favorable views toward the United States or the American tsunami relief efforts.
Rank orders for each question are in parentheses. The first two columns of Table
4 seem to suggest that bias -- perhaps both for and against the United States -- had
an impact on opinions about the adequacy of American tsunami relief efforts.
There is an enormous range of views on the U.S.-led relief effort, disregarding
U.S. respondents, who were overwhelmingly favorable. Sixty-two percent of the
Russian public considered American efforts adequate, as compared to 34 percent
who did not; at the other extreme, only 17 percent of the Greek public considered
American efforts adequate, as compared to 73 percent who did not. None or
almost none of these respondents had any personal experience of the operation on
which they had opinions; they had to be reacting to media coverage, their own
schema, and the nationally prevailing images of the American relief effort.
-- Tables 4 and 5 about here. --
There exists a strong correlation between general views of the United
States and views of the adequacy of American-led tsunami relief efforts, with a
Spearman rank-order coefficient well under the 0.01 level of significance. Three
of the five publics most favorably disposed toward the United States in general,
rank also among the five most favorable publics toward the U.S. relief effort, and
conversely for the least favorable publics. It is particularly instructive to examine
the variation in attitudes among the European countries whose publics were
polled by GMI. For these countries there is a wide variation in responses to the
tsunami; the rank orders in the two columns are almost perfectly correlated.
These correlations, for all 20 countries and only for the European ones, provide
strong evidence in favor of the proposition that general attitudes toward the
United States "bleed over" into attitudes toward its tsunami relief efforts,
particularly for publics such as those in France and Greece with strong negative
predispositions toward the United States
The third column of Table 4 indicates clearly that, with only a few
exceptions, publics rate their own country's performance highly favorably.
38
In chapter 5, Meunier argues on the basis of an analysis of the French media that the French reaction to
American tsunami relief efforts should not be interpreted as reflecting anti-American bias, and that the
French media were also highly critical of France's reaction. But the polling data indicate that the French
public was overwhelmingly supportive of France's response and even more overwhelmingly critical of that
of the United States.
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Convention