Recently we set out to examine in a novel way the connections between what people see in local newscasts and what they think about juvenile crime. We designed an experiment to assess the impact of the "superpredator news frame" in which the only difference between what groups of viewers saw in a news story involved the race of the alleged youth perpetrator.

This paper is a preliminary consideration of slate mail. We provide some basic information about the nature and use of slate mail in California and about the policy debates that have surrounded it in the last decade or two.4 We then briefly describe a program of experimental research into the effects of slate mail and report and analyze in detail the results of one such experiment.