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C H A P T E R 5 Shot by the Messenger AN EXPERIMENTAL EXAMINATION OF THE EFFECTS OF PARTY CUES ON PUBLIC OPINION REGARDING NATIONAL SECURITY AND WAR Republican candidates have famously argued that the media are biased against their candidates, perhaps best exemplified by a popular 1992 bumper sticker reading, “Annoy the Media: Re-elect George Bush.” However , with the rise of the Fox News Channel, Democrats have mounted specific, targeted attempts to marginalize and delegitimize what they argue is a pro-Republican news outlet. For instance, in early 2007, liberal activists pressured the Nevada Democratic Party to cancel a Fox-sponsored Democratic candidate debate. In launching the successful campaign to drop Fox as a debate sponsor, liberal blogger Chris Bowers of MyDD. com argued that “instead of giving [Fox] a golden opportunity to further distort the image of Democratic presidential candidates, and instead of providing them with credibility for all of their past and future attacks against Democrats, it would be best if the Nevada Democratic Party chose a different media partner to broadcast this debate” (Bowers 2007).1 Shortly before the 2008 presidential election, in turn, then-Democratic nominee Barack Obama offered the following speculation: I am convinced that if there were no Fox News, I might be two or three points higher in the polls. If I were watching Fox News, I wouldn’t vote for me, right? Because the way I’m portrayed 24/7 is as a freak! I am the latte-sipping, New York Times-reading, Volvo-driving, no-gunowning , effete, politically correct, arrogant liberal. Who wants somebody like that? I guess the point I’m making is that there is an entire 1The cited cause for the cancellation was a joke by Fox News chairman Roger Ailes conflating Barack Obama with Osama Bin Laden. Ailes responded to the boycott by complaining that pressure groups were now urging candidates to “only appear on those networks and venues that give them favorable coverage” (Whitcomb 2007). While Fox and the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) later agreed to co-sponsor one Republican and one Democratic candidate debate, activist groups immediately sought to pressure both the CBC and Democratic candidates to withdraw from the debate (Phillips 2007). The Democratic National Committee subsequently declined to sanction it, and the three major Democratic candidates also declined to participate, leading to the indefinite postponement of the debate. Shot by the Messenger • 115 industry now, an entire apparatus, designed to perpetuate this cultural schism, and it’s powerful. (Bai 2008) In this chapter, we test Obama’s conjecture regarding the influence of media outlets perceived as having partisan interests, and in doing so begin to systematically address the third major research question motivating this book: to what extent do the new media alter the relationships between media content and public opinion regarding foreign policy? To do so, we examine how different types of elite messages regarding national security and war, appearing in media outlets with distinct partisan reputations , affect the attitudes of different types of individuals. While prior research (including our own in chapter 3 and other studies cited therein) provides some intuition about the potential effects of elite messages, in this chapter we employ national survey data and a media exposure experiment to determine exactly when and how public opinion is influenced by various partisan messages emanating from different sources and media outlets. As we have previously noted, our core assumptions concerning the factors contributing to the persuasiveness of information are not novel. However, in this chapter we offer more systematic tests than prior studies of several implications of these assumptions, at least some of which (e.g., with respect to partisan support for Iraq) are counterintuitive. The present chapter tests four of the hypotheses derived in chapter 2, beginning with the Partisan (H4) and Costly (H5) Credibility hypotheses. Recall that the former predicts that presidential evaluations will have a greater influence on partisans from the speaker’s own party, while the latter predicts that evaluations that impose a cost on a speaker’s own party will have a stronger effect than self-serving, or cheap talk, evaluations . We previously tested these hypotheses in chapter 3; however, those tests focused on short-term relationships emerging during rally periods. They also relied on aggregate survey data, making causal inferences difficult . In this chapter we employ both survey data and a media exposure experiment to more directly test our opinion hypotheses. Both were conducted several (two to four) years after the...

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