Public Outrage Research Articles

Mural Removals During COVID-19 Pandemic: Violation of Freedom of Expression?

This COVID-19 pandemic has caused a decline in the community's economy, leading the government to issue policies that are deemed unsatisfactory by the people. As a result, it has spurred artists to create murals containing criticism of the government. However, the public perceives the government to be against criticism because they have removed murals, which is deemed to have violated local regulations and forgotten that everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This study aims to analyze the implementation of the Pasuruan City Regional Regulation No. 2 of 2017 Article 19 Letter a and assess the compatibility of the regulation with Law No. 39 of 1999 concerning Human Rights. The research method used is socio-legal method, and the results of this study indicate that the removal of murals was not based on human rights. Therefore, this study concludes that there should be a special treatment for murals with critical content.
 Highlights :
 
 COVID-19 pandemic has led to a decline in the community's economy, which has resulted in the government issuing unsatisfactory policies.
 Murals have been created by artists to criticize the government, but the removal of these murals by the government has sparked public outrage.
 The study found that the removal of murals violated human rights, and therefore, there should be a special treatment for murals with critical content.
 
 Keywords: Mural removals, COVID-19 pandemic, Freedom of expression, Government policies, Human rights.

Designing a Road Map for Action to Address Bias and Racism Within a Large Academic Medical Center.

The convergence of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Black Lives Matter Movement, and the public anguish and outrage resulting from the murder of George Floyd in 2020 intensified the commitment of many health care institutions to pursue racial and social justice and achieve health equity. The authors describe the Road Map for Action to Address Racism, which was developed to unify and systematize antiracism efforts across the Mount Sinai Health System. A 51-member Task Force to Address Racism, comprising faculty, staff, students, alumni, health system leaders, and trustees, developed recommendations to achieve the goal of becoming an antiracist and equitable health care and learning institution by intentionally addressing all forms of racism and promoting greater diversity, inclusion, and equity for its workforce and community. Grounded in the principles of Collective Impact, the Task Force developed a set of 11 key strategies to effect systemwide change. The strategies affected all aspects of the organization: business systems and financial operations, delivery of care, workforce development and training, leadership development, medical education, and community engagement. The authors describe Road Map implementation, currently in process, including the appointment of strategy leaders, evolution of a governance structure integrating stakeholders from across the health system, development of an evaluation framework, communication and engagement efforts, and process measures and progress to date. Lessons learned include the importance of recognizing the work of dismantling racism as integral to, not apart from, the institution's day-to-day work, and the need for specialized expertise and a significant investment of time to coordinate Road Map implementation. Going forward, rigorous assessment of quantitative and qualitative outcomes and a commitment to sharing successes and challenges will be critical to eradicating systems that have perpetuated inequities in the biomedical sciences and medicine and in the delivery of health care.

Pitfalls of amateur regression: The Dutch New Herring controversies

AbstractApplying simple linear regression models, an economist analyzed a published dataset from an influential annual ranking in 2016 and 2017 of consumer outlets for Dutch New Herring and concluded that the ranking was manipulated. His finding was promoted by his university in national and international media, and this led to public outrage and ensuing discontinuation of the survey. We reconstitute the dataset, correcting errors and exposing features already important in a descriptive analysis of the data. The economist has continued his investigations, and in a follow‐up publication repeats the same accusations. We point out errors in his reasoning and show that alleged evidence for deliberate manipulation of the ranking could easily be an artifact of specification errors. Temporal and spatial factors are both important and complex, and their effects cannot be captured using simple models, given the small sample sizes and many factors determining perceived taste of a food product.

