Media use, social structure, and belief in 9/11 conspiracy theories

Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly

Volumn 84, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 353-372

  Stempel, Carl ^a   Hargrove, Thomas ^b   Stempel III, Guido H ^c  

^a CALIFORNIA STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b Scripps Howard News Service   (United States)

^c OHIO UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

MEDIA INDUSTRY; SOCIAL STRUCTURE;

EID: 34848836301     PISSN: 10776990     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/107769900708400210     Document Type: Article

References (58)

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2. Daniel Pipes, Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Came From (NY: Free Press, 1997);
3. Mark Fenster, Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999);
4. Serge Moscovici, "The Conspiracy Mentality," in Changing Conceptions of Conspiracy, ed. Carl F. Graumann and Serge Moscovici (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1987), 151-70;
5. Areie W. Kruglanski, "Blame-Placing Schemata and Attributional Reseach," in Changing Conceptions of Conspiracy, ed. Carl F. Graumann and Serge Moscovici (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1987), 219-29;
6. Carl F. Graumann, "Conspiracy: History and Social Psychology - A Synopsis," in Changing Conceptions of Conspiracy, ed. Carl F. Graumann and Serge Moscovici (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1987), 245-51;
7. Timothy Melley, "Agency Panic and the Culture of Conspiracy," in Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar America, ed. Peter Knight (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 57-83;
8. Jane Parish, "The Age of Anxiety," in The Age of Anxiety: Conspiracy Theory and Human Sciences, ed. Jane Parish and Martin Parker (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 1-16;
9. Harry G. West and Todd Sanders, eds., Transparency and Conspiracies: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003); 10 Peter Knight, Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to the X Files (Routledge: New York, 2000);
10. Timothy Melley, Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000);
11. Patricia A. Turner, I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
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25. Jack M. McLeod, Zongshi Guo, Katie Daily, Catherine A. Steele, Huiping Huang, Edward Horowitz, and Huailin Chen, "The Impact of Traditional and Nontraditional Media Forms in the 1992 Presidential Election," Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly 73 (summer 1996): 401-16;
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29. Amy E. Jasperson, Dhavan V. Shah, Mark Watts, Ronald E. Faber, and David P. Fan, "Framing and the Public Agenda: Media Effects on the Importance of the Federal Budget Deficit," Political Communication 15 (March 1998): 205-24;
30. Gangheong Lee and Joseph N. Capella, "The Effects of Political Talk Radio on Political Attitude Formation: Exposure Versus Knowledge," Political Communication 18 (October 2001): 369-94.
31. Hofstadter, The Paranoid Style of American Politics.
32. Pipes, Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Came From.
33. John Mirowsky and Catherine Ross, "Paranoia and the Structure of Powerlessness," American Sociological Review 48 (April 1983): 228-39, quote on 228.
34. Peter Knight, Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar America (NY: New York University Press, 2002), Ch 2.
35. Anita M. Waters, "Conspiracy Theories as Ethnosociologies: Explanation and Intention in African American Political Culture," Journal of Black Studies 28 (September 1997): 112-25;
36. Skip Willman, "Spinning Paranoia: The Ideologies of Conspiracy and Contingency in Postmodern Culture," in Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar America, ed. Peter Knight (NY: New York University Press, 2002), 21-39;
37. Fran Mason, "A Poor Person's Cognitive Mapping," in Conspiracy Nation: The Politics and Paranoia in Post War America, ed. Peter Knight (NY: New York University Press, 2002), 40-56;
38. Knight, Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to the X Files; David Hellinger, "Paranoia, Conspiracy and Hegemony in American Politics" in Transparency and Conspiracies: Ethnographies of Suspicion in the New World Order, ed. Harry G. West and Todd Sanders (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 204-32.
39. Peter Knight, "ILOVEYOU: Viruses, Paranoia and the Environment of Risk," in The Age of Anxiety: Conspiracy Theory and Human Sciences, ed. Jane Parish and Martin Parker (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), 24.
40. Robert Alan Goldberg, Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).
41. Knight, Conspiracy Culture: From Kennedy to the X Files, 24.
42. Goldberg, Enemies Within: The Culture of Conspiracy in Modern America, 256.
43. Fenster, Conspiracy Theories: Secrecy and Power in American Culture, 67.
44. Waters, "Conspiracy Theories as Ethnosociologies: Explanation and Intention in African American Political Culture," 115.
45. Hellinger, in "Paranoia, Conspiracy and Hegemony in American Politics," 208, says that conspiracy theories "introduce subjectivity and individualized forms of accountability into otherwise impersonal, structural forces that, according to social scientists, journalists, and historians, move our world."
46. This study is not a good test but we hypothesize that conversely, conspiracy theories that are more "free floating," that are not much connected with the major contours of social and political divisions, will have fewer followers, and believers will more closely fit the characteristics of a paranoid style. See Max Weber, "The Social Psychology of the World Religions," in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, ed. and trans, by H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (NY: Oxford, 1946);
47. Ann Swidler, Talk of Love: How Culture Matters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001).
48. William Paul Simmons and Sharon Parsons, "Beliefs in Conspiracy Theories Among African Americans: A Comparison of Elites and Masses," Social Science Quarterly 86 (September 2005): 582-598.
49. Knight, Conspiracy Nation: The Politics of Paranoia in Postwar America.
