Soviet propaganda and the neutron bomb decision

Abstract

In July 1977, newly elected President Jimmy Carter suddenly found himself confronted with a difficult neutron bomb decision. With a narrow victory in Congress, pro neutron‐bomb forces had successfully presented the President with the authority to proceed with production. Unfortunately, as the months passed, Carter failed to move swiftly with production of the neutron warheads which many NATO alliance members saw as a much needed deterrent to the Warsaw PACT'S massive armor superiority.

Confronted with mounting international and domestic opposition to the neutron weapon, Jimmy Carter, in the fall of 1977, insisted that the NATO allies officially support American production of the warheads before the United States would produce it. Spurred on by Carter's indecision and by certain NATO members’ reluctance to officially support the weapon, the Soviet Union shifted its propaganda machine into high gear in a massive effort to sway international opinion against the weapon.

During the first few months of 1978, Western Europe saw a flood of protests against this so‐called “inhumane” weapon. Domestic communist and left‐wing socialist opposition to the neutron bomb precipitated a precarious right‐left split within many Western European socialist parties. Nowhere was this split more graphically illustrated than within the ruling West German Social Democratic Party (SPD). Chancellor Helmut Schmidt and his moderate technocrats basically favored the neutron bomb, but feared crippling left‐wing SPD opposition and possible defections if West Germany complied with American demands to break with over 30 years of U.S.‐West German nuclear precedent and agree officially to American production of a nuclear weapon, the neutron bomb.

Only after much American cajoling did the allies move toward official NATO support for production. Carter had failed to understand the disastrous political implications which left‐wing opposition had created within the NATO countries and refused to let Schmidt and other leaders off the hook. And then in an amazing move, after Schmidt and the NATO allies had risked political ruin to reach an agreement to support the neutron bomb, President Carter pulled the rug from under them on April 7,1978, when he indefinitely delayed a decision on the weapon.

With this decision, Carter had set a dangerous precedent by yielding to Soviet pressure and had missed an opportunity to win the favor of skeptical NATO allies and critics who asserted he was too weak and indecisive. But above all, Carter had unnecessarily alienated and angered NATO leaders like Schmidt who risked possible political ruin by supporting the neutron bomb.     

A Matter of Context: A Comparative Study of Media Environments and News Consumption Gaps in Europe

Research has shown that individual-level characteristics such as socioeconomic status and political interest are becoming more important as predictors of news consumption in a rapidly changing media environment. Despite this general trend, this article argues that the importance of individual-level predictors of news consumption varies between national media environments. We use extensive survey data from 16 European countries and multilevel modeling in order to investigate both contextual-level and cross-level effects on news consumption. The results show that media environment characteristics have additional effects on news consumption beyond the effects of individual-level characteristics such as education and political interest, but also moderating impacts on these individual-level predictors of news consumption. More specifically, national media environments characterized by higher levels of newspaper-centrism are related to smaller gaps in newspaper reading between those with high and low levels of education and political interest. Lower degrees of newspaper-centrism are, on the other hand, related to a weaker “lower-class bias” of television news and larger gaps in news consumption between those with and without high political interest. These findings are discussed in light of previous research on news consumption, knowledge, and participation gaps as well as cross-national comparative research.     

Notes on recent articles

An increasing number of studies in political communication focus on the “sentiment” or “tone” of news content, political speeches, or advertisements. This growing interest in measuring sentiment coincides with a dramatic increase in the volume of digitized information. Computer automation has a great deal of potential in this new media environment. The objective here is to outline and validate a new automated measurement instrument for sentiment analysis in political texts. Our instrument uses a dictionary-based approach consisting of a simple word count of the frequency of keywords in a text from a predefined dictionary. The design of the freely available Lexicoder Sentiment Dictionary (LSD) is discussed in detail here. The dictionary is tested against a body of human-coded news content, and the resulting codes are also compared to results from nine existing content-analytic dictionaries. Analyses suggest that the LSD produces results that are more systematically related to human coding than are results based on the other available dictionaries. The LSD is thus a useful starting point for a revived discussion about dictionary construction and validation in sentiment analysis for political communication.     