Distorted Korean Idol’s Scandal, Deceitful Media, and The Role of Forensic Linguistics

A celebrity’s scandal can be an enthralling theme for the media to produce news, either factual or fabricated. This research primarily focuses on distorted content or media manipulation to report it. It explores the correlation between misleading news and the motives behind twisted reality. The method used in this research is a descriptive qualitative method through the lens of the forensic linguistics approach, supported by Villa’s interpretative pragmatics (2010). The collected data were from selected sources of distorted media reporting, especially about a highly considered Korean singer’s crime, known Seungri of Bigbang. His charge was not direct link with sexual abuse and systematic drugs, which is in fact unrevealed wealthy people committing them. Even nonconsensual disclosure of sexually-explicit videos was committed by other celebrities. Yet, the media fraudulently blended and misrepresented Seungri as the key figure of the scandal in a club named ‘Burning Sun’. Society was misled to hate and blame him. This research shows that passive constructions, lexical references, and subject matters of the texts become linguistic evidence of fact distortion. Manipulating celebrity’s scandal is driven by political goals, such as creating mistrust and bewildering larger audiences, especially in South Korea about proving the justice system as the actual culprits are withdrawn. This research is noteworthy since there are interwoven claims of the power of media to wriggle out of legal punishments after spreading distorted facts. Hence, it implies that pragmatics is applicable and efficacious to prove the case. It leads to defamation by media, correlated with forensic linguistics. To reveal the distorted facts by deceitful media, this study expectantly contributes in enhancing social awareness of the truth behind blatant public outrage and its social consequences.

The War of Jenkins’ Ear and the Spectre of French Universal Monarchy

ABSTRACT The Anglo–Spanish War of 1739, commonly referred to as the War of Jenkins’ Ear, is generally explained as having been caused by public outrage at the depredations of the Guarda Costas without consideration of European politics. While Prime Minister Sir Robert Walpole risked his political life to avoid war with Spain for fear that it would only benefit France and disrupt the British economy, the Country opposition, led by Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, exploited the situation with a maritime vision of empire to bring down the government. This article, however, suggests that Bolingbroke’s Country party was no less troubled by the prospect of French universal monarchy than the Walpole ministry but that they pushed for war with Spain as an urgent precautionary measure. Once France decided to support Spain, they thought it would be extremely difficult and costly to separate them and re–establish the balance of power. They believed that owing to Hanoverian influence on British foreign policy, which culminated in the Anglo–French Alliance of 1716–1731, the Utrecht peace settlement had been significantly distorted in favour of the French, and a French–Spanish alliance was already in sight. Therefore, before it was too late, Spain had to be defeated and Austria befriended again.

The War Beat, Pacific: The American Media at War against Japan

The War Beat, Pacific is a nuanced and engaging narrative of the Pacific war in World War II, told through the lens of the reporters who covered it. Steven Casey, who earlier wrote about U.S. reporting from the European theaters, untangles the complex challenges that reporters experienced from the moment they arrived on the vast front. The essential dilemma in the Pacific battle zone involved the public's right to know against the government's need to keep some plans and results secret. Casey skillfully unfolds the layers to show how American military leaders tried to manipulate the press for their own purposes, whether it was to provoke public outrage by turning attention from the war against Adolf Hitler in Europe, or, in the case of Gen. Douglas MacArthur, to shamelessly spin the coverage to mask his own failings, which Casey rightfully refers to as a “military misinformation campaign” (p. 29). Throughout, Casey reveals illuminating lesser-known cases, such as a racial “mutiny” where hundreds of Black G.I.'s were rounded up by American soldiers with “bayonets and loaded guns” (p. 72). A visiting Rep. Lyndon Johnson, wanting to keep such examples of Americans fighting each other hidden from the public, destroyed the original copy that one reporter referred to as “one of the biggest stories of the war” (ibid.). Others worried that some admirals “were more interested in protecting their own reputations than in denying usable information to the enemy” (p. 92).

