Tolerance for Extremists Index

Tolerance toward extreme groups was measured by asking respondents for their level of agreement with the following statements: “I feel sorry for groups that are the targets of FBI surveillance,” “the media should give extremist groups the opportunity to express their views,” “a group that is targeted by the FBI probably deserves the treatment it gets” (reverse-coded), and “the media should not encourage extremist groups by providing news coverage” (reverse-coded). Tolerance toward extreme groups was constructed by averaging respondents’ answers on a 10-point scale (Cronbach’s alpha = .75, M = 6.00, SD = 1.77).

Tolerance for Targeted Group Index

Tolerance for the targeted group was operationalized with an additive index of four statements taken from Marcus et al. (1995), but modified to fit the current social context. Subjects were asked how they felt about a set of statements regarding the treatment of the hypothetical group that had appeared on the manipulation stories: group members should be allowed to work as a teacher in public schools, hold public rallies, broadcast public access cable programs, and share their views over the Internet. Items were measured on 10-point scales from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree.” Responses were used to create an index averaging the scores from these items (Cronbach’s α = .77, M = 7.12, SD = 1.86).