Suchergebnisse

The 2011 UK riots were unusual for their apparent pointlessness. The significance of the riots was in fact their lack of obvious significance. Although critical theory is often disparaged for being unduly esoteric, recent exponents like Jean Baudrillard and Slavoj Žižek are shown to be highly useful at reaching a political understanding not present within mainstream journalism. Objective and subjective violence are concepts used in order to argue that an under-acknowledged form of violence in our society is one committed by a media that systematically displaces the deeper, underlying political causes of violence through excessive focus upon merely symptomatic outbreaks.

Explores the centrality of Holocaust footage to postwar practices of identity construction. In the immediate aftermath of WWII, Anglo American occupation authorities proposed that Germans should be compelled to view footage from the newly liberated camps. This visceral confrontation with Nazi atrocities was intended to animate a sense of collective guilt among Germans, a prerequisite to Germany's regeneration as a pacific, liberal polity. But multiple complications confronted this attempt to employ concentration camp footage in a narrative of Germanic guilt. As Allied documentarists found, not only did the camps prove resistant to cinematic representation, but German audiences appeared disinclined to accept the victors' morality so forcibly enunciated by the films. Where the documentarists saw the footage as a mirror to German culpability, many German viewers regarded compulsory exposure as a screen behind which the war's victors sheltered from acknowledgment their own wartime actions. This fraught encounter provides an emblematic example of the ways in which the Holocaust has been used to establish relational identities of barbarism & civility. Adapted from the source document.

Local TV news is the public's primary source of public affairs information. News stories about crime dominate local news programming because they meet the demand for "action news." The prevalence of this type of reporting has led to a crime narrative or "script" that includes two core elements: crime is violent & perpetrators of crime are nonwhite males. We show that this script has become an ingrained heuristic for understanding crime & race. Using a multimethod design, we assess the impact of the crime script on the viewing public. Our central finding is that exposure to the racial element of the crime script increases support for punitive approaches to crime & heightens negative attitudes about African Americans among white, but not black, viewers. In closing, we consider the implications of our results for intergroup relations, electoral politics, & the practice of journalism. 5 Tables, 54 References. Adapted from the source document.

Explores the news media's ability to activate racial attitudes via stereotypic portrayals of minorities in common local crime coverage, drawing on data from an experiment in which subjects (N = 289 adults in Los Angeles, CA) were shown no crime story, a story with nonminority suspects, or a story featuring minority suspects. President Bill Clinton's support suffered when any crime story was present, but his support was lowest among those who saw news with minority suspects. Evaluation of Clinton's performance on crime was primed powerfully by exposure to crime news, & this effect was largest when the suspects in the story were nonwhite. Spreading activation to performance on welfare, another "race-coded" issue, was also evident among those exposed to racially stereotypic crime stories. Finally, among whites, exposure to minority suspects boosted the importance of the president's concern for whites as a predictor of his overall support. Results suggest that implicitly racial issues are connected in memory & can be simultaneously activated by common news coverage. The findings prompt further consideration of the political impact of stereotype-reinforcing news. 1 Table, 5 Figures, 1 Appendix, 44 References. Adapted from the source document.