Media Statements Research Articles

Sexual citizenship in Latvia: geographies of the Latvian closet

This study examines sexual citizenship in Latvia. It investigates the process by which political narratives have heterosexed the nation since regaining independence from the Soviet Union in 1991. My aim in exploring this process is to develop a deeper understanding of non-heteronormative identities and counter-hegemonic spaces in this heterosexist society. Drawing on discourse analysis of political media statements I argue that despite the legalizing of homosexuality, political narratives have continued to sex the nation as heterosexual, forging the national closet. I then explore how these narratives become experienced in lives of sexual minorities through the state's failure to prevent sexual discrimination. Drawing on participant observation and a decoding of the urban landscape, I investigate how the Latvian closet is materialized in the bodies and places of the everyday lives of ‘gay’ men living in the capital, Riga. Examined in this way insights are given to the spatial forms of political resistance to heterosexism in Latvia and how it differs from western models.

Terri Schiavo and the Roman Catholic Tradition of Forgoing Extraordinary Means of Care

Media coverage and statements by various Catholic spokespersons regarding the case of Terri Schiavo has generated enormous and deeply unfortunate confusion (among Catholics and non-Catholics) regarding Church teaching about the use of life-sustaining treatments. Two weeks ago, for example, I received a letter from the superior of a community of Missionary Sisters of Charity, who operate a hospice here in the United States The Missionary Sisters of Charity are the community founded by Mother Theresa, the 20th Century saint whose primary ministry was to rescue dying Untouch-ables from the streets of Calcutta and bring them into her convent where they were washed, sheltered, fed if they were able to eat, prayed for, and cherished. In other words, the sisters gave these poor souls the gift of a death with dignity. The order Mother Theresa founded has continued this ministry, running hospices in the United States and elsewhere for the homeless, the destitute, those dying of AIDS and poverty and drug addiction, and all those dying alone and otherwise unwanted.

Secularism beyond the East/West divide: Literary reading, ethics, and The Moor's Last Sigh

The rise of Hindu majoritarianism in India's political and cultural life has led to questions about the viability of secularism in the postcolonial context. Despite the colonial power relations that inform secular discourse, it is assumed the state should maintain a critical distance from religious culture in the face of the increasing marginalization of minority groups in Indian society. At the same time, concerns have been raised that secular rhetoric around syncretism, the preservation of diversity, and religious tolerance often ends up laundering the cultural norms of the majority as national or universal. This paper seeks to displace the East/West divide that informs liberal commentary on secularism - a divide characterized by an opposition between tradition and modernity, faith and rationality. Rather than reject secular discourse on the basis of its colonial genealogy, it is possible to see it as 'an enabling violation' of Enlightenment thought that must be renegotiated through one's ethical relationship to the other. Gayatri Spivak's understanding of ethics as 'a problem of relation before they are a task of knowledge' necessarily shifts our understanding of ethics from a 'self driven political calculus as "doing the right thing" ' to 'ethics as openness toward the imagined agency of the other'. My paper considers how Spivak's concepts of ethical alterity and literary reading link ethics with praxis in thinking about secularism in the postcolonial context. I argue that while Rushdie's media statements, recently republished in Step Across this Line: Collected Nonfiction, 1992-2002, seem complicit with liberal views of secularism, his novel, The Moor's Last Sigh, works to displace secular discourse's Enlightenment assumptions.

The More Things Change...American Identity and Mass and Elite Responses to 9/11

This article examines conceptions of American national identity by contrasting Americans’ responses to the Pearl Harbor attack in 1941 with their responses to the terrorist attacks in 2001. Examinations of official rhetoric, mass media statements, and public opinion polls after Pearl Harbor and after 9/11 reveal changes as well as continuities in the relationship between conceptions of national identity and responses to experiencing threat in the face of diversity. Lingering ascriptivist views have been awakened by 9/11, yet this narrow image of American identity is being directly challenged by a more inclusive incorporationist tradition. This clash of symbolic conceptions of national identity results in divergence between elite rhetoric and mass opinion, with elites promoting incorporationism and ordinary citizens displaying the reawakening of ascriptivist norms.

