All participants first read one of the three news reports. Some participants were assigned to the two thematic conditions, but the majority encountered an episodic report featuring a particular individual left homeless by the hurricane. We embedded several manipulations of the victim's personal attributes into this episodic report. The victim's name was either Terry Miller or Terry Medina. ' Terry was either a mother or father of two children, married or single, and said to be either a school custodian, factory worker, or real estate agent. We also inserted a small headshot photo of Terry into the report; depending on the condition, the photograph showed a white, African-American, Hispanic, or Asian person (see Table 1 for an example of the episodic report). We selected a total of 18 different photographs (9 men and 9 women) from a national database all showing people from the shoulders up with a neutral (non-smiling) expression. We then edited each photograph so as to alter the subject's skin complexion. In effect, for each of the 18 selected faces, we created dark and light-skinned versions of our fictional Terry. (Examples of the skin color manipulation are provided in Table 2.) We then had Stanford undergraduates view all 36 photographs and identify the ethnicity of the person. (They were asked to classify each face as white, African-American, Hispanic, Asian, or ambiguous.) A majority of the undergraduates were able to identify each face as either white, African-American, Hispanic, or Asian. Approximately 2,300 people completed the experiment. As in our past studies, the sample was skewed heavily in the direction of Democrats and liberals -- only 12 percent of the participants identified as Republican. Eighty-six percent were critical of President Bush's handling of Katrina. The sample was also highly educated -- 84% had completed at least a bachelor's degree. These features of the sample are especially important in light of the results we describe below.... We expected that beliefs about the appropriate level of assistance would vary with the presence or absence of racial cues in the news. As shown in Figure 1, the looting news frame had significant effects. Participants were least generous in their recommendations after reading the report on looting.... The data does not permit us to assess whether the significant reduction in the amount and length of financial assistance in the looting condition is attributable to racial cues per se, but many previous studies have documented the existence of a close connection between references to violent crime and implicit racial stereotypes. We suspect that exposure to the news story on looting "primed" people to associate hurricane victims with crime, thus making them scale back on what they considered the appropriate level of assistance.... We do not mean to suggest that participants were sensitive only to the race of the person featured in the new story. In fact, they were also affected -- and significantly so -- by gender and occupation.... These results suggest that news media coverage of natural disasters can shape the audience's response. Framing the disaster in ways that evoke racial stereotypes can make people less supportive of large-scale relief efforts..... As we noted at the outset, this particular sample of participants consisted of highly educated individuals who located themselves toward the liberal end of the political spectrum. Many of them live in and around the nation's capital, one of the more racially diverse and cosmopolitan areas of America. We suspect that this group would score at or very near the top of most measures of support for civil rights and racial equality. Yet their responses to Katrina were influenced by the mere inclusion of racial cues in news media coverage. The fact that this group awarded lower levels of hurricane assistance after reading about looting or after encountering an African-American family displaced by the hurricane is testimony to the persistent and primordial power of racial imagery in American life. washingtonpost.com