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CONTENT ANALYSIS OF MORAL MAJORITY REPORT

Statement of Assumptions and Research Methods. As noted in our literature review above, the popularity of an SMO or its leader(s) is not a very useful indicator of organizational strength. We argue that a more useful technique for assessing organizational strength is to examine its activities. What are an organization's goals and projects? Is there evidence to indicate that the organization is engaged in activities aimed at achieving its stated goals?

The Moral Majority Report is a monthly newspaper offered "at no cost as an extension of the Moral Majority Foundation" (11/85 masthead, pg. 2). This is the only regularly scheduled publication of Moral Majority and, as such, offers the best possible public record of Moral Majority activities.

We do not assume that MMR reports all activities of the Moral Majority. Some activities, such as lobbying, may be more effective if they remain low-keyed or even private information. Similarly, active SMO leaders are often too busy engaging in movement activities to stop and provide a chronicle of what they do. Thus, we would expect some underreporting of organizational activity. But it is also reasonable to assume:

1. (1) that the national organization has an interest in promoting itself to its "members" and other readers of MMR;
2. (2) that significant activities, whether carried out by the national or state organizations, will not go unknown to the tabloid and, thus;
3. (3) most significant activities will be reported in the pages of MMR.

A corollary assumption is that the absence of reports of organizational activity can be interpreted as an indicator of the lack of organizational activities.

In order to assess the nature and magnitude of Moral Majority activities, we conducted a content analysis of all issues of the MMR for the calendar years of 1984 and 1985. The Report appears in tabloid newspaper form, typically 24 pages in length.

A typical issue of MMR features some topic of interest to the New Christian Right, e.g., pornography, homosexuality, abortion, school prayer, etc. In addition to this feature section, MMR carries columns of several conservative writers, news stories of interest to conservative Christians, an insert about Liberty University and some commercial advertising.

Another regular feature of the newspaper during the time period of our examination was called "Moral Majority Reports." This section included reports from the "National Officers" as well as "State-By-State" reports. This section seemed ideally suited for our efforts to chronicle the activities of the Moral Majority.

Before deciding to focus on the "Moral Majority Reports" section of the newspaper, however, we conducted a global survey of the entire content of the newspaper. For the two year period under investigation, we concluded that the pages of MMR provide no evidence of sustained ongoing activities or projects that can be uniquely attributed to the Moral Majority. We expected that the Moral Majority would have programatic activities dealing with each of the topics featured in the newspaper, but we found little news about Moral Majority activities per se that would document specific organizational activities.

With this global evidence, we turned to a systematic analysis of the section of the news tabloid entitled "Moral Majority Reports." A cursory examination of the reports of the National Leaders revealed evidence that they, as individuals, were engaged in various activities, speaking, lobbying, etc. But again we found an absence of specificity regarding organizational activities.

Hence, we decided to concentrate our analysis on the "State-By-State" reports. The Moral Majority claims to be a grass-roots network of local and state organizations. If the organization is functioning well at this level, the state reports should provide good evidence of the nature and extent of grass roots activities.

The unit of analysis for this investigation, thus, is the State-By-State reports. Our strategy for analysis is to record all activities reported. An activity was very broadly defined as any event (general or specific) reported in the State-By-State sub-section of the Moral Majority Reports. Each activity was classified in terms of nature of the activity and the issue content of the activities. Nature refers to what was done, e.g. demonstrating, registering voters, monitoring legislators, lobbying, etc. Issue content refers to the substantive matter of the activity, e.g., pornography, abortion, homosexuality, etc. In addition we coded

a number of demographic variables such as state, region, who participated, how many, the time frame, the target group, etc.