Instances of Threat Headlines in Major Newspapers Before and After a Presidential Election
Saddam Hussein, during his regime, employed thousands of people whose assignment was to seek out and report impending threats to the government, in order to use those threats in propaganda methods. The red scare in the United States succeeded in coercing the American people into ignoring the first amendment of the constitution and approving the Espionage Act, a law that made it illegal to speak out against the government. The violent leaders of the Taliban were welcomed into power by the people of Afghanistan because a violent government was preferable to the chaos and fear of civil war. In the present study, newspaper headlines were searched for words that implied a direct threat on the United States.
Papers were searched before and after the elections of President George W. Bush and President William J. Clinton. It was hypothesized that threat words in headlines would be significantly more numerous before an election than after because of the theory that perceived threat will make a population more likely to follow a leader that promises to rid them of those threats. Threat Headlines were hypothesized to be more numerous in the first presidential term than the second because a candidate without experience would need to rely on methods alternative to historical track-record in order to acquire the trust of the population. It was also hypothesized that threat headlines would be more numerous during the presidency of George Bush because of general media sentiment implying the reliance of President Bush on propaganda methods.
The Social Identity Theory (Tajfel & Turner 1971) was developed to understand how individuals identify with social groups and how they relate to groups outside their own. A main component of the Social Identity Theory states that we have an innate need to categorize in order to simplify our complex world. Therefore it follows that one of the best ways to control a population of people is to instill in those people a common goal or a common enemy. Categorizing groups of people into an out-group and an in-group automatically changes our understanding of these groups into us vs. them. (Tajfel & Turner 1971) Another element of the Social Identity Theory states that the more we compare our own in-group to an out-group the more we favor aspects of our own, including the government, the military and its leaders. (Greene 2004)
It follows that as a general election tactic it would be logical to assume that the more threat an electing population feels, the more they will want to vote for the leader promising freedom from that threat, thus raising the occurrence of threatening propaganda methods in the months before a presidential election. According to the ideas of the Social Identity Theory, threatening newspaper headlines would increase feelings of categorization and the us vs. them mentality. Another main idea within the Social Identity Theory is the idea of out-group derogation. Out-group derogation occurs when an out-group is looked upon negatively because of the fact that they are not part of the in-group, and therefore not able to be related to. With out-group derogation, something that may be looked upon as a good trait in the in-group would be looked upon as negative in the out-group. I.E. the in-group is creative while the out-group is crafty. (Costarelli 2004)
Portraying specific groups of non-Americans as a threat to the United States would serve to further solidify our social identity and would create in-group favoritism and out-group derogation in the U.S. population. It follows that the U.S. would therefore see the outside groups as people to be feared and treated as less than human. Social Identity also has a strong link to perception of a leader. According to a study done by Michael J Platow and Dann Van Knippenberg on the effects of in-group leader prototypicality, leaders that clearly favored the in-group maintained the strongest endorsements from people who highly identified with the in-group. The overall endorsement level for a leader was found to be dependent upon the level of social identification found within the endorsing group member. (Knippenberg & Platow 2000)
Consequently, the more an out-group is portrayed as a threat to U.S. security, the more we tend to mentally separate the groups and the more we will support strong leaders such as the government and the current president that clearly practice in-group favoritism. In a political journal, linguist and political theorist Noam Chomsky discussed the difference between the American opinion on the Iraq war and the opinions of the rest of the world. The campaign about Iraq took off last September. It had a couple of constant themes. One big lie was that Iraq was an imminent threat to the security of the United States. We have got to stop them now or theyre going to destroy us tomorrow. The second big lie was that Iraq was behind September 11. Nobody says it straight out; its kind of insinuated. Take a look at the polls. They reflected the propaganda very directly. By September and since then, roughly 60 percent, oscillating around that, of the population believes that Iraq is a threat to our security. (Chomsky as cited in David Barsamiam 2003)
