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Show Cedar Leaders Queried on Soviet Attitudes Fifty church, civic, fraternal, and service leaders in Cedar City Ci-ty were interviewed extensively about their attitudes toward the Soviet Union and the results were Included in a recently completed Master's thesis by CSU staff member George Barrus. The tests tes-ts was a part of graduation requirements re-quirements at the Brigham Young University. I Spontaneous responses from Cedar City leaders indicated they held attitudes that were 58 per ' cent negative, 26 per cent neu-! neu-! tral, and 18 per cent positive toward to-ward the U. S. S. R. Public education was the only area of Soviet activity where pos-itive pos-itive attitudes dominated the mental picture. Home life of the ordinary citizen of Russia was the most difficult for the leaders to visualize. Twenty per cent of the respondents "had no idea" what the average citizen of the , USSR did or thought. These community leaders experienced ex-perienced high exposure to the various news media, newspapers, news magazines, television news and radio news. Ninety-eight per cent used one or all four of the media. These leaders indicated that these media were also their major sources of information about the Soviet Union. However, these leaders rated their news media as being only C9.3 per cent accurate and complete in reports about the Soviet Union. The same me,dia were rated at 77.3 per cent accuracy on information inform-ation in and about the United States. Respondents chose newspapers news-papers as the least accurate of all media but as the primary source of information about the Soviet Union. A determination of background information about the Soviet Union Un-ion revealed that respondents had very little factual material. In a' question to recall historic facts or names and events, the average number of recalls was only 7.1. Social and economic factors of sex, occupation, education, age, and financial status played roles in attitude formulation. Variations Varia-tions in the factors produced difference dif-ference in attitudes. |
