Polling, media discourse, and the construction of ignorance: Public opinion formation and the Bush tax cuts
Item
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Title
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Polling, media discourse, and the construction of ignorance: Public opinion formation and the Bush tax cuts
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Identifier
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d_2009_2013:6ba657c1069d:10570
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identifier
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10819
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Creator
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Crum, Martha,
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Contributor
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Janet Gornick | Robert Y. Shapiro
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Date
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2010
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Language
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English
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Publisher
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City University of New York.
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Subject
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Social structure | Political science | Public policy | Bush tax cuts | media framing | political ignorance | public opinion | public sphere
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Abstract
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The advent of polling brought anticipation of renewed government accountability as well as concerns that powerful interests would use the power of mass media to subvert public opinion's emancipatory potential. When early models of public opinion manipulation did not stand up to empirical scrutiny, its study took a decidedly technocratic turn. Critiques of public opinion today tend to be either so fundamental that they suggest its study is moot or so technical that it is difficult to see the larger substantive implications for public opinion formation. We know that public opinion on many issues is "irrational" in the sense that a more informed public would be, quite literally, a public of a different mind. At the same time, we know that mass media exerts a substantial influence over how the public thinks about issues.;In this case study of public opinion and the Bush tax cuts, I take a comprehensive and integrated look at public opinion formation in order to identify the multiple processes by which its emancipatory potential is suppressed. These processes include the news media's public opinion producing practices, its public opinion consuming practices, and its issue reporting practices. Rarely are these three dimensions of the public sphere analyzed together on a particular issue. I argue that the public was not as supportive of the tax cuts as conventional wisdom supposed; that ignorance dampened oppositional opinion; that values were more central to opinion formation than self interest yet the unwillingness of the media to challenge the Bush administration's economic framing and its own propensity to frame the tax cuts as a political issue resulted in a severely curtailed media discourse, devoid of content or context on the tax policy itself. This socially constructed ignorance prevented people from being able to connect their policy preferences with their political values.
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Type
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dissertation
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Source
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2009_2013.csv
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degree
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Ph.D.
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Program
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Sociology
