1. Characterizations of Public Opinion in Iraq War News.
- Author
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Fried, Amy
- Subjects
- *
IRAQ War, 2003-2011 , *PUBLIC opinion , *WAR , *FOREIGN news , *INTERNATIONAL cooperation on communication - Abstract
This paper examines the ways that major U.S. news magazines constructed and portrayed public opinion during the run-up to the Iraq war. Focusing on reports in Time and Newsweek, the paper focuses on the context for opinion and news coverage, the degree to which coverage of public opinion was focused and explicit to rather vague and general, and the emphasis on world opinion. Furthermore, the paper analyzes reports of present public opinion in terms of their emphasis on past, contemporaneous and future public opinion. A wave of recent scholarship on the construction of public opinion has given new insights into the place of public opinion in American democracy. (See Ginsberg; The Captive Public; Herbst, Numbered Voices; Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere; Herbst, Reading Public Opinion; Fried, Muffled Echoes; Fried and Cole, ? Talking About Public Opinion and Public Opinion Yet To Come: Media and Legislator Constructions of Public Opinion in the Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal; ?Hart et al., ?Constructing the Electorate During Presidential Campaigns;? and Jacobs and Shapiro, Politicians Don?t Pander.) This paper contributes to this research on the construction of public opinion by analyzing the ways public opinion analysis is embedded within news stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2004
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