Massive news revelations often leave stable foreign policy attitudes unchanged

Evidence

Table 8.1 reveals that public opinion on these matters changed hardly at all in response to the Iran-Contra revelation. Isolationism as a broad stance, attitudes toward U.S. involvement in Central America in general, and willingness to support more assistance to the Contras were all apparently unaffected by news of the diversion of funds, although more citizens than before claimed afterward that the United States’ position in the world was weakening (45.1% vs .37.6%, p<.02). This one shift probably has less to do with the Iran-Contra disclosure than with the wide-spread perception in the public that the Reagan administration had undertaken an arms-for-hostages deal with Iran. — John T. Jost and Jim Sidanius, Political Psychology, 1587

Categorization

• QUESTION: Why would public assessments of overall performance drop while specific policy attitudes stay flat? Distinguishes between evaluations of the president as a person and evaluations of distinct policy stances.
• SEED: Essay angle: media priming theory predicts scandals shift the criteria of evaluation, not the specific attitudes themselves — a subtle but crucial difference in how we understand political scandal effects.
• XREF: connects to: Anti-foreign fears persist in contained form instead of being eliminated — John Higham, Strangers in the Land: Patterns of…, 170