I teach and carry out research on the effects of mass media and political communication on stereotyping and prejudice, particularly with regard to public opinion about race and sexual orientation. My recent book, The Obama Effect: How the 2008 Campaign Changed White Racial Attitudes (RSF, 2014), combines large-scale survey data and automated text analysis of all U.S. news sources available on the Internet to demonstrate that mediated exposure to Obama and his family during the 2008 presidential campaign helped to reduce white racial prejudice. As part of this project, I helped develop and execute the 2008 National Annenberg Election Survey (NAES), a five-wave nationally representative panel survey executed online, with 95,464 completed interviews between October 2007 and January 2009. My current research tracks changes over time in racial attitudes beyond the 2008 campaign using additional re-interviews of whites and blacks in 2010 and 2012/2013. In addition to survey research, several of my current projects employ population-based survey experiments. For example, one study uses a national survey and an experiment embedded in a separate survey to investigate the effects of conservatives’ attacks on “activist judges” on the underlying drivers of support for gay marriage. Another study uses two experiments embedded in a nationally representative survey of heterosexual and LGB Americans to assess the effects of “victim” portrayals of LGBs in the media on both majority prejudice and minority pride.
