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Media discourse and public opinion are treated as two parallel systems of constructing meaning. This paper explores their relationship by analyzing the discourse on nuclear power in four general audience media: television news coverage, newsmagazine accounts, editorial cartoons, and syndicated opinion columns. The analysis traces the careers of different interpretive packages on nuclear power from 1945 to the present. This media discourse, it is argued, is an essential context for understanding the formation of public opinion on nuclear power. More specifically, it helps to account for such survey results as the decline in support for nuclear power before Three Mile Island, a rebound after a burst of media publicity has died out, the gap between general support for nuclear power and support for a plant in one's own community, and the changed relationship of age to support for nuclear power from 1950 to the present.
Current issues are now on the Chicago Journals website. Read the latest issue.Established in 1895 as the first US scholarly journal in its field, the American Journal of Sociology (AJS) presents pathbreaking work from all areas of sociology, with an emphasis on theory building and innovative methods. AJS strives to speak to the general sociology reader and is open to contributions from across the social sciences—political science, economics, history, anthropology, and statistics in addition to sociology—that seriously engage the sociological literature to forge new ways of understanding the social. AJS offers a substantial book review section that identifies the most salient work of both emerging and enduring scholars of social science. Commissioned review essays appear occasionally, offering the readers a comparative, in-depth examination of prominent titles.
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American Journal of Sociology
© 1989 The University of Chicago Press