Threat, Anger, and Support for War: Media Coverage of U.S. Policy toward ISIL

Abstract

This dissertation focuses on media coverage and public opinion about United States foreign policy during a time of national crisis. It seeks to better understand the nature of news content by exploring the concept of press independence through the lens of two theories of news media: indexing and echoing. Focusing on the current U.S. military engagement with the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the present study tracks media coverage between June 2014 and June 2015 across six distinct print and online news outlets. This content analysis reveals that the press offered limited criticism of policies, particularly early in the intervention. Print and online news media covered U.S. policy in similar fashion, each relying more on nongovernmental sources than on Washington elites. Combat and non-combat policies were more likely to appear together in the same story in print news than in online news and print offered more justifications for policy positions than did online news. This dissertation examined how news media affects public opinion by experimentally manipulating news coverage of U.S. policy toward ISIL. Based on a national sample, the current work utilized a 2 (high/low in-group threat)X 2 (high/low in-group strength) experiment to explore the mediating role of group emotions on support for foreign policies. Guided by intergroup emotions theory, this study found that group anger mediated the relationships between in-group threat and a host of combat and non-combat policies, while group anxiety did not. On the other hand, in-group threat and in-group strength interacted to predict group anxiety, resulting in two moderated-mediation models, which predicted support for negotiating with ISIL and modern racism toward Muslims. This experiment demonstrates that these group emotions operate in divergent ways, and that group emotions on the whole function differently than individual emotions when predicting political attitudes.