23 results
Appendix C - Measurement Details for Activist Study: Close-Ended Responses
- Douglas M. McLeod, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Dhavan V. Shah, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Summary
Tolerance for Extremists Index
Tolerance toward extreme groups was measured by asking respondents for their level of agreement with the following statements: “I feel sorry for groups that are the targets of FBI surveillance,” “the media should give extremist groups the opportunity to express their views,” “a group that is targeted by the FBI probably deserves the treatment it gets” (reverse-coded), and “the media should not encourage extremist groups by providing news coverage” (reverse-coded). Tolerance toward extreme groups was constructed by averaging respondents’ answers on a 10-point scale (Cronbach’s alpha = .75, M = 6.00, SD = 1.77).
Tolerance for Targeted Group Index
Tolerance for the targeted group was operationalized with an additive index of four statements taken from Marcus et al. (1995), but modified to fit the current social context. Subjects were asked how they felt about a set of statements regarding the treatment of the hypothetical group that had appeared on the manipulation stories: group members should be allowed to work as a teacher in public schools, hold public rallies, broadcast public access cable programs, and share their views over the Internet. Items were measured on 10-point scales from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.” Responses were used to create an index averaging the scores from these items (Cronbach’s α = .77, M = 7.12, SD = 1.86).
Appendix D - Measurement Details for Activist Study: Open-Ended Responses
- Douglas M. McLeod, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Dhavan V. Shah, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Summary
According to the coding scheme, coders focused exclusively on manifest content in order to establish a high degree of reliability in coding three factors: the degrees of differentiation (i.e., the number of discrete cognitive categories mentioned), the average elaboration (i.e., the extent of detail provided for each mentioned category), and integration (i.e., the interconnectedness of the various cognitive categories mentioned) in the answers provided by respondents.
The coding instrument asked coders to focus on nine conceptual categories that had been identified from a preliminary examination of the open-ended responses. To establish differentiation, coders were asked to judge which constructs were present in an explicit fashion in each answer. For example, if a respondent mentioned in her answer the “importance of ensuring due process for all,” this would have been coded as one construct (category #6: rights/constitution/freedoms). If in addition to mentioning due process, the respondent wrote about the threats posed to national security by the activities of certain groups and the need to ensure public safety, the coder, recognizing the presence of a second construct (category #5: national security/safety), would give this response a value of 2 in terms of construct differentiation.
In addition to the number of constructs present in the answer, coders were asked to rate the degree of elaboration for each concept that was present. Following the example given, just mentioning the importance of due process would have been coded as low in elaboration. A one-sentence explanation of due process would have received a medium elaboration grade, while an extended explanation of due process (two sentences or more on the subject) would have been coded as high on elaboration.
Bibliography
- Douglas M. McLeod, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Dhavan V. Shah, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Part III - Implications and Conclusions
- Douglas M. McLeod, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Dhavan V. Shah, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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5 - Cognitive Complexity and Attitude Structure
- Douglas M. McLeod, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Dhavan V. Shah, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Summary
“Our enemies operate secretly and they seek to attack us from within. In this new kind of war, it is both necessary and appropriate for us to take all possible steps to locate our enemy and know what they are plotting before they strike.”
– U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez Testimony before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee February 6, 2006“I know for an absolute fact that we have not been involved in anything related to promoting terrorism, and yet the government has collected almost 1,200 pages on our activities. Why is the ACLU now the subject of scrutiny from the FBI?”
– Anthony. D. Romero ACLU Executive Director July 16, 2005As the United States government took actions to engage in surveillance of activist groups, the discourse surrounding this action straddled both sides of the national security/civil liberties dichotomy. Some officials, such as Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez (quoted above), made the argument that such government activities are necessary to protect the safety and security of the American public. On the other hand, civil rights advocates such as Anthony Romero, the ACLU’s Executive Director, questioned whether activist group surveillance wasn’t motivated by political rather than security concerns. As discussed earlier, this national security/civil liberties debate was played out for public consumption through the mass media. Audience members seeking to understand the debate over government surveillance activities had to make judgments about what was happening on the basis of information reported in the media. This led us to ask questions about how the audience would make sense of this controversy in response to the news stories that they encounter.
In this chapter, we examine how different frames used to construct such new stories affect audience understanding and cognitions. As we noted in Chapter 1, frames are likely to affect people differently according to the predispositions that they bring to the processing of news stories. As such, this chapter examines the interplay of news frames and political predispositions on audience reactions to news stories. For this analysis, we used data from the Activist Study in which research participants read news stories about the surveillance of political advocacy groups under the USA PATRIOT Act.
