This Essay offers an examination of the legal provision of the USA Patriot Act. It then looks at the distinct shift in U.S. media reporting on this legislation over time, and in-depth public opinion findings on people\u27s mixed views of post-9/11 civil liberties. This Essay concludes that media coverage of events is best accompanied by tracking polls, to chart how much and why the U.S. public is coalescing or further dividing on issues of individual liberties during crisis

Abdolian, Lisa Finnegan

Takooshian, Harold

Fordham University School of Law

English

The USA Patriot Act: Civil Liberties, the Media, and Public Opinion

The new millennium was not yet one year old when it was rocked by the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001. How does the public regard the continued protection of individual rights, after this greatest terrorist attack in U.S. history? This has naturally been a topic of intense and thorough media reporting in the United States, and worldwide. In the uneasy months following the WTC attack, an interdisciplinary team of researchers at Fordham University designed and conducted a survey of public opinions on terrorism, with several distinct objectives: 1) to question a representative sample of adults in Greater New York, including those in the vicinity of Ground Zero in New York; 2) to apply a previously standardized twenty point scale of general attitudes toward terrorism to compare with public opinions prior to 2001; and 3) to develop and use two new scales to precisely measure attitudes toward al-Qaeda terrorism in particular, and toward security versus individual liberties in the United States. Surprisingly, this terrorism mean of 6.8 after the 2001 terrorist attack was almost unchanged from the mean of 6.5 among ninety college students in 1993

Fordham University: DigitalResearch@Fordham

The USA Patriot Act: Civil Liberties, The Media, and Public Opinion

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https://ir.lawnet.fordham.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2097&amp;context=ulj

The USA Patriot Act: Civil Liberties, the Media, and Public Opinion

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Fordham University School of Law

Fordham University: DigitalResearch@Fordham

bepress Legal Repository