Press Secretaries,Journalists, and Editors: Shaping Local Congressional News Coverage

The news media plays a key role in American democracy, often serving as the primary means by which voters learn about their elected representatives. However, the news media varies in its coverage of representatives, presenting voters with more frequent and favorable information about some House members than others, which may in turn influence voters' decisions at the polls. Although many scholars have examined the determinants of congressional news coverage, few have focused on the role of the actors who perhaps exert the most direct effect on such coverage: congressional press secretaries, journalists, and editors. In this study, I explore the influence of these actors on the tone and frequency of local congressional news coverage. I rely on data from two sources: (a) a content analysis of newspaper coverage of 100 representatives during the month prior to the 2006 election and (b) in-depth interviews with 51 congressional press secretaries and 22 journalists. These sets of data illustrate the important roles of both newspaper staff and congressional press secretaries in shaping the coverage House members receive. I conclude by discussing the implications of the findings for U.S. representatives and their constituents.     

The Path to Political Substance: Exploring the Mediated Discourse Surrounding Controversial Media Texts

This article proceeds from the assumption that entertainment texts—particularly controversial ones—function in a broad intertextual field and that their political significance does not lie solely in their value as stand-alone texts, or in their direct influence on political knowledge, attitudes, opinions, and behaviors, but in their ability to instigate politically relevant discussions in other media venues. Focusing on the mediated discourse surrounding two controversial U.S. docudramas, The Reagans and The Path to 9/11, this study examines the political qualities of the public discourse surrounding these docudramas in the U.S. news media and investigates which factors were significant predictors of political substance in this discourse. Based on a distinction between “issue substance” and “media substance” as the two major types of political substance that emerge in the discourse surrounding controversial texts, the analysis demonstrates how these types of political substance varied across the two docudramas and across various dimensions of the discourse, among them the time in which the discussion took place. The analytical framework presented in this article is offered as a platform for future examinations of the contribution of media-centered political scandals to public discourse, the conditions under which entertainment texts spur substantive political discussions, and the complex interactions between journalism, entertainment, and politics in contemporary media environments.     

Product counterfeiting and the media: examining news sources used in the construction of product counterfeiting as a social problem

Product counterfeiting has received increased attention due to its economic and public health impact. Media framing of product counterfeiting shapes how the public and policymakers understand the problem. While there is a large body of literature examining crime and the media generally, empirical studies have yet to focus on the media construction of product counterfeiting. This study presents the results of a content analysis using a random sample of newspaper articles referencing product counterfeiting in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal from 2000 to 2009. Articles were coded for common patterns in sources of information. While the results indicate the presence of a wide variety of themes, product types, and industries, government and business sources are overrepresented among the sources cited, leading to some level of consistency in the presentation of the impact of and appropriate responses to product counterfeiting. Implications for understanding how the public and policymakers understand product counterfeiting are discussed.     

促进出版传媒企业快速发展的思考——以打造“双百亿”广西出版传媒集团为例

打造"双百亿"出版传媒集团是当下各省(自治区、市)文化跨越式发展的重要举措。文章分析了打造广西"双百亿"出版传媒集团的可行性、优势和困难,提出政府应统筹规划积极支持打造广西"双百亿"出版传媒集团;接通出版发行产业链;将集团上市工作列入政府工作规划之中;以重大项目的培育与实施,支撑和推动大型文化企业的快速发展;在北京建立广西出版中心;打造一支过硬出版传媒队伍;政府应加大对文化产业的资金及政策扶持等建议。     

Los poderes fácticos mediáticos y el surgimiento del Estado híbrido en México

The process of institutional overlapping that developed in Mexico between formal traditional constitutional powers and mass electronic technologies, which gradually attained factual positions in the second half of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, changed the nature and basic governing functions of the national State. Thus, mass media power gave rise to a novel mixing phenomenon that generated a new type of “hybrid State”. The corresponding new historical Republic with a highly political and media oriented nature modified the structure and scenario of the conventional contemporary nation state. The evolution of this historical reality has not yet come to an end, but instead continues to develop with an enormous amount of dynamism and force towards new stages of transformation of the State, public space, and society as a whole, without knowing its final outcome due to the strengthening of factual media power while the major branches of government are gradually weakening. Consequently, society needs to critically engage in an objective analysis of this strategic phenomenon, its phases of transformation and the viable alternatives for recovering the national development path.