John Sonnett

Climates of risk: A field analysis of global climate change in US media discourse, 1997-2004

How are industry and environmentalist discourses of climate risk related to dominant scientific and political discourses? This study operationalizes Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic capital in order to map dimensions of risk description and prescription onto a journalistic field of industry, environmentalist, scientific, and political media. Results show that conventional definitions of risk mirror an opposition between scientific and political discourses. Prescriptions for action on risk are partly autonomous from definitions however. Environmentalist and scientific media feature more proactive discourse, and industry and political media feature more reactive discourse. Implications for future research on climate risk and relational studies of media discourse are discussed.

Conflicting Climate Change Frames in a Global Field of Media Discourse

Reducing global emissions will require a global cosmopolitan culture built from detailed attention to conflicting national climate change frames (interpretations) in media discourse. The authors analyze the global field of media climate change discourse using 17 diverse cases and 131 frames. They find four main conflicting dimensions of difference: validity of climate science, scale of ecological risk, scale of climate politics, and support for mitigation policy. These dimensions yield four clusters of cases producing a fractured global field. Positive values on the dimensions show modest association with emissions reductions. Data-mining media research is needed to determine trends in this global field.

Speaking of Looting: An Analysis of Racial Propaganda in National Television Coverage of Hurricane Katrina

Few analyses offer statistical support for claims that news broadcasts during Hurricane Katrina propagated racist ideologies. The authors conducted a content analysis of the first week of network and cable television broadcasts from New Orleans after the hurricane made landfall. Although many hurricane victims were low-income African Americans, news of looting and other activities featured disproportionate numbers of Whites, particularly in speaking roles. In general, White journalists and sources were sympathetic toward African American victims but critical of their behavior when it did not conform to White middle-class norms. The authors believe such coverage reflects aversive racism, a subtle and conflicted form of contemporary racial animosity. Accordingly, their work revises Herman and Chomskys model of news production by considering the racial dimensions of propaganda.

Interjournalistic discourse about African Americans in television news coverage of Hurricane Katrina

This article examines how on-air conversations between journalists indicate how US television coverage of a race-related crisis can reflect racial ideology. Using critical discourse analysis, we examined interjournalistic discourse about African Americans in national network and cable news programs that aired after Hurricane Katrina reached New Orleans. While we expected conversational semantic items from conservative Fox News to reflect racial ideology, we also found such discursive elements from politically moderate and progressive news organizations such as CBS, CNN, and MSNBC. These findings are consistent with Anxiety Uncertainty Management theory, which predicts that exposure to stressors in unfamiliar settings causes individuals to think in ethnocentric, dichotomous, stereotypical ways. Our research underscores the impact of white privilege on language, communication, and news production, and the need for cultural competence training to enhance journalists’ ability to discuss racial matters with ease.

The symbolic lynching of James Meredith: a visual analysis and collective counter narrative to racial domination

The hanging of a noose on the University of Mississippi’s statue of civil rights pioneer James Meredith in February 2014 was framed by university administrators as the act of a few deviant white students, but our analysis suggests otherwise. A historical review shows the university’s long-standing resistance to meaningful change and a continuing lack of transparency following racist incidents. Visual analysis shows that the university remains saturated with monuments, place names, and other symbols of racial dominance. Narratives of marginalized people on campus, including some of the authors, reveal the corrosive effects of normalized white supremacy. The authors’ analysis suggests that, instead of an aberration, the noosing aligned the statue with the prevailing symbolic environment. This study builds bridges between sociological analysis and critical race theory and demonstrates the importance of group processes in understanding and responding to racist incidents on campuses.

Katrina Coverage in Black Newspapers Critical of Government, Mainstream Media

T JL he advocacy function of the black press is well established, reaching back to the messages of hope in the nations first black newspaper, Freedoms Journal (1827).̂ An emphasis on education and morality shaped the content of countless newspapers to follow, which sought also to provide news from a black perspective.^ Many black editors were also ministers and educators, seeking to provide hope and unity through their journalistic enterprises. A black press legacy forged by editors who struggled to publish with few resources and amid threats of violence, reached its zenith during World War II, when innovative papers such as the Ghicago Defender and Pittsburgh Gourier had their largest circulations.^ Although many scholarly studies have dwelled upon the past efforts of black newspapers to build communities, todays black press and its response to events, such as Hurricane Katrina, affecting the black community, have not been addressed in scholarship. Using Katrina as a lens, this study seeks to identify perspectives of black newspapers today and to determine their similarity with concerns of the black press historically.

People Like Us: Dominance-oriented Racial Affiliation Preferences and the White Greek System on a Southern U.S. Campus

ABSTRACT Studying in-group affiliation preferences can be a valuable tool for understanding race relations in the contemporary United States. We draw on theories of social dominance and social identity to analyze racial attitudes, as measured by the Social Distance Scale, for a subset of black and white students at the University of Mississippi. While both black and white students expressed strong in-group preference, this preference was stronger for whites than for blacks, especially for white women presently affiliated or planning to affiliate with campus Greek organizations. Social dominance orientation, a measure describing whether social inequalities are accepted and justified, mediated the greater in-group preference of many whites, especially for intimate or high-power relationships. We discuss possible individual and institutional causes for the differences we observe, and we draw implications for understanding continued self-segregation both on- and off-campus in a society that implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, espouses “color-blind” ideals.