Daniel Eltringham. Poetry & Commons: Postwar and Romantic Lyric in Times of Enclosure

In January 2023, the UK High Court ruled in favour of the wealthy owners of a large area of Dartmoor National Park who sought to overturn an assumed right to overnight wild camping under a bylaw in the Dartmoor Commons Act 1985. Provoking public outrage, much media attention and a protest attended by an estimated 3000 people, the ruling represented a symbolic moment in complex histories of land access and usage. Dartmoor had been, until now, the only remaining place in England that allowed overnight camping without the landowner’s permission. Such events highlight the timeliness of Daniel Eltringham’s Poetry & Commons: Postwar and Romantic Lyric in Times of Enclosure. As Eltringham eloquently argues, and as the Dartmoor case exemplifies, processes of enclosure continue apace into the twenty-first century, and the potent imaginary of the commons as a space for practices of resistance may be more relevant than ever. Furthermore, poetry engages with these issues in vital ways. By putting into dialogue Romantic-era poetry and British avant-garde poetry since the 1960s, Eltringham traces how and why post-war poetics returns to figures of the commons and practices of commoning in the context of interconnected forms of market-driven neoliberalism and ecological crisis.

The Indian Rape Law: Vocabulary of Protest, Reactionary Legislations and Quality of Equality Culture

The problem of violence perpetrated against women in India is not simple. It is embroiled in the historical subjugation of the ‘weaker sex.’ Women have been unable to claim equality in society despite mandatory provisions in the Constitution of India and other legislations in their favour. Despite numerous amendments to the Indian criminal law, rape, one of the most heinous crimes, continues to be committed in India at an alarming rate. The law on Rape in India has undergone three phases of amendments, and all precipitated in the aftermath of public fury on account of brutal and heinous incidents of rape. This paper employs the socio-legal approach to assess the efficacy and impact of these amendments in changing social behaviour. It concludes that though the massive public outrage undoubtedly led to radical amendments, it was a knee-jerk reaction that suffered from legislative ambiguities. The increase in the retributive content of the law ultimately resulted in reduced convictions. Although law is believed to be an instrument of social change, the amendments in the anti-rape legislation have been unable to bring about a positive transformation in the existing cultural inequality.

Defamation of the president, racial nationalism, and the Roy Clarke affair in Zambia

ABSTRACT In January 2004, residents of Zambia’s capital, Lusaka, were treated to a disturbing sight. Over 200 members of the governing Movement for Multiparty Democracy party marched through the streets of the capital carrying a mock coffin bearing the name of Roy Clarke, a prominent newspaper satirist and white British national who had been a permanent resident in the country since the early 1960s. The protesters accused Clarke of insulting and defaming President Levy Mwanawasa in his previous column and demanded his immediate deportation. The Minister of Home Affairs obliged, but the satirist successfully challenged his deportation in Zambia’s courts. Drawing from newspaper sources, court documents, and interviews with key informants, this article shows that these protests were anything but a spontaneous demonstration of public outrage. Instead, they had been carefully orchestrated by Mwanawasa and his close allies to bolster Mwanawasa’s beleaguered presidency. The article argues that deportation orders and racial nationalism against racial minorities are strategies adopted by political elites during periods of weakness, even when these ideas have little or no popular support. More broadly, we argue that the status of racial minorities and other foreigners in Zambia is often provisional, depending on political considerations.

Mobilization, Repression and Policy Concessions in Authoritarian Regimes: The Cases of Egypt and Jordan

In 2018 new economic reform measures were implemented in Egypt and Jordan under the auspices of the International Monetary Fund. These measures were met with public outrage in both countries. In Jordan, mass mobilization, demonstrations and strikes took place, lasted for a month and ended in policy concessions. In Egypt, however, only few independent demonstrations erupted, no mass mobilization occurred, and no policy concessions were enacted by the regime. This article seeks to understand, why activists were able to mobilize large numbers of citizens and attain policy concessions in Jordan, while they were not able to in Egypt. I argue that in authoritarian regimes, different types of repressive strategies against activists and their movements impact their ability to develop networks and advance short-term policy concessions. Targeted repression against activists enables the development of formal and informal networks in addition to coalitions, increasing a movements’ bargaining power. However, widespread repression hampers the development of all types of networks, especially formal networks, which impedes activists’ ability to bargain for policy concessions.