3 - Designing the Studies
- Douglas M. McLeod, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Dhavan V. Shah, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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“Police arrested an American-born Muslim in St. Louis early Sunday and took him to a police station where FBI agents questioned him about his anti-war activities and whether he was planning any attacks against the U.S. government. Bret Darren Lee, whose Muslim name is Umar ben-Livan, said…he is active in Muslim and anti-war groups and acknowledged that he holds views that may be considered outside the political mainstream. But Lee said he is far from a terrorist.…While Lee was still in custody, FBI agents returned to Lee’s apartment about noon Sunday and spent a half-hour questioning his wife about whether he was a terrorist, his thoughts about the Taliban, and whether he was planning to take part in any more anti-war protests.”
– Phillip O’Connor St. Louis Post-Dispatch February 11, 2003“An FBI counterterrorism unit monitored and apparently infiltrated a peace group [the Thomas Merton Center] in Pittsburgh that opposed the invasion of Iraq, according to internal agency documents released Tuesday.…The documents make no mention of illegal activities, noting only that the group advocated ‘pacifism,’ opposed an invasion of Iraq, doubted the U.S. rationale for war, and had ties to an Islamic group with no known links to terrorism. The disclosure raised new questions about the extent to which federal authorities have been conducting surveillance operations against Americans since the Sept. 11 attacks.”
– Jonathan S. Landsay Knight Ridder Newspapers March 15, 2006The quotes above are from news stories that reflect the central theme of this book: the tension between the contending values of protecting national security and defending civil liberties. Both stories involve actions by the FBI as part of the War on Terror that are seen by some as expanding the scope of surveillance to include groups that are not threats to national security. Both deal with activists who have connections to Muslim groups, but apparently have no linkages to terrorism. Yet they also differ in important ways – ways that highlight the effects of message frames that we explore in the studies reported in this book.
6 - Security Concerns and Tolerance Judgments
- Douglas M. McLeod, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Dhavan V. Shah, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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“While the FBI possesses no information indicating that violent or terrorist activities are being planned as part of these protests, the possibility exists that elements of the activist community may attempt to engage in violent, destructive, or dangerous acts.”
– New York Times Bulletin October 15, 2003“‘Anti-terrorist’ legislation has been adopted in a number of western countries which allows for the arrest and detention without charge of alleged terrorists, including leaders of so-called ‘domestic radical groups’ (meaning antiwar activists), who are now categorized as a threat to Homeland Security.”
– Michel Chossudovsky Professor of Economics, University of Ottawa December 21, 2005The above passages illustrate how the focus of the government’s antiterrorism activities included political activist groups, who were being considered as a threat to national security. Documented cases of government surveillance and infiltration of nonviolent activist groups, including the Occupy movement, and the dragnet monitoring of Americans revealed by Edward Snowden (as detailed in Chapter 2) substantiate concern that the USA PATRIOT Act is being used to infringe on the privacy and due process rights of citizens, including political activists who may stake out extreme positions on issues but are not suspected of criminal activities.
Public response to this range of government surveillance activities is likely to be shaped by how they are portrayed by the media. We argue that the nature of news coverage about civil liberties controversies has the potential to sway individuals’ security concerns and social tolerance judgments. Our theory builds on past research that finds contemporary information works in combination with citizens’ political predispositions to shape the level of support for civil liberties (Marcus et al., 1995). However, this past research focused only on how individuals respond when confronted with disliked groups, arguing that it is under these conditions that the limits of tolerance are best understood (Sullivan and Marcus, 1988; Sullivan et al., 1979). An unintended consequence of this focus on disliked groups has been a dearth of research on how individuals make these judgments when they confront efforts to restrict the civil liberties of groups whose causes they support, but whose tactics they may oppose. The decision to defend the civil liberties of radicals, even if only for targets toward which one feels some latent sympathy, is a meaningful test of tolerance in the political climate created after 9/11 and typified by the Snowden revelations.
Frontmatter
- Douglas M. McLeod, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Dhavan V. Shah, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Appendix B - Measurement Details for Response Latency
- Douglas M. McLeod, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Dhavan V. Shah, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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In addition to addressing response-time outliers, we also considered the potential differences in the rate of response as influenced by the individual and technological differences particular to each participant. For example, some people are naturally faster than others in answering questions or have faster Internet connections that may influence baseline response latencies. To control for this, Mulligan et al. (2003) make the following recommendation:
Researchers typically include in their models the latency or average latency on one or more simple, factual, nonpolitical questions considered to be indicative of respondents’ baseline rate of response. Controlling for the baseline speed of response allows researchers to isolate between-respondent differences in response latency on particular survey questions from systematic differences in answering survey questions generally.