Hospital preparedness for weapons of mass destruction incidents: An initial assessment

Study Objective: We performed an assessment of hospital preparedness for weapons of mass destruction (WMD) incidents in Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) Region III. Methods: Interviews of hospital personnel were completed in 30 hospitals. Data collected included level of preparedness, mass decontamination capabilities, training of hospital staff, and facility security capabilities. Results: No respondents believed their sites were fully prepared to handle a biologic incident, 73% (22/30) believed they were not prepared to manage a chemical weapons incident, and 73% believed they were unprepared to handle a nuclear event. If a WMD incident were to occur, 73% of respondents stated a single-room decontamination process would be set up. Four (13%) hospitals (all rural) reported no decontamination plans. WMD preparedness had been incorporated into hospital disaster plans by 27% (8/30) of facilities. Eighty-seven percent (26/30) believed their emergency department could manage 10 to 50 casualties at once. Only 1 facility had stockpiled any medications for WMD treatment. All facilities had established networks of communication. No hospital had preprepared media statements specific to WMD. Nearly one fourth (7/30) stated that their hospital staff had some training in WMD event management. All reported need for WMD-specific training but identified obstacles to achieving this. Seventy-seven percent (23/30) of hospitals had a facility security plan in place, and half were able to perform a hospital-wide lock down. Ninety-six percent (29/30) reported no awareness regarding the threat of a secondary device. Conclusion: Hospitals in this sample do not appear to be prepared to handle WMD events, especially in areas such as mass decontamination, mass medical response, awareness among health care professionals, health communications, and facility security. Further research is warranted, including a detailed assessment of WMD preparedness using a statistically valid sample representative of hospital emergency personnel at the national level. [Treat KN, Williams JM, Furbee PM, Manley WG, Russell FK, Stamper CD Jr. Hospital preparedness for weapons of mass destruction incidents: an initial assessment. Ann Emerg Med. November 2001;38:562-565.]

The production of outstanding leadership — an analysis of leadership images in the Swedish media

In this paper the constructive and ideological aspects of (business) journalism provide the starting point for an exploration of the images of (outstanding) leadership (re)produced in the Swedish printed media. Using an ethnographic semantics method, articles in five major Swedish publications during two separate weeks were scanned, selected and analysed, resulting in 853 media statements about leadership subsumed under 60 leadership categories. These statements were further categorised and analysed, resulting in 12 underlying leadership themes that together suggest a dominant implicit model of leadership. The results were found to be consistent to some extent with central aspects of a “Swedish leadership style” as reported in previous studies, but they also gave rise to some interesting paradoxes. These paradoxes were partly resolved by introducing a distinction between leadership in a political as opposed to a business context. The analysis shows that institutional contexts seem to generate different implicit models of leadership, but within the same national framework. Excellent leadership is evidently exercised and enacted as an expression of socially constructed institutions and culturally grounded values.

"Anti-cancer gene found".

Most cancer researchers take care when making media statements about progress in their field. Most science journalists, too, deal with the subject cautiously. Both understand the dangers of raising false hopes. Yet a recent episode in the UK shows how the well-intentioned handling of a story, from laboratory bench to the popular media, can still have unfortunate consequences. The chain began with a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (Henderson et al., 1998, 95:5275-5280) showing that mice lacking the glutathione S-transferase gene developed significantly more benign skin tumours, as compared to mice with the gene, when exposed to a polycyclic hydrocarbon. Publication was heralded by a press release from the Imperial Cancer Research Fund (ICRF), which had partly sponsored the research. “This is a very exciting finding,” said co-author Roland Wolf. “We've shown for the first time that a single gene could be profoundly important in protecting us against cancer. And that's good news because it's easier to manipulate one gene than many”. Ken Brown of the Cancer Research Campaign, which had also funded the work, added: “It's a very important discovery.” An avalanche of publicity followed. The Daily Mail and the Express carried front page pieces with headlines 10 centimetres deep, while on television both the BBC and ITN main evening news bulletins gave the story considerable prominence. Virtually all national newspapers allocated a substantial amount of space to the announcement, and all of the broadcasting channels gave generous amounts of time. There was much talk of a “lung disease breakthrough”, “a cancer prevention pill” and “new drug therapies that prevent many forms of the disease”. Soon, however, all concerned seemed to realize that the episode had been over-blown. The Independent on Sunday, for example, quoted Ken Brown as being surprised at the coverage. He said not only that the relevance of the study to human cancer was uncertain, but also that both Nature and Science had rejected the paper because “it wasn't a major enough discovery for them.” In reality, the perplexities and irritations arose largely from the size and impact of the media blitz, rather than from its detailed content. Although there was some sensationalism, most of the accounts were unusually guarded. Jenny Hope, writing in the Daily Mail, cautiously noted that the discovery “could be the starting point for research leading to new anti-cancer drugs and could eventually mean that genetic engineering could be used to enhance the body's natural defence system.” Such caution may be contrasted with the self-confessed excitement of some of the scientists involved. Much more sober was Paul Nurse, director-general of the ICRF, who was cited in the Guardian’s account. “We are talking about mice, and we are talking about the induction of precancerous growths on skin which have been induced by chemicals,” Nurse said. “It would need to be shown to be relevant to humans.” So why, for at least a day, did banner headlines and TV interviews with cancer researchers dominate public attention ahead of issues such as the middle east peace process, political change in Northern Ireland and famine and conflict in the Sudan? The answer probably rests in one simple observation about the way in which target audiences respond to an announcement of this sort. Science correspondents and editors alike know that medical scientists as a group tend to be exceedingly cautious. They also recognize that cancer research is a time-consuming, incremental process, with countless disappointments along the way. The antennae of even the most level-headed of them twitch, therefore, when researchers announce that a new development is “very exciting”, “good news” and “very important”. Likewise, even if the actual wording of an article is judicious, newspaper readers are impressed by huge headlines on page one. TV viewers are similarly affected when a prime-time programme includes a substantial item about an advance in dealing with a deadly and feared disease. The crucial error in the press release was the failure to point out that although the finding is scientifically exciting, an enormous amount of work remains to be done to determine whether it has any real implications for human cancer. There's another necessary caution. Media coverage like that surrounding the “cancer gene” story re-emphasises the erroneous belief that cancer is a single disease, for which scientists are seeking the cure. It overshadows the reality that many cancers can already be cured if detected sufficiently early, while others may be avoided by lifestyle changes such as not smoking. Reporting that obscures these facts is not only regrettable in terms of public understanding. It could also, for particular individuals, mean the difference between life and death. B Dixon, Bernard Dixon is a freelance science writer based in Middlesex, UK.

