6 - Improving Mass Attitudes: The Media’s Role in Shaping Group Attitudes and Policy Preferences

Summary

Chapter 6 explores how public attitudes toward Muslim Americans are swayed to become more positive or more negative. Specifically, it evaluates if the media can play a role in shaping public opinion toward them. This chapter employs experiments to assess how negative and positive media portrayals of Muslims and Muslim Americans affect public attitudes toward, as well as policy preferences affecting, Muslims foreign and domestic. These experiments causally demonstrate that the tone of media coverage matters for shaping public attitudes toward Muslim Americans.