Tough on Hate?: The Cultural Politics of Hate Crimes

Appendix: Methods and Sources

127 Appendix: Methods and Sources I arrived at this book’s claims by employing a transdisciplinary research process that integrated methods from history, sociology, American studies, and cultural studies. During this process, archival, news media, and legislative sources were gathered. Specifically, I examined internal memos from the Clinton administration and the Anti-Defamation League (ADL); conducted personal interviews with the initial architects of antihate -crime legislation, with the top administrator of MTV’s anti-hate-crime campaign, with the current legislative director at the ADL, and with several artist/activists; and sifted through legislative hearings, anti-hate-crime legislation , newspaper and news magazine articles, and transcripts of television news broadcasts. Working inductively, I systematically coded, analyzed, and interpreted all of the archival, legislative, and news media sources, as well as the personal interviews and unarchived documents first to get a feel for underlying themes and a second time to further discover nuances within these themes. As the news media analysis is the hub of the entire study, I worked with particular rigor in coding these sources. I conducted a systematically coded two-part discourse analysis of every article from the NewYorkTimes’ section A, Newsweek, and the Wall Street Journal and of transcripts from ABC, NBC, and CBS News that include the exact phrase “hate crime(s)” and are also labeled by LexisNexis under the topic heading “hate crime(s).”While earlier sources were consulted in putting together the etymology and social history, the dates of the principal study range from December 1986, when the NewYork Times first printed the phrase “hate crimes,” to May 2010.The sources studied were selected because they reached the widest audience of mainstream U.S. news consumers during the period of study and because they are word searchable on LexisNexis, except for the Wall Street Journal. I printed out a total of 1,037 stories in hard copy, organized them chronologically by source in binders, and color coded them for type of crime committed, main characters, themes, and content details. I began by noting both dominant and outlying themes. Early on in this iterative process, I identified perpetrators, victims, and the nation as central characters. Armed 128 To u g h o n H at e ? with these observations, I retraced my steps within the sources listed above and within the wider source base. During this second round of coding, I marked every story that contained a detailed description of a hate crimes perpetrator,victim,or the nation and then observed patterns across and within this more discrete source base. There are three main limitations to this approach. First, it fails to consider news sources with wide audiences that hail from a particular political position, including the powerhouse network Fox News. Second, on the opposite end of the heft spectrum, it also misses smaller-scale advocacy groups and their publications.The first and concluding chapters partially address this oversight. Third, it does not account for shifts in patterns of news consumption over the period studied. From the late 1980s through 2012, the traditional news networks studied, namely ABC, NBC, and CBS, lost viewers to the Internet and cable news networks with round-the-clock coverage, particularly CNN and the blogosphere. Disenchanted younger viewers flocked to comedy news reviews, like The Daily Show andThe Colbert Report. Given these omissions, future research on the cultural politics of hate crimes could fruitfully focus on sources that are self-consciously outside the mainstream, that broadcast via cable stations, or that publish online. A more diverse source base would likely offer a range of alternative perspectives on the problem. A comparison between liberal and conservative voices would be particularly fascinating and would likely dredge up greater inconsistencies between depictions of the problem than my study is capable of accounting for. In sum, what this study is able to conclude about mainstream cultural politics is achieved at the expense of delving into the nuances of less well publicized, more politically charged representations of the problem. ...