(p. 294)Accordingly, time scores used for our analyses were normalized by dividing time spent responding to the item battery by overall time spent completing preexperimental questions.
Following accepted practice in response latency measurement (Mulligan et al., 2003), outliers were assumed not to represent the actual time participants spent in answering questions and, instead, were replaced with corresponding sample mean scores. Although seemingly arbitrary, “trimming the tail of the latency distribution in this manner results in the loss of a very small proportion of the latencies and improves analysis by reducing the signal-to-noise ratio, allowing researchers to assess more clearly associations between accessibility and substantive variables of interest” (Mulligan et al., 2003, p. 293).
Part I - Conceptual Framework
- Douglas M. McLeod, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Dhavan V. Shah, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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4 - Converging Cues and the Spread of Activation
- Douglas M. McLeod, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Dhavan V. Shah, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Summary
“The USA PATRIOT Act and Homeland Security, while aimed at immigrants especially from the Middle East, is a threat to the civil rights and liberties of all people. How do you end racial profiling and stop police racist harassment in this atmosphere? How do you end racist discrimination when someone can be picked up, their phones can be tapped or they can be kicked off airplanes because they look Middle Eastern?”
– Jarvis Tyner Executive Vice Chair, American Communist Party February 16, 2002“The federal government can and must protect Americans from the threat of terrorism without eroding our constitutional liberties. Today, Arab Americans are especially vulnerable to abuses of government power. Yet ultimately all Americans are put at risk when our rights come under attack. We must work to preserve our constitutional rights and roll back the most egregious infringements of our individual freedoms.”
– Congressman Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) 2004The above quotations share a common concern that the war on terrorism has exacerbated perceptions that people of Arab descent constitute a threat to public safety. Moreover, such threat perceptions have provided an impetus to generate public support for the policies of the USA PATRIOT Act that in turn has threatened the civil liberties of Muslims and Arab-Americans. For most citizens, the mass media provide the primary source of information upon which to base judgments about potential threats. As such, the nature of news coverage and its effects become important concerns for researchers seeking to understand the dynamics of political judgments.
In the discussion of our integrated Message Framing Model (Figure 1.2) in Chapter 1, we noted that news frames and cues have much in common in that they both describe ways in which journalists give meaning to text. They differ in terms of the unit of text to which they are applied. Both frames (i.e., organizing devices used by journalists to structure press accounts) and cues (i.e., the labels used to characterize issues, groups, and figures in the news) have received considerable attention from mass communication researchers interested in understanding how subtle changes in news reports influence audience understanding (Shah et al., 2002).
Introduction
- Douglas M. McLeod, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Dhavan V. Shah, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Summary
“After September the eleventh, I vowed to the American people that our government would do everything within the law to protect them against another terrorist attack. As part of this effort, I authorized the National Security Agency to intercept the international communications of people with known links to al Qaeda and related terrorist organizations. In other words, if al Qaeda or their associates are making calls into the United States or out of the United States, we want to know what they’re saying.”
– President George W. Bush May 11, 2006“Last December, the Times reported that the N.S.A. was listening in on calls between people in the United States and people in other countries, and a few weeks ago USA Today reported that the agency was collecting information on millions of private domestic calls.…The N.S.A. began, in some cases, to eavesdrop on callers (often using computers to listen for key words) or to investigate them using traditional police methods. A government consultant told me that tens of thousands of Americans had had their calls monitored in one way or the other.”
– Seymour M. Hersh The New Yorker May 22, 2006These opening statements reflect fundamental, yet opposing, concerns in what has been one of the most important postmillennial debates for American democracy, the tradeoff between protecting national security and defending civil liberties. Though this debate has been evident since the dawn of U.S. history, the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 raised its intensity to an unprecedented level, as the course of both foreign and domestic policy have been substantially altered. On the international front, these attacks led to protracted wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. On the home front, and central to the focus of this book, the Bush administration pushed the USA PATRIOT Act (officially titled the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act) through Congress on October 25, 2001, substantially expanding the government’s surveillance powers in ways that were unimagined at the time of its inception. Since that time, the law has been reauthorized twice, first in July 2005 and again in May 2011, with the key provisions now extended until June 2015. This law thrust the debate to the center of the American political stage, as policymakers, activists, and citizens considered the steps taken to prevent another terrorist attack.
8 - Covering “Big Brother”
- Douglas M. McLeod, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Dhavan V. Shah, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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“The consciousness of being at war, and therefore in danger, makes the handing-over of all power to a small caste seem the natural, unavoidable condition of survival.”
