Covert framing, not policy substance, determined public protests

Evidence

This response has been in many ways surprising. While Muslims are more aggressively targeted, as I’ve shown, both President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama participated in surveillance of Muslims. Yet there were no protests at airports when Bush prevented Muslim noncitizens from twenty-four countries from entering the United States immediately after 9/11. The covert ways in which the Obama and Bush administrations implemented these policies did not incite protest. Both Bush and Obama utilized rhetoric that made it appear their policies were targeting not Muslims but terrorism. … In contrast, the public today is more aware that Trump’s overt anti-Muslim and Islamophobic rhetoric is racist toward Muslims. — Saher Selod, Forever Suspect_ Racialized…, 480

Categorization

• XREF: Causal mechanism of how official rhetoric shapes public perception of surveillance; resonates with the framing discussion in Communication as Culture. — connects to: Lawmakers and the public label any non-accepted protest as violent — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2596; Treating issues as purely technical makes public protest look like attention-seeking, not debate. — Nina Eliasoph, Avoiding politics: how Americans…, 1027; Well-planned protest spectacles can dictate front-page coverage — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 369 (+4 more)
• SEED: Angle: the rhetorical packaging of surveillance policy decides whether protest happens — covert vs. overt racism as the real variable.