Paul Achter

Exploration of the impact of messages about genes and race on lay attitudes

The effect of messages about genetics on lay audiences was assessed through an experimental study that exposed participants (n = 96) to a Public Service Announcement about race, genes, and heart disease. Participants who received a message that specified either ‘Whites’ or ‘Blacks’ as the subject of the message demonstrated elevated levels of racism, genetic basis for racism, and one dimension of genetic discrimination as compared to those receiving a version of the message with no race specification or in a no‐message control condition. The presentation of such messages to the public is not recommended until additional research clarifies this finding and perhaps describes mitigating vocabularies or approaches.

Informed lay preferences for delivery of racially varied pharmacogenomics

Objectives To understand public perceptions and opinions of three options for prescribing medicine: individualized genetic testing, race-based prescription, and traditional prescription.Methods Focus groups in urban, suburban, and rural communities over-sampled for minority groups conducted from February through April, 2001 in Georgia.Results Group members (N = 102) identified individualized genetic testing as providing the best quality of care (60% of talk turns; 75% in postdiscussion anonymous survey), but stipulated the need for protection from the invasion of privacy, discrimination, and prohibitive cost. Most individuals chose genetic testing because it provided individualized attention, and African-Americans indicated they would choose genetic testing even if the costs were high. Overall, individuals were suspicious of race-based prescription. Analyses for degree of suspicion revealed a main effect for race and an interaction effect for race and gender.Conclusions If issues of cost, discrimination, and privacy are addressed, lay individuals prefer genetic testing as the basis for prescription of medicines that exhibit racially patterned response variation.

Comedy in Unfunny Times: News Parody and Carnival After 9/11

Comedy has a special role in helping societies manage crisis moments, and the U.S. media paid considerable attention to the proper role of comedy in public culture after the 9/11 tragedies. As has been well documented, many popular U.S. comic voices were paralyzed in trying to respond to 9/11 or disciplined by audiences when they did. Starting with these obstacles in mind, this essay analyzes early comic responses to 9/11, and particularly those of the print and online news parody The Onion, as an example of how “fake” news discourse could surmount the rhetorical chill that fell over public culture after the tragedies. By exposing the news as “mere” production and by setting an agenda for learning about Islamic culture and Middle East politics, The Onion avoided violating decorum and invited citizen participation. This kind of meta-discourse was crucial after 9/11, when shifting rules for decorum created controversy and as official voices in government and media honed frames and narratives for talking about the attacks.

Evaluating Direct-to-Consumer Marketing of Race-Based Pharmacogenomics: A Focus Group Study of Public Understandings of Applied Genomic Medication

Some medical providers have advocated applied genomics, including the use of genetically linked racial phenotypes in medical practice, raising fear that race-based medication will become justified. As with other emerging medical genetic technologies, pharmaceutical companies may advertise these treatments. Researchers fear that consumers will uncritically accept pharmaceutical messages and demand the product. In this exploratory study, we examined public reactions to advertisements for applied genomic medications. A focus group methodology was employed. Participants tended to resist the message and generated warrants for doing so, indicating critical reception of the messages. Message accepters also provided warrants. Warrants for resistance and acceptance differ between self-identified racial groups. Consumers, health care providers, and pharmaceutical corporations will benefit from a better understanding of direct-to-consumer advertisements as medical communication. Our study concludes that both advocates and opponents of direct-to-consumer advertisements should recognize that potential consumers of pharmacogenomics act as critical consumers of health advertising discourse.

Unruly Bodies: The Rhetorical Domestication of Twenty-First-Century Veterans of War

Veterans of wars in Afghanistan and Iraq with visually identifiable injuries possess “unruly” bodies that render the story of war in efficient, emotional terms. The injured veterans explicit connection of war with injury motivates state and mainstream news discourse that domesticates veterans’ bodies, managing representations of injured veterans through three dominant strategies. First, dominant discourses invoke veterans’ bodies as metonymy of the nation-state at war—bodily well-being operates as a metonym for both the nations health and for the condition of the war. Second, veterans are domesticated by strategic placement in contexts that regulate their range of movement, especially amputees, who are often framed as having already overcome any limitations imposed by their war injuries. Third, dominant visual discourse domesticates veterans’ bodies by ascribing a strategic telos to them, shifting the meaning of the injuries away from their origins in state policy and toward wholeness and “normalcy.” Representations of whole-bodied and injured veterans tame the harshness of war and erode the argumentative grounds for questioning it.