The political frame of a housing crisis: Campaigning for the right to housing in Ireland

ABSTRACT This article examines the politicized discourse employed by housing movement to shift long-standing narratives around housing, that attempt to shape the national debate over Ireland’s housing crisis. Amid issues of housing insecurity and affordability, homelessness in particular has become a hotly debated issue over the past decade and images of increasing family homelessness as a consequence of the housing crisis have sparked public outrage. Campaigners and activists have challenged the government’s market-based policy responses and demanded housing that is accessible to those who need it. The results show that while the narratives used by activists to change housing policy were somewhat successful in raising the issue of homelessness as a housing problem, the movement was less effective in motivating public concerns around housing as a fundamental right and in building a larger mass housing movement.

Профилактика преступлений, совершаемых с использованием служебного положения

The problem of crimes committed using official position has a special drama. Indeed, persons who have been delegated many rights to address vital issues, including ensuring public safety and maintaining law and order (including the right to legitimate violence), often use these rights for selfish and other base interests. This causes public outrage and undermines the authority of the legitimate government. The purpose of this article is to determine the current directions of crime prevention in the field of official activity of employees of state and municipal bodies. The research methodology includes dialectical, comparative-historical sociological and formal-dogmatic methods. Results. The main directions of preventive activity in the field of official activity of employees of state and municipal bodies are: training of specialists in the field of state and municipal education only in law schools; termination of the practice of training lawyers in non-core universities; introduction of a ban on admission to the magistracy of law schools of persons who do not have a basic legal education; ensuring the legal force of moral standards of behavior of lawyers; directing efforts to solve the problem of identifying and eliminating dilettantism and legal nihilism in professional work; implementation of full-fledged criminological monitoring; creation of real mechanisms to strengthen legal science and practices; assessment of the authority of state and municipal employees on the part of the population. Conclusion. Prevention of crimes committed with the use of official position will remain a good wish if none of the proposed areas of preventive activity will be implemented.

Zombies in the story of the Holodomor: Brynykh’s outrage and the nation’s trauma

The gradual de-Sovietization of Eastern Europe caused the emergence of a “new historical wave” in literature, which combines various ways of covering historical material: from the traditional aesthetics of realism to playing with genres and stylistics on the border of socially acceptable techniques. The new Russian-Ukrainian war has actualized the issue of covering trauma in fiction. The question is whether a playful way of dealing with topics, sacralized by society, has the right to exist. The subject of the study is the poetics of Mykhailo Brynykh’s scandal and how it manifests itself in the author's text and personal branding. The purpose of the study is to outline the scandalous approach to highlighting the nation's trauma in Mykhailo Brynykh’s novel “Bread with cartilage” and to establish the correlation between the poetics of the scandal and the personality of the writer. The poetological and biographical methods were used to solve the tasks. As a result of the study, the following conclusions were made. The reaction of readers to new texts, where the topic of war appears, shows that they are more careful with authors who did not witness historical events but seek to use them for commercialization. An acceptable way, which will not cause public outrage, to use real stories to non-witness authors is a “bracketed representation” based on post-memory, which can be embodied by means of scandalous techniques that manifest themselves at various levels of the text. The main task of outrage is to expose the commonplace by rude means. The most obvious outrage in “Bread with cartilage” stands out precisely at the plot level, because the author combines the pop image of zombies with the topic of the Holodomor, which is sacralized in Ukrainian society. The trauma of the Holodomor is also manifested on different levels. According to the plot, the cannibalism gene is activated by alcohol, the abuse of which is a sign of social depression. The loss of identity is realized due to the stylistic play with the speech of one of the characters, which reveals the split of his personality. The correlation between the author's brand and his works with elements of outrage is important. Readers expect a prank from the writer, and therefore intuitively do not reject atypical representations. In his zombie novel, Mykhailo Brynykh used provocative means not only for the sake of playing with the reader, but also covered in a provocative way an event sacred to Ukrainians and achieved one of the main goals of the outrage — he exposed the problems of alcoholism or ignoring one's own history by rude means.