Drugs and the media in the era of postmodernity: an archaeological analysis

This article addresses the vast heterogeneity of UK media reports on illicit drugs by applying Michel Foucault's archaeological methodology. Accordingly, the media reports are classified to reflect their connections within a discursive formation that is itself situated within the milieu of postmodernity. By using the binary oppositions of private-public and societal-subcultural as classificatory axes, the author identifies four categories of media statements on drugs, which possess particular discursive vantage points. The variations of statements within these categories are explored at length, as are their contradictions. The paper concludes by advancing Foucault's archaeology as a valuable contemporary methodology for understanding the nature of the moral and epistemological claims which discourses make.

Treatment of Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder-Reply

<h3>In Reply.</h3> —What follows is a sequential, point-by-point response to concerns about the "subtextual implications" of our study raised by Drs Vatz and Weinberg. The anti-Ritalin campaign of 1987 through 1989 was fueled primarily by the Church of Scientology.^1,2Dr Barkley³reported that Church of Scientology "propaganda" claimed that "Ritalin was a dangerous and addictive drug often used as a chemical straitjacket to subdue normally exuberant children because of intolerant educators, parents, and money hungry psychiatrists." Dr Barkley, a child psychologist and behaviorist, concluded that these media statements against Ritalin were "dramatic, exaggerated, and unfounded."³Bass, a science reporter for the Boston<i>Globe</i>, referring also to the media blitz, noted in 1988 that "in newspapers, television, and radio accounts, Ritalin is often depicted as a dangerous drug being forced on millions of innocent children."² Most drug-sensitive hyperactive children did not do well when taken off stimulant

Behavioral scientists and law enforcement personnel: Working together on the problem of terrorism

AbstractBehavioral scientists work with law enforcement personnel on the problem of terrorism in three general contexts: clinical help for victims, training and consultation for hostage negotiation, and profiling and institutional consultation. In a study of 115 senior police officers working in the area of terrorism, subjects valued psychological counseling for crime victims within a broad framework of financial and criminal justice services. When describing a past personal victim experience, they valued direct physical action in their own coping, but expressions of sympathy and reassurance when provided by others. Problems encountered by behavioral scientists working in this area have usually involved difficulties in maintaining an effective consultant role, over‐identification with the law enforcement identity, or inappropriate media statements.

Equivalence of meaning among statements presented through various media

From the results of this study, these conclusions are warranted: 1. Statements equated in content and difficulty but presented in different media evoke different connotative meanings. 2. The specific form of these differences varies substantially with the subject matter of the statements. 3. The extent of the difference among media statements vary on at least the two dimensions of content used in this study. Within the presentational-representational dimension, more significant differences were found with complex statements than with simple statements. Within the simple-complex dimension, more significant differences among media statements occurred with the presentational statements than with the representational statements. More significant differences among media statements occurred with the simple presentational concepts than with the complex representational concepts. 4. Scales relate to each other in markedly different ways from medium to medium.