– George Orwell in 1984“There are many other things that are excluded from the official framing of the ‘global war on terror,’ such as oil, the economy, the deficit, health care, jobs, education, taxes, and the effects of global trade. The implication is that none of these things matter if every American is in mortal danger, even those in the swing states where there’s little to no chance of a terrorist strike. But rationality is not at issue here. People think in terms of frames.”
– George Lakoff Professor of Linguistics at U. of California – Berkeley August 31, 2004Framing that enhances a sense of danger and threat is a potent tool in the hands of powerholders. If the research presented in this book is any indication, this influence is bestowed by the factors that shape the production of news, not the least of which are the codes and practices of the journalistic profession. When covering the tension between national security and civil liberties – that is, reporting on the government’s massive surveillance powers – journalists tended to construct news reports on that basis of these conventions, emphasizing the conflict between these contending values while trying to find ways to personify and personalize the policy debate. Framing coverage around principled conflicts and individual instances are longstanding news values (Price and Tewksbury, 1997). Although framing news around “rights talk” has been well studied (Shah et al., 1996; Brewer, 2007), in this book we find it is this personification – framing stories in individual as opposed to collective terms – that plays such an important role in shaping the responses of audiences, their thought processes, their mental sophistication, their social tolerance, and their political expression. Such individual framing is a fixture of news construction, particularly when covering “Big Brother.”
7 - Group Perceptions and Expressive Action
- Douglas M. McLeod, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Dhavan V. Shah, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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“Since when did feeding the homeless become a terrorist activity? When the FBI and local law enforcement target groups like Food Not Bombs under the guise of fighting terrorism, many Americans who oppose government policies will be discouraged from speaking out and exercising their rights.”
– Ann Beeson ACLU Associate Legal Director“To treat a reporter as a criminal for doing his job – seeking out information the government doesn’t want made public – deprives Americans of the First Amendment freedom on which all other constitutional rights are based. Guns? Privacy? Due process? Equal protection? If you can’t speak out, you can’t defend those rights, either.”
– Dana Milbank The Washington Post May 21, 2013Shortly after the September 11 attacks, television commentator and comedian Bill Maher found his program losing sponsors. Advertisers Sears and FedEx were among those that pulled advertising from Maher’s “Politically Incorrect” program after his comments regarding the attacks proved too “incorrect.” Maher proposed that while the 9/11 terrorists could be called many things, “cowardly” was not among them. He went on to suggest that the American military, lobbing cruise missiles from afar, was the cowardly group (Bohlen, 2001). Maher was not the only one to make such a suggestion. In fact, his comments echoed those of a conservative commentator from the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Dinesh D’Souza, a guest on Maher’s show that evening. Susan Sontag also argued that whatever the terrorists might have been, they were not cowards. While Sontag was skewered in columns and letters, there was no evidence of a drop in support for the AEI (Bohlen, 2001). Maher was one of the first individuals to experience the chilling effect of the post-9/11 climate on public expression, but he was certainly not the last.
Even in recent years, it was revealed that the government had also engaged in efforts to muzzle whistleblowers and silence reporters, prosecuting them as criminal codefendants. Journalist Glenn Greenwald (2012) asserted, referring to the case of William Binney, an NSA leaker who preceded Snowden, that the “war on whistleblowing [was] designed to shield from the American public any knowledge of just how invasive this Surveillance State has become.” Many observers, both inside and outside of government, noted that this was just one of many instances of how the government “uses technology to silence critics” (Milbank, 2013).
Part II - Framing Effects Research
- Douglas M. McLeod, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Dhavan V. Shah, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Index
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Preface and Acknowledgments
- Douglas M. McLeod, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Dhavan V. Shah, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Summary
When this story began more than a decade ago in the early fall of 2001, we were relatively new professors at the University of Wisconsin. We were in the process of launching a research collaboration that has lasted to this day. We were on our way to work when a report came over the radio that a second plane had struck the World Trade Center. Within the hour, we were both at work watching CNN in a conference room along with other faculty, staff, and students. Like everyone else in the room – and so many others across the country – we sensed that the world was about to change.
What we didn’t know was how profound this change would be, nor that we would spend the next decade writing this book that focuses on one particular aspect of this change, the War on Terror, how it was covered in the media, and the effects that this coverage had on the public. But we did know that the public opinion survey that we were planning was going to have to be redesigned to deal with public reactions to the 9/11 attacks. As the ensuing weeks unfolded, we read news reports about the federal government’s reorganization of its various intelligence agencies, as well as proposed legislation that would allow them to fight terrorism more effectively. This legislation, dubbed the PATRIOT Act, was passed overwhelmingly by both the House and Senate and signed into law by President Bush on October 26, 2001, only 45 days after the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Appendix A - Measurement Details for Arab Study
- Douglas M. McLeod, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Dhavan V. Shah, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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Group Evaluation Index
Respondents evaluated the target group according to four 7-point semantic-differential scales (foolish/wise, unfair/fair, threatening/nonthreatening, and dangerous/harmless). We used the mean of these items to create the group evaluation index (Cronbach’s α = .87, M = 5.17, SD = 1.63).
