News on the 700 Club: The Cycle of Religious Activism

This content analysis evaluates political topics and themes of televangelist Pat Robertson's high-profile news program The 700 Club during the early months of the 1992 presidential campaign. Considered the media arm of the Religious Right, this program was found to go against the trend of increasingly political and less religious content observed in earlier analyses of equivalent episodes during the 1983, 1986, and 1989 seasons. In addition, political topics were addressed more neutrally than in the past. The study discusses the possible impact of an increasingly competitive telecommunication environment on religious broadcasters.

How Effective are Codes of Ethics? A Look at Three Newsrooms

Few changes in journalism ethics have been as dramatic as the proliferation of codes of ethics in newsrooms. Yet little has been done to assess how codes of ethics shape journalists' behavior when they are faced with real ethical problems. This study explores that question by looking at the role that codes have played in real cases in three separate newsrooms.

The Messages Replication Factor: Methods Tailored to Messages as Objects of Study

In research on effects of message variables, it is generally necessary to examine responses to actual messages that represent, embody, or instantiate the values of the variable of interest. Researchers have lately become attentive to problems of confounding in the use of individual concrete messages to represent abstract theoretical contrasts, and replicated treatment comparisons are increasingly common in communication research. How to treat the replications factor in the statistical analysis remains controversial. Whether to treat replication factors as fixed or as random hinges on what is assumed about the relationship between abstract treatment contrasts and their concrete material implementations. We argue that reflection on this relationship justifies a general policy of treating replications as random. Two circumstances in which fixed-effects analyses might seem attractive (the case of matched-message designs and the case of experimental manipulations occurring outside of messages) are considered, but it is concluded that these situations also require random-effects analyses.

Books as Culture/Books as Commerce

The book industry historically has been characterized as caught between two seemingly conflicting goals: to contribute to the cultural life of the society and to make a profit. As the most influential medium for information about books, the text of the New York Times Book Review reflects that conflict and marks the boundary between books as culture and books as commerce in a way that maintains an artificial distinction between high and low culture.

“A Death in the Family” – A Case Study of Newspaper Influence on Health Policy Development

This case study of an Alabama newspaper's series on infant mortality and of subsequent changes in related state health services shows that the series helped increase public support for policy changes to reduce infant mortality and created pressure on the governor and legislators to make those changes. Factors that seem to have affected the series' influence include expert agreement on solutions, the existence of supportive private citizen groups and public officials, Alabama's political situation, the newspaper's location in the capitol city, widespread distribution of series reprints, editorial and reporting follow-ups, and publicity when the series won a Pulitzer Prize.

Black and White Models and Their Activities in Modern Cigarette and Alcohol Ads

This article compares model characterizations and activity portrayals of blacks and whites in modern cigarette and alcohol advertising. An analysis of 418 cigarette and alcohol ads appearing in eleven magazines from June 1990 through June 1991 revealed a world in which blacks and whites smoke and drink separately, seldom encountering one another. Despite this segregation, black and white portrayals are similar in terms of sexual suggestiveness and involvement in erotic or romantic activities. However, noteworthy differences also exist. For example, blacks are more often portrayed in leisure activities while whites are portrayed at work. Femininity is a more dominant theme in black than in white representations, while masculinity themes are more dominant in ads with white representations.

Latest from the Canadian Revolution: Early War Correspondence in the New York Herald, 1837–1838

In December 1837, New York Herald publisher James Gordon Bennett announced to his readers that he had decided to dispatch special correspondents to report on armed uprisings in Canada. His decision constitutes one of the earliest uses of war correspondents by the American press, and it was part of a developing practice to draw on contributors specifically engaged to furnish newspapers with reports from afar. While other papers also sent correspondents to cover the Canadian conflict, the Herald stood out because of the structure and organization of its news gathering efforts.

The Effectiveness of Locator Maps in Increasing Reader Understanding of the Geography of Foreign News

This study tested the influence of two techniques of providing contextual geographical information in foreign news stories - the traditional method of weaving it into the text and the increasingly common method of including a map with the story. Results of the experiment indicated that newspaper readers' understanding of the geographical context of a foreign event can be increased either by building geographical information into the text or by including a map, but the most effective technique is the redundant one of providing geographical information both in the text and via a map.

Source v. Content Effects on Judgments of News Believability

A between-groups 3 × 3 factorial experiment (N=516) tests effects of message type and source reputation on judgments of news believability, judgments conceptualized as source credibility (judgments about the source), and assessments of apparent reality (judgments about the message content). Three indices combining measures of source credibility and message apparent reality emerge from a factor analysis, comprising judgments of (1) source truthfulness and message accuracy, (2) source expertise and message representativeness, and (3) source bias and personal perspective. The results show that a more innocuous message results in more positive judgments of believability, but the reputation of the source has no direct effect on believability judgments, nor does it interact with message type. It is concluded that at least some publics base judgments of news believability more on judgments of the apparent reality of message content rather than on the reputation of the media source.