If I were President Obama, I’d be enormously frustrated. The actual President Obama may be frustrated, too. After all, the country has created more than 200,000 jobs each month for the last 10 months, and unemployment has dropped to a level that is lower than it was before the president […] Read more »
Fear-Mongering with Polls on Ebola
Recent polls have arrived at starkly different conclusions about the level of fear among Americans over the Ebola virus. The ABC News/Washington Post poll suggests “broad worries” of an Ebola outbreak in the United States, with more than four in ten Americans personally worried about catching the disease, while a […] Read more »
Political Polarization & Media Habits
When it comes to getting news about politics and government, liberals and conservatives inhabit different worlds. There is little overlap in the news sources they turn to and trust. And whether discussing politics online or with friends, they are more likely than others to interact with like-minded individuals, according to […] Read more »
Fear of Ebola Closes Schools and Shapes Politics
In the month since a Liberian man infected with Ebola traveled to Dallas, where he later died, the nation has marinated in a murky soup of understandable concern, wild misinformation, political opportunism and garden-variety panic. … The panic in some way mirrors what followed the anthrax attacks of 2001 and […] Read more »
How sensationalist TV stories on terrorism make Americans more hawkish
… Political and media observers, particularly on the left, worry that media coverage of the Islamic State is terrifying Americans and persuading them to support foreign policies and candidates that they would otherwise not support. Political science suggests that their fears are warranted. My own research – conducted in the […] Read more »
Trust in Mass Media Returns to All-Time Low
After registering slightly higher trust last year, Americans’ confidence in the media’s ability to report “the news fully, accurately, and fairly” has returned to its previous all-time low of 40%. Americans’ trust in mass media has generally been edging downward from higher levels in the late 1990s and the early […] Read more »