Unearthing the Social Oppression of Muslim Identity under American Imperialism in The Submission by Amy Waldman

This study is centred on the first novel published by the contemporary American author, Waldman, in 2011, entitled The Submission. The novel recounts the story of a Muslim architect named Mohammad who wins a contest to design the 9/11 memorial. Set in 2003, New York, the consequence is a serious public outrage swirling around Mohammad or, more precisely, the fact that he is a Muslim. This study highlights the issue of the social oppression of the identity of Muslim minority characters in America, and how they are perceived as inferior by their American counterparts using the concept of cultural imperialism and its related critical insights of oppression by the American socio-feminist philosopher, Young (1990). The objective of this study, accordingly, is to examine the author’s depictions of the American society as the cultural imperialism persecuting Muslim characters. The findings show the multifarious peculiarities of oppression as a social phenomenon embodying the genuine critical nuance of America as the miniatures of cultural imperialism that oppresses Muslim characters.
 
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Literary Racial Impersonation

Literary racial impersonation occurs when a narrative work fails to express the perspective of a minority ethnic or racial group. Interestingly, even when these works express moral themes congenial to promoting empathetic responses towards these groups, they can be met with public outrage if the group’s perspective is portrayed inaccurately. My goal in this paper is to vindicate the intuition that failure to express the perspective of a minority group well renders the work defective, both aesthetically and morally. I argue that available frameworks exploring the connections between aesthetic and moral realms of value are inadequate to analyzing this phenomenon and propose a novel connection between aesthetic and moral values. Specifically, I demonstrate that the primary defect of literary racial impersonation is aesthetic and contingently constitutes a moral defect in our current social context.

Beyond all boundaries: women empowerment and the Russian sportswear market

Learning outcomes The case demonstrated the importance of cultural peculiarities and mechanisms of customer learning in localizing global marketing campaigns. It introduced the consequences of unexpected spillover of viral marketing and PR scandals on the competition. It helps in developing the students’ ability to determine and assess the impact of viral marketing campaigns from the perspectives of various stakeholders of the organization. Case overview/synopsis In 2017, Nike Russia created one of the most successful and influential ad campaigns in the Russian women's sportswear market by encouraging young girls to try new sports. At the same time, Reebok launched a successful worldwide “be more human” campaign aimed at empowering women all around the globe. Two years later, Reebok Russia tried to localize the successful campaign while adjusting the message to be more assertive. As a result, the company met a country-wide outrage from both feminists and anti-feminists. The case centers around Nikolay Borisov, the CEO of Nike Russia, who was unexpectedly drawn into a provocative public discussion on the use of the female empowerment agenda for cause-related marketing. The case dilemma was set during mid-February 2019 and involved Borisov’s assessment of the impact of the competitor’s viral campaign on the market and choice of a reaction strategy to public outrage. Complexity academic level This case is appropriate for an undergraduate or graduate-level program curriculum for courses dedicated to or including topics related to positioning, doing business in emerging markets, corporate social responsibility and consumer behavior. Before engaging with the case, the students should be aware of basic management and economics-related concepts and terms, such as strategy, positioning, CSR and viral marketing. Supplementary materials Teaching notes are available for educators only. Subject code CSS 8: Marketing.

The associations between the credibility of the tobacco control regulatory body and smoking behavior change among Saudi smokers.

