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Drawing predominately on a once-a-day Google News Alert for newspaper coverage of the "bird flu," this study examines global discourses on this topic in terms of alarming and reassuring coverage. Three stages of discourse are identified. The first is termed sounding the alarm, where fearful claims making predominates. The second is mixed messages, and involves a continuation of the threat with efforts to moderate it with elements of reassurance, including scientific promises and national plans to combat bird flu. The third stage is hot crisis and containment, and involves efforts to undo the most frightful elements of the avian mutation interpretative package as the H5N1 virus spreads into Europe. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the persistence and intensification of ignorance in the ostensible knowledge society. Given the ubiquity of ignorance, it focuses on research and observations dealing with functional knowledge deficits that challenge the ideal of the well-informed citizen. These developments are traced back to the contradictory dynamics of the knowledge society, specifically information explosions in the knowledge economy and the resultant knowledge–ignorance paradox. The theoretical unfolding of this paradox in terms of entry and speech barriers suggests that pockets of observed public knowledge – rather than ignorance – are exceptional and require specific explanation. While ignorance among individuals, as well as experts and organizations, is a serious social problem with potentially deadly consequences, ignorance remains relatively unrecognized since it has major liabilities as a marketable issue. The conclusion points to the importance of future research on the cultural and institutional production of ignorance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the knowledge society metaphor is an uncritical transposition from the knowledge economy. It examines three different approaches to the former. These include the idea of the well-informed citizen, the institutional arrangements and social expectations for being knowledgeable, and the role of the Internet in providing critical underpinnings of a knowledge society. All three approaches are found to be seriously deficient. The paper suggests that a knowledge-aversive culture may be a better metaphor, as the social processes creating a high degree of knowledge specialization in the workplace may serve to increase ignorance in the broader society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper compares moral panic with the potential political catastrophes of a risk society. The aim of the comparison is threefold: 1. to establish the position of risk society threats alongside more conventional moral panics; 2. to examine the conceptual shifts that accompany the new types of threats; and 3. to outline the changing research agenda. The paper suggests that as new sites of social anxiety have emerged around environmental, nuclear, chemical and medical threats, the questions motivating moral panic research have lost much of their utility. Conceptually, it examines how the roulette dynamics of the risk society accidents expose hidden institutional violations that redound into 'hot potatoes' that are passed among and fumbled by various actors. Changing conceptions of folk devils, claims making activities, and of a safety are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents information on a study which determined if the sense of strange weather is accompanied by shifts in the amount of media coverage devoted to extreme weather events. Data and results; Extreme weather event index for television; Network coverage of global warming; Possible effects of television coverage of extreme events; Conclusions.

Evaluates the factors determining the level of tolerance of first year university students and faculty in the United States for gender-based humor and their implication to the acceptability of such humor in the family, academe and society. Implication to shifting gender relations; Discussion on theories about the role of humor; Lesser acceptability gender-based jokes by faculty.

The article argues that attitude is an invalid predictor for behavior in the issue of environmental protection. This paper contends that the environment is a domain in which attitudes do not predict behaviors very well. After reviewing evidence of low association, the author argues that the findings are not a result of poor methodology. Rather, the environment is a synthetic macro-category that does not fulfil any of the three criteria that are necessary for strong associations between attitudes and behavior. The paper goes on to argue that the attitude-behavior model misconceives the social structural basis of most environmental impacts and should be replaced with a more macro approach that focuses on collective actions. To this end, the author reconceptualizes environmental public opinion so that its potential impact on political debates can be addressed. With the amount of research devoted to environmental attitudes and attitude change, one might expect that these would be modestly if not strongly related to behavior.