50. Hellinger, in "Paranoia, Conspiracy and Hegemony in American Politics," quote on 213, studied the response of the New York Times, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times to Gary Webb's story in the San Jose Mercury News linking profits from the sale of cocaine to Los Angeles street gangs to funding the CIA-organized Contras in Nicaragua, and concluded, "Instead of pursuing additional leads⋯ coverage emphasized shortcomings in Webb's reporting, disparaged its diffusion on the Internet and 'call-in' radio shows and alleged that believers (i.e., African Americans) were more gullible than most other Americans."
51. We sample first by randomly selecting zip codes proportionate to population. We then select the NXX code (the first three digits of the seven-digit number) which has the most numbers serving this zip code. Then we randomly select the last four digits. If the first call does not result in a completed interview, we add one number and try again. Only after twenty attempts to obtain an interview from the selected NXX codes is the NXX rejected and a new zip code selected. Our experience is that this sampling strategy, which essentially stratifies by local geographic units (zip codes), has considerably less bias in terms of race and urban dwelling than random digit dialing. The advantage of this strategy in terms of geographic spread can be seen in the fact that in this survey we completed interviews in 92% of the U.S. telephone area codes.
52. Belief in "government assists 9/11" theory only required that key members of the Bush administration opportunistically failed to act on intelligence reports that al-Qaeda was planning attacks. This does, however, involve a major shift in the motivations attributed to the Bush administration, from possible neglect or incompetence to high immorality and treason. This imputed opportunism fits with evidence that Bush officials had intelligence warnings that al-Qaeda was planning to strike, lack of evidence of any alliance between the Iraqi regime and al-Qaeda, insider reports that Bush focused on these ties immediately after the 9/11 attacks, and the failure to find weapons of mass destruction, all of which certainly increased its plausibility.
53. Compare our alpha of .59 to the .78 reported by Goertzel for ten diverse conspiracies ranging from flying saucers to the government creating the AIDS virus in a lab. Ted Goertzel, "Belief in Conspiracy Theories," Political Psychology 15 (1994): 731-42. The differences are probably in part an artifact of an arguably flawed technique: on theoretical grounds Cronbach's alpha increases with more items, holding the mean correlation coefficient constant.
54. The alternative of treating the dependent variables as interval level measures and using OLS regression introduces bias similar to "ceiling and floor" effects on the dependent variable that has led most analysts to switch to logistic or probit maximum likelihood methods when using dichotomous dependent variables. This bias is greatest when the dependent variables are highly skewed and at least two of our three dependent variables qualify as being highly skewed. See Christopher Winship and Robert Mare, "Regression Models with Ordinal Variables," American Sociological Review 49 (August 1984): 512-25, for a comparison of the relative merits of using OLS vs. ordinal logistic or probit regression with ordinal dependent variables and a real world example of misleading results from using OLS regression with an ordinal dependent variable. PLUM extends general linear modeling to ordinal level dependent variables. It uses a "cumulative odds" approach to measuring ordinality. Multivariate OLS regression estimates an intercept and beta weights for each of the independent variables which tell how much the predicted value of the dependent variable changes with each one unit increase in the independent variable controlling for the other independent variables. PLUM estimates each threshold between the ranked categories of the dependent variable (thresholds are analogous to the intercept in OLS regression) and a beta weight for each independent variable that is the change in the log odds for each of the thresholds. (To keep the beta weights as interpretable as possible, the PLUM formulas subtract the beta weights times independent variable scores from the threshold estimates.) For excellent introductions to PLUM, see Anna A. O'Connell, Logistic Regression Models for Ordinal Response Variables (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2006);
55. and Marija J. Norusis, SPSS 14.0 Advanced Statistical Procedures Companion (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall, 2005), 69-90.
56. Because PLUM estimates the natural log of the cumulative odds, the threshold estimates are not easily interpretable. On the other hand, untransformed betas for each of the independent variables register the direction of the relationships between independent and dependent variables.
57. The odds ratios (the columns labeled "odds") in Table 2 are exponentiations of the betas. As with logistic regression, these are much more easily interpretable measures of tine magnitude of the relationships than log odds, but in ordinal regression they must be related to the thresholds to make sense. Ordinal regression models the impact of independent variables as "proportional" or "parallel" across thresholds of the dependent variables. Our dependent variables have three categories and thus two thresholds, one between unlikely and somewhat likely, and the other between somewhat likely and very likely. PLUM uses a "cumulative odds" method of modeling the thresholds. This means that for the first threshold PLUM models the log of the odds of respondents choosing "unlikely" and the second threshold models the cumulative log odds of respondents choosing "unlikely" or "somewhat likely." The independent variables are assumed to have the same impact on each of the thresholds. This is an assumption that was tested for and confirmed in all the models presented here.
58. This was a simple summated index which added together each of the nine interval variables scores that range from 0 to 7 and conservatively coded "occasionally" as a two and "regularly" as a four with tabloids and news magazines.