Recently, Saudi Arabia has extensively reformed its tobacco control policies and extended its smoking cessation services. A public outrage on social media among smokers was witnessed, especially after the implementation of plain cigarette packaging, which might have discredited the significant efforts of tobacco treatment services and tobacco control policies. However, it is not known how the credibility of the tobacco control regulatory body among Saudi smokers might affect their smoking behavior. Saudi tobacco smokers (n=511) were recruited using a convenience sampling technique. A cross-sectional survey was conducted comprising questions related to the credibility of the tobacco control regulatory body (modified Food and Drug Administration Tobacco Credibility Scale), quit attempts, use of nicotine replacement therapy (NRT), and motivation to change smoking behavior in the future. Logistic and linear regression models were used for the analysis. The public interest subscale of the credibility of the tobacco control regulatory body, was positively associated with confidence in changing smoking behavior (β=0.204; 95% CI: 0.078-0.713; t=2.449, p=0.015) and readiness to change smoking behavior (β=0.237; 95% CI: 0.127-0.727; t=2.802, p=0.005). Moreover, the subscale of expertise was positively associated with confidence in changing smoking behavior (β=0.190; 95% CI: 0.006-0.697; t=1.999, p=0.046) and readiness to change smoking behavior (β=0.225; 95% CI: 0.063-0.710; t=2.352, p=0.019). However, public interest in the credibility of the tobacco control regulatory body was negatively associated with NRT use among smokers who tried to quit (adjusted odds ratio, AOR=0.691; 95% CI: 0.526-0.909). The credibility of the tobacco control regulatory body, however, was not associated with the last month's or ever quit attempts. The credibility of the tobacco control regulatory body was positively associated with motivation to change smoking behavior but negatively associated with NRT use. Optimizing communication tools with the public is a potential avenue for improving smoking treatment and prevention in Saudi Arabia.

Negotiating the boundaries of the politically sayable: populist radical right talk scandals in the German media

ABSTRACT The breaking of speech taboos by populist radical right (PRR) parties and the resulting talk scandals have received considerable attention, with provocative statements being seen as playing a central role in generating media attention and in shifting the boundaries of what is sayable. In Germany, breaches of taboos by the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) have caused public outrage, with some claiming that the AfD follows a deliberate provocation strategy. This study examines the reactions to the AfD’s breaches of taboos as they play out in mainstream media. Focusing on reactions to five of the AfD’s most controversial statements, the study analyses 340 articles from the daily quality newspapers Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Süddeutsche Zeitung and Die Welt. The analysis zooms in on identifying (1) reactions to the taboo-breaking statements and how the boundaries of the respective taboos are being negotiated by the AfD and its critics, and (2) reflexive discourse on the role of breaches of taboos in the AfD’s political strategy and on the role of the media in responding to them.

Predator’s Progress: the bureaucratic challenges to the Clinton administration’s development and deployment of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (1993-2001)

ABSTRACT The utilization of drone technology by successive American administrations continues to provoke global protest. However, the operational and political basis for their use can be found in the 1990s, when they first became viewed as a pragmatic, cost-effective surveillance platform during the Clinton administration. The evolution of the U.S. Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) program reveals far greater continuity between successive administrations than has been previously acknowledged. This paper examines the bureaucratic challenges that the Clinton administration faced as it sought to implement the nascent UAV technology in its own war on terror, with little public scrutiny or outrage.

Ten simple rules for creating and sustaining antiracist graduate programs.

In 2020, the combination of police killings of unarmed Black people, including George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, and the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic brought about public outrage over long-standing inequalities in society. The events of 2020 ignited global attention to systemic racism and racial inequalities, including the lack of diversity, equity, and inclusion in the academy and especially in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM) fields. Racial and ethnic diversity in graduate programs in particular warrants special attention as graduate students of color report experiencing alarming rates of racism, discrimination, microaggressions, and other exclusionary behaviors. As part of the Graduate Dean’s Advisory Council on Diversity (GDACD) at the University of California Merced, the authors of this manuscript held a year-long discussion on these issues and ways to take meaningful action to address these persistent issues of injustices. We have outlined 10 rules to help graduate programs develop antiracist practices to promote racial and ethnic justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion (JEDI) in the academy. We focus on efforts to address systemic causes of the underrepresentation and attrition of students from minoritized communities. The 10 rules are developed to allow graduate groups to formulate and implement rules and policies to address root causes of underrepresentation of minoritized students in graduate education.