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Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Of Corporate Media Framing of Political Rhetoric: The Creation of a Moral Panic in the wake of September 11th 2001 John Paul Mason Thesis submitted to the faculty of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science In Sociology James E. Hawdon, Chair Dale W. Wimberley Anastasia S. Yogt Yuan September 4, 2009 Blacksburg, Virginia Keywords: moral panic theory, 9/11, terrorism, social solidarity, corporate media Corporate Media Framing of Political Rhetoric: The Creation of a Moral Panic in the wake of September 11th 2001 John Paul Mason ABSTRACT The purpose of this study is to examine the rhetoric and subsequent media framing of President George W. Bush during the years following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and how such frames have been able to generate and sustain a national moral panic. While a number of scholars have explored the effect of presidential rhetoric in generating panic (53; Cohen 1972; Goode and Ben-Yehuda 1994; Hawdon 2001; Kappeler and Kappeler 2004), none have evaluated the effect of media framing on such rhetoric. This study will use three major sources of data: (1) National Public Opinion Data from Gallup Poll, (2) daily USA Today news articles, and (3) rates of international terrorism from the U.S. State Department. Employing a content analysis of USA Today articles pertaining to terrorism, I will evaluate the relevant themes used by the corporate media to frame the Bush administration’s rhetoric, and further analyze the relationship between such rhetoric and the collective conscience across the eight years of the Bush presidency, while controlling for rates of international terrorism. Table of Contents ABSTRACT iii Table of Contents iii List of Figures iv List of Tables v Chapter 1: Statement of the Problem and Introduction 1 Section 1.1: Statement of the Problem 1 Section 1.2: Introduction 1 Chapter 2: Review of the Literature: 4 Section 2.1: From Durkheim to Simmel: Social Solidarity and Group Conflict 4 Section 2.2: Terrorism as a Social Construct 11 Section 2.3: Moral Panics and the Consumption of Fear 19 Section 2.4: Corporate Media Framing of Political Rhetoric 23 Chapter 3: Elaboration, Approach and Methods 27 Section 3.1: Review and Elaboration 27 Section 3.2: Definitions and Propositions 30 Section 3.3: Data Collection 38 Section 3.4: Content Analysis 43 Section 3.5: Statistical Analysis 45 Chapter 4: Findings and Discussion 50 Section 4.1: Moral Panic Theory Tested 50 Section 4.2: Corporate Media Framing of Presidential Rhetoric 68 Section 4.3: The Impact of Corporate Media Framing on Political-Social Solidarity 80 Chapter 5: Discussion and Conclusion 86 Appendix A: Gallup Poll Questions 104 Appendix B: Created Indices and Factor Loadings 106 Appendix C: Methodology for the Conference Board Consumer Confidence Survey 108 iii List of Figures Figure 3.1: Gannett Company’s Interlocking Directorates as of 2004 29 Figure 3.2: Trend Plot of Severe Terrorist Incidents, General Terrorism Database (GTD) and Worldwide Incidents Tracking System (WITS), 2001 - 2008 42 Figure 4.1: Volatility Trend Plot - The Number of USA Today Articles per Month and per Day 51 Figure 4.2: Means Plot Articles per Day by Four Month Time Period 52 Figure 4.3: Combined Trend and Means plot of Respondents Who Say Terrorism is the Most Important Problem Facing the Nation (2001 – 2008) 54 Figure 4.4: Trend Plot of the Likelihood of Further Acts of Terrorism in the United States Over the Next Several Weeks 56 Figure 4.5: Crosstabulation of Hostile and/or Brutalizing Rhetoric by Time Period 59 Figure 4.6: Means Plot of Responds Who Say Immigration Levels Should Decrease 60 Figure 4.7: Percentage of Anti-Islamic Hate Crimes Victims of Total Religious Motivated Hate Crime Victims, Uniform Crime Report Hate Crime Statistics, 2005 - 2007 61 Figure 4.8: Trend Plot of Severe Terrorist Incidents Worldwide, per Month, 2001 - 2008 65 Figure 4.9: Trend Plot, Number of USA Today Articles, Number of Anti-U.S. Attacks, Number of Worldwide Incidents, and Number of Severe Terrorist Incidents, 1981-2008 66 Figure 4.10: Crosstabulation of Disproportional Media Claims by Time Period 67 Figure 4.11: Crosstabulation of Communitarian Media Frames by Time Period 71 Figure 4.12: Crosstabulation of Media Frames of Proactive Political Rhetoric by Time Period 74 Figure 4.13: Trend Plot of Media Framing of Proactive and Reactive Policy, 2001 -2008 75 Figure 4.14: Crosstabulation of Individualistic Media Frames by Time Period 77 Figure 4.15: Trend Plot of Communitarian and Individualistic Corporate Media Frames, 2001- 2008 79 Figure 4.16: Crosstabulation of Media Frames of Reactive Political Rhetoric by Time Period 80 Figure 4.17: Trend Plot of Presidential Approval and Satisfaction with the Way Things Are Going in the United States, over Time 81 Figure 4.18: Trend Plot of Presidential