This article explores the employment of the elements of civil religion to legitimate the American development of and reliance on atomic weapons. The nuclear monopoly was viewed as a `sacred trust,' the result of the United States' uniqueness and proof of its special destiny. As the claim of the U.S. to uniqueness was undermined before the whole world, the nation's special destiny was associated particularly with its technological superiority. It is argued that the absence of a similar civil religion in Canada tied to the bomb helps account for the different Canadian response to the Soviet nuclear threat. Where the priestly mode of civil religion is celebratory, affirmative and culture building, the prophetic mode is challenging and judgmental. It is virtually impossible to establish direct causal connections between civil religion and the unfolding of the arms race. However, connections between the two can be established by two indirect means. The plausibility of the civil religion-arms race link can be further enhanced by an understanding of the difference between Canadian and American responses to the Soviet threat. Nuclear censorship replaced the free exchange of scientific information, and the public was left largely uninformed about a device that seemed impossible to understand.

This article extends recent work on the public arenas approach to social problems (Hilgartner and Bosk 1988) by examining changes in audience receptiveness to claims- making activities. Scientists' claims about global warming lulled to attract much public attention until the extraordinary heat and drought of the "summer of '88" created a social ware. That is, environmental claims arc most likely to be honored-and accelerate demands in the political arena-when they piggyback on dramatic real-world events. The dynamics of this social problem over time reveal that both demand attenuation and issue redirection processes have diminished global warming's standing as a "celebrity" social problem. Social scares hold potential importance for prospective social problems that revolve around new technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an argument on the generalized fear of the Soviet threat punctuated by moral panics provided a signal impetus to the arms race. Growth of the American nuclear arsenal; Role of panics unleashed by Soviet challenges to American nuclear hegemony; Provision of political leverage for large-scale nuclear buildups.

This study examines some well-known attributional tendencies in a unique situation. Specifically, it examines attributions for the unexpected fall of a Canadian hero, Ben Johnson, who was stripped of his Olympic gold medal for the use of anabolic steroids. The results reveal a reversal of the fundamental attributional bias and the use of base rate information in observers' attributions. The findings are interpreted and discussed in terms of Pyszczynski and Greenberg's (1987) biased hypothesis-testing model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Expanding the traditional question of how and why the bomb was built when it was. this paper asks how socio-historical factors influenced the reception of the bomb in the West. It suggests that the bomb was received as the 'winning weapon' and that this view of it was linked to two historical factors: the Great Collapse, which undermined belief in historical progress and threatened the survival of the democracies: and the failure of balancing, the inability of the democracies, for a number of sociopolitical reasons, to act in their own collective security. As the winning weapon, the bomb was expected to overcome these problems. More broadly, the analysis suggests that when collective actions do not appear capable of redressing persistent threats, then leaders tend to invest their faith in technological panaceas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on the sociology of moral panic, this paper argues that the media will shift from alarming to reassuring coverage when a `hot crisis' portends a possible grass root panic. To determine whether this moderation effect follows from dread-inspiring events that are developing in unpredictable and potentially threatening ways, the paper compares newspaper and magazine coverage of emerging diseases with their coverage of Ebola Zaire. The results reveal that the mutation-contagion package, with its frightful account of emerging diseases, was quickly abandoned and subverted during the Ebola epidemic. In its place, the media fashion a containment package that uses a strategy of 'othering' to allay the fear. The conclusion discusses the flexibility in the tool kits used by the media to frame events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article applies the gender-based attribution theory to the Canadian track athlete Ben Johnson's loss his gold medal for using a banned performance-enhancing steroid. Attribution theories have largely ignored the effects of gender or sought cross-situational predictions for the foci of men's and women's attributions. A theoretical position that sheds light on gender and attributions is that of differential moral development of men and women. Sociologist C. Gilligan claimed that in Western societies mother-centered early socialization leads to a rule-and-rationality based morality in men that maximizes self-interest. In contrast, women learn to emphasize relationships, and their ensuing morality is empathic, responsive to others' needs, and sensitive to context-specific circumstances. Thus, attributions of' the two sexes may be due to the fact that men resolve moral dilemmas through an instrumental and women through a socio-emotionai logic that Gililgan called the ethic of care.