I wake up every Sunday morning around 7:00AM, make coffee for me and tea for my boyfriend. While everything is brewing and steeping, I walk outside with the pups while the beau is snoring away. The two dogs, the beau, and I snuggle back in bed and turn on CBS Sunday morning at 8:00AM. We sip our morning rituals and see heartwarming stories about celebrities, children helping others, renovations at art museums, historical figures revisited, and at the end we get 60 peaceful seconds of nature, our favorite segment.
Not this morning. Not even 10 minutes into our Sunday morning haven, Margaret Brennan from Face the Nation chimed in that Trump was going to tell us that we killed ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Okay, she told us, can we get back to the heartwarming stories?
Instead, Trump gets on TV and tells the nation about his great success of killing Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. I turn off the TV because his face incites a panic attack. I later read his account of the leader being chased into a tunnel by dogs with three of his children, ignited his vest, and he was whimpering, screaming, and crying (Whitehouse.gov, 2019). That was such a violent picture to broadcast on a Sunday morning (anytime, really). Cultivation theory says that TV is our main socialization agent (Gruman, 2017). So where before we could hear President Obama talk about the death of Osama Bin Laden with respect and reverence, is it that Trump has been so “successful” at engaging his core base by giving raunchy accounts of situations? Personally, it incites fear in me because I’m not sure how ISIS will react to his remarks and he does not seem fit to respond in a way that will actually help the United States.
From our text, we read that as males are exposed to more and more violent content, there is a higher likelihood of violent behavior (Gruman, 2017). Looking at this presidency, we have seen an uptick in hate-related violence. According to Rushin & Edwards, counties who voted for Trump with the widest margins in the elections have experienced the largest increases in reported hate crimes (2018). They also saw on a time series analysis that there was a significant surge in hate crimes since the election, which has been dubbed The Trump Effect (2018). An article in the Washington Post remarked that counties that hosted a Trump rally had a 226% increase in hate crimes (2019). The article also included that the New Zealand shooter called Trump a “renewed symbol of white identity” which had to stem from Trump’s rhetoric.
What is coming across our TV screens matters, as it is showing what is socially acceptable behavior. Years past, we could count on our presidents to have class and decorum. We did not need to worry about the president inciting violence and describing raids in gruesome detail. A good friend of mine said that she makes her grandchildren leave the room whenever Trump comes on TV because she doesn’t know what he is going to say. It is amazing that we have come to a point where people are uncomfortable allowing their children to be exposed to our president.
We kept checking back to CBS every 10 minutes or so but Trump was still tooting his own horn for the death of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. We didn’t get our heart warming stories while snuggled in bed with our warm beverages and puppies. We missed a tribute to Prince that we were really excited about. Instead, we got up and started our week with a little anger in our hearts.
Resources:
Ayal Feinberg, R. B. (2019, August 6). Analysis | Counties that hosted a 2016 Trump rally saw a 226 percent increase in hate crimes. Retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/03/22/trumps-rhetoric-does-inspire-more-hate-crimes/.
Gruman, J. A., Schneider, F. W., & Coutts, L. (2017). Applied social psychology: understanding and addressing social and practical problems. Los Angeles ; London ; New Dehli ; Singapore ; Washington DC ; Melbourne: SAGE.
Remarks by President Trump on the Death of ISIS Leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. (2019, October 27). Retrieved from https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/remarks-president-trump-death-isis-leader-abu-bakr-al-baghdadi/.
Rushin, S., & Edwards, G. S. (2018). The Effect of President Trumps Election on Hate Crimes. SSRN Electronic Journal. doi: 10.2139/ssrn.3102652
Your blog highlights the power of the media as a news outlet to affect our thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Through their agenda setting power, the media decides what stories they consider relevant and through their political priming abilities, media coverage can greatly influence our political opinions. Media outlets are very powerful indeed. Studies have shown that when viewers are shown negative news coverage of government actors, public trust declines (Gruman, Schneider, and Coutts, 2017). Watching the Sunday morning news, as you pointed out, can be a very shocking and traumatic event, as extreme violence is often displayed. The cultivation theory of learning posits that heavy television viewing (over four hours per day) can seriously affect one’s thoughts about the world around them; when one sees violence, one could begin to believe that the world is a dangerous place. A consequence of that may be that the viewer becomes more violent themselves, or more desensitized to violence. Now I know why my parents never allowed me to watch the evening news—it can be worse than a movie because it is realistic violence.
Gruman, J. A., Schneider, F. W., & Coutts, L. M. (Eds.). (2017). Applied Social Psychology:
Understanding and Addressing Social and Practical Problems (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA:Sage. ISBN 9781483369730