Approval Scale, National Satisfaction Scale, and Political Solidarity Scale, Over Time 82 iv List of Tables Table 4.1: Computed Odds Ratio of Percent of Population Worried to % of Population Killed in a Terrorist Attack by Year 63 Table 4.2: Regression of Solidarity Index^ on Communitarianism and Individualism Indices, Controlling for Consumer Confidence Index and Severe Terrorist Incidents 84 Table B.1: Factor Loadings and Variable Descriptions of Communitarianism Index 106 Table B.2 Factor Loadings and Variable Descriptions of Individualism Index 107 v Chapter 1: Statement of the Problem and Introduction “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaida, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped, and defeated.”1 Section 1.1: Statement of the Problem The purpose of this study is to examine the rhetoric and subsequent media framing of President George W. Bush during the years following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and how such frames have been able to generate and sustain a national moral panic. While a number of scholars have explored the effect of presidential rhetoric in generating panic (53; Cohen 1972; Goode and Ben-Yehuda 1994; Hawdon 2001; Kappeler and Kappeler 2004), none have evaluated the effect of media framing on such rhetoric. This study will use three major sources of data: (1) National Public Opinion Data from Gallup Poll, (2) daily USA Today news articles, and (3) rates of international terrorism from the U.S. State Department. Employing a content analysis of USA Today articles pertaining to terrorism, I will evaluate the relevant themes used by the corporate media to frame the Bush administration’s rhetoric, and further analyze the relationship between such rhetoric and the collective conscience across the eight years of the Bush presidency, while controlling for rates of international terrorism. Section 1.2: Introduction Immediately after the 9/11 attacks, a slew of politicians, religious leaders, terrorism “experts,” academics, and other social commentators engaged in a claims-making frenzy surrounding the apparent causes, motives, appropriate responses, and future socio-political implications that these attacks would have for the United States and the world. The American people were told that terrorism was the single greatest threat to humanity, and indeed, that 1 President George W. Bush, address to Joint Session of Congress, 20 September 2001 1 “freedom and fear are at war.” In a September 20th 2001 address to Congress and the American people, President Bush asserted “the advance of human freedom -- the great achievement of our time, and the great hope of every time -- now depends on us.” Invoking a sort of divine calling, President Bush continued, “our nation -- this generation -- will lift a dark threat of violence from our people and our future.”2 This new “calling of our generation” is reminiscent of attempts by Reagan to garnish support for the “War on Drugs” in the mid to late 1980’s (Hawdon 2001). In the weeks, months and years following the attacks on New York City and Washington D.C., the United States waged two wars, enacted various laws and provisions, created new governmental organizations designed to deal with a new and “dangerous” threat, and restricted various civil liberties; all of this was, and still is, justified as an offensive means of defending the United States against future terrorist attacks, and a way of spreading democracy and peace throughout the world. I will begin by addressing relevant themes in the structural-functionalist literature regarding social solidarity and the implications of group antagonism for boundary maintenance. From this perspective, we can then examine how an event like 9/11 is capable of inflating levels of social solidarity and bolstering the collective conscience. As such, we will examine the dynamics of group boundary maintenance as it relates to a two-directional process of in-group glorification and out-group deviantization. I then turn to a discussion of the social construction of the concept “terrorism.” I argue that terrorism is a form of “self-help” (Black 2004) employed by individuals or groups as a form of “social control.” I then make the argument that what we today understand as “terrorism” does not have a socio-historic existence sui generis; instead, “terrorism” has emerged as a highly politicized category containing various meanings and interpretations afforded the concept by those in a position of power able to do so. By situating 2 http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010920-8.html 2 such acts of “terror” as a socially constructed phenomenon sensitive to the politicized and historic milieu in which the concept is reified as “good vs. evil,” we are better able to analyze the effects that various forms of political rhetoric, claims-making, and corporate media framing has on large social forces.
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