The Terror Management Theory (Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Solomon, 1997) is another way to explain why fear can make an individual more likely to blindly follow a leader, and why propaganda methods would be used more frequently during times before a presidential election. The Terror Management Theory is a psychological theory, rooted in the ideas of existentialism. The theory states that humans are in constant fear of death and that many of the choices we make are influenced by this fear. According to Terror Management, culture can subdue this fear of death by providing meaning and structure for the people who choose to reject dissonance and follow cultural expectations. In addition to the structure a person receives from participating in cultural standards, there is also the potential for symbolic immortality and permanence. Going along with the ideas and values of a culture will provide a feeling of security and freedom from death. (Winerman 2005) When looking at the combined historical evidence, Terror Management Theory, and Social Identity Theory, it is clear that there is a very direct and measurable correlation between perceived threat on a population and approval of a leader. Instilling fear, perception of threat and an us vs. them attitude will always be one of the easiest ways to gain control over a population. METHOD Materials 101 newspaper threat headlines were gathered using Lexus-Nexus. The newspapers searched were The Boston Globe, Chicago Sun Times, Los Angeles Times, New York Times, and the Seattle Times. Procedures A headline search was run on Lexus Nexus looking for threat words in each of the five newspapers. The three combinations of threat words that were put into the search engine were threat, American threat, America and threat, U.S. The dates of newspaper headlines that were searched were broken up into three categories; who was president at the time (Bush or Clinton), what presidential term (first or second) and whether the search headlines were before or after the date of the election in question. When searching headlines before or after an election, the dates searched were 6 months before and 6 months after the date of the election. RESULTS The Hypothesis that threat headlines were used more frequently during the Bush presidency than in the Clinton presidency was tested by submitting the frequency of threat mentioned to a Chi square test. As predicted, Bush (64%) was associated with more threats than Clinton (32%), X2 (1) = 12.12, P < .001. The hypothesis that threat headlines were more frequent before an election than after was analyzed by a second Chi square test. Before election threats (59%) while more numerous were not statistically significant compared with after election threats (40%) X2 (1) = 3.574, P > .001. The hypothesis that threat headlines would be more numerous in the first term (65%) than after (34%) was tested by the third Chi square test. As predicted, term one (65%) was associated with more threat headlines than term two (34%) X2 (1) = 9.51, P < .001 DISSCUSSION It was hypothesized that threat words in headlines would be significantly more numerous before an election than after because of the theory that perceived threat will make a population more likely to follow a leader that promises to rid them of those threats. There would be many ways to improve this study one of which would be searching the headlines before and after the elections of more than two presidents. Raising the number of presidents would eliminate potential threats to internal validity such as history confounds that could change the number of threat headlines depending on the things that were happening in the world at the time of data collection. Another way to get better results would be to search more newspapers and perhaps do the study in other democratic countries. This would improve the study because the larger a sample the more accurately it can be generalized to the population without a threat to external validity. One confound that could potentially be present in the study is the fact that all searching of headlines stopped on February 24, 2006. This is 3 months before the designated 6 month searching period would be over for the second term of President Bush. However, the data shows that even without the missing months, Bush has significantly more threat headlines than Clinton. Another potential confound that could have made a large difference in the comparison of Clinton to Bush is the fact that the World Trade Center attacks occurred during Bushs presidency. This confound could be corrected by raising the number of presidential elections searched. Even though the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center will confound the comparison of president to president threat numbers, the comparison between threat number before an election and after an election and the comparison of threat numbers between terms would still be relevant. REFERENCES Barsamiam, D. 2003. Collateral Language. Z Magazine. vol 16 Cambridge: South End Press Costarelli, S. 2004. Social Identity Threat and Experienced Affect: The Distinct Roles of Intergroup Attributions and Social Identification. Current Research in Social Psychology. Department of Cognitive Sciences and Education: University of Trento, Italy Greenberg, J. & Pyszczynski, T. & Solomon. S. 1997. Terror Management Theory of Self-Esteem and Social Behavior: Empirical Assessments and Conceptual Refinements. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 29 (pp. 61-139). New York: Academic Press. Greene, S. 2004. Social Identity Theory and Party Identification. Social Science Quarterly Vol 85(1) 136-153 United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishing Knippenberg, D.V. & Platow, M. 2000. A Social Identity Analysis of Leadership Endorsement: The Effects of Leader In-group Prototypicality and Distributive Intergroup Fairness. La Trobe University, Australia Tajfel, H., & Turner. J. 1971 The Social Identity Theory of Inter-Group Behavior. Psychology of Intergroup Relations. Chicago: Nelson-Hall. Winerman, L. 2005. The Politics of Mortality. Monitor on Psychology vol 36 (pp. 32).