Tolerance for Extremists Index
Two statements, “the media should give extremist groups the opportunity to express their views” and “the media should not encourage extremist groups by providing news coverage” were used. Subjects rated their agreement with each statement using a 10-point scale, ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.” The second item was reverse-coded and averaged with the first item to create an index where a higher score means a more tolerant attitude (Inter-item r = .39, M = 6.56, SD = 1.99).
2 - Framing Surveillance and the War on Terror
- Douglas M. McLeod, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Dhavan V. Shah, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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“While our job is not finished, we have used the tools provided in the Patriot Act to fulfill our first responsibility to protect the American people. We have used these tools to prevent terrorists from unleashing more death and destruction on our soil. We have used these tools to save innocent American lives. We have used these tools to provide the security that ensures liberty.”
– John Ashcroft Former U.S. Attorney General August 19, 2003“The tour that the attorney general has started suggests that they’ve had enough criticism of what they’ve been doing that they’ve found it necessary to actually go out and defend the PATRIOT Act, with all of its intrusive measures. All the violations of people’s privacy, doing things without the supervision of a court, doing things in a warrantless fashion, many of the things that are banned by our Bill of Rights, they’re doing it.”
– Larry Pratt Executive Director of Gun Owners of America August 21, 2003Following the events of September 11, 2001, a core issue that lay dormant beneath the surface of everyday politics roared to life, confronting policymakers, journalists, activists, and citizens with what has arguably been the central civic dilemma of the new millennium. How do we strike an appropriate balance between concerns about guarding citizens against future acts of terrorism, while minimizing infringements on civil liberties? The Bush administration and certain members of Congress argued that fundamental changes in intelligence gathering and law enforcement were necessary to protect national security, an assertion that resulted in both the founding of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and the passage of the USA PATRIOT Act in October of 2001. The latter initiative has prompted serious criticism from both policymakers and activists, who assert that certain provisions compromised established civil liberties of American citizens. Indeed, evidence has accumulated that government agencies substantially overstepped the expanded powers of the PATRIOT Act, engaging in illegal surveillance activities. This dilemma, and the conflict that has unfolded around it, form the central issue of this book.
1 - Understanding Message Framing and Effects
- Douglas M. McLeod, University of Wisconsin, Madison, Dhavan V. Shah, University of Wisconsin, Madison
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“Ever since the 1970s, when Army intel agents were caught snooping on antiwar protesters, military intel agencies have operated under tight restrictions inside the United States. But the new provision (Senate Bill S.2386, Sec. 502), approved in closed session last month by the Senate Intelligence Committee, would eliminate one big restriction: that they comply with the Privacy Act, a Watergate-era law that requires government officials seeking information from a resident to disclose who they are and what they want the information for.”
– Michael Isikoff Newsweek Magazine June 21, 2004“Among the Americans who complain about the Patriot Act, Mohammad Junaid Babar probably dislikes it more than most. Absent that often-criticized federal statute, Babar still might stroll the sidewalks of New York, gathering money and equipment for al Qaeda. According to the unsealed transcript of his June 3 appearance before U.S. District Judge Victor Marrero, Babar pleaded guilty to five counts of furnishing ‘material support or resources to a foreign terrorist organization.’”
– Deroy Murdock The National Review October 25, 2004Both of these passages from magazine articles – the first from Newsweek and the second from the National Review – discuss the implications of domestic surveillance activities by U.S. government agencies. But this is where the similarity ends. These two excerpts represent two very different ways of telling a story about government surveillance. One obvious difference is that the first excerpt emphasizes the issue of civil liberties, while the second emphasizes the issue of national security. In addition, the stories illustrate two different common targets of government scrutiny: activist groups and Arab groups. But a more subtle difference is that the first story addresses the broader policy implications of surveillance in relation to large groups, while the second focuses on a single, potentially dangerous individual.
The differences in these stories raise a number of questions: Would audience members react differently depending on which of these stories they encountered about the debate over domestic security and civil liberties? How would the frame of the news story, whether it organized the issue around individuals or collectives, shape reactions of audience members? Are audience members more likely to favor national security over personal freedoms when seeing individuals or collectives targeted under the PATRIOT Act?