Genetics, race, and crime: An audience study exploring the bell curve and book reviews

This essay employs a qualitative and quantitative audience study to explore the reception of racially controversial books, such as The Bell Curve, and their dominantly negative reviews in the popular press. Findings do not support the hypothesis that reviews increase racism by recirculating racist views under cover of disapprobrium. Instead, responses suggest that audience members can incorporate components of both genetic and environmental accounts to their prior views. Thus, relative acceptance of genetic vs. environmental accounts of human difference did not correlate with racist attitudes; rather those whites who had strong negative affect toward persons of other races appropriated both genetic and environmental accounts to bolster their racism, while both blacks and whites with more egalitarian attitudes were able to incorporate genetic accounts into their schemas. We conclude that the agenda setting effects of the book and its reviews may have encouraged a less than ideal stasis point in the debate, focusing the debate on nature vs. nurture as causative agents for individuals rather than focusing on issues of individual vs. social responsibility. We suggest further exploration of the functioning of popular book reviews and of audience interpretations of popular reception of mass mediated arguments about race.

African Americans' opinions about human-genetics research.

Abstract Background. Research on attitudes toward genetics and medicine registers skepticism among minority communities, but the reasons for this skepticism are not well known. In the past, studies linked mistrust of the medical system to historical ethics violations involving minority groups and to suspicions about ideological premise and political intent. Methods. To assess public knowledge, attitudes, and behavior regarding human-genetics research, we surveyed 858 Americans onsite in four community settings or online in a geographically nonspecific manner. Results. Compared to participants as a whole, African Americans were significantly more likely to believe that clinical trials might be dangerous and that the federal government knowingly conducted unethical research, including studies in which risky vaccines were administered to prison populations. However, African Americans were also significantly more likely to believe that the federal government worked to prevent environmental exposure to toxicants harmful to people with genetic vulnerabilities. Conclusions. Our data suggest that most Americans trust government to act ethically in sponsoring and conducting research, including genetics research, but that African Americans are particularly likely to see government as powerfully protective in some settings yet selectively disingenuous in others.

A preliminary study of how multiple exposures to messages about genetics impact on lay attitudes towards racial and genetic discrimination

Media depictions of genetics have led to concerns that this coverage will lead to increased belief in genetic determinism and increased discrimination, including racism. Previous studies of single exposures to messages about genetics or messages about genetics and race have shown some increases in discrimination and racism. Since attitude change is linked to repeated exposure to many messages, this study aimed to identify the effect of multiple exposures to multiple messages about genetics on attitudes towards determinism, discrimination and racism. Results showed an increase in genetically based racism, no increase in general racist affect and no significant increase in belief in determinism. Based on these results, we suggest that genetically based racism is a combination of racist affect with belief that perceived differences in human characteristics are solely or primarily influenced by genetics and that a move towards genetically based racism has implications for social policy.

Narrative, intertextuality, and apologia in contemporary political scandals

This study argues for a revised perspective on political apologia, using the dramatic 1990 Minnesota gubernatorial campaign as a case study. Jon Grunseth, Independent Republican candidate, was accused of sexual impropriety by several women, a situation that, predictably, eventuated in his use of apologetic strategies. However, this study argues that the failure of those strategies must be understood outside of conventional apologetic frameworks, which stress immediate material circumstances, and should instead be analyzed within a revised, narrativized, approach to apologia. This new approach emphasizes the intertextuality of scandal narratives and argues that critical understanding of Grunseths apologia must be situated within a wider web of late 1980s/early 1990s cultural discourse concerning mediated scandal, sexual infidelity, and male behavior.

TV, technology, and McCarthyism: crafting the democratic renaissance in an age of fear

One of the most watched political events in the United States at mid‐century, the Army‐McCarthy hearings coincided with the early period of the reception and evaluation of television as a force in society. Although optimistic rhetoric often attends the rise of new technologies, worries and fears about the power of television pervaded coverage of the hearings. The popular press expressed concern that Edward R. Murrow and Joseph McCarthy exercised unrivaled control over television viewers. Murrow and McCarthy became condensation symbols in a new struggle over control of the airwaves, and their highly publicized standoff established discursive rules for thinking about the power of audiences, journalists, and politicians.