Audiences,metaphors, and the Persian Gulf war

This paper examines George Bush's Persian Gulf war addresses as a representative anecdote of Bush's campaign to build an international military coalition. The paper argues that in war rhetoric international audiences should be considered. A theorization of the international audience is offered. George Bush's public speeches are then analyzed as they use two metaphoric clusters. The SAVAGE cluster is used to justify a response to Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait. The CIVILIZATION cluster is used to justify an American‐led military response. The metaphoric clusters are shown to be persuasive to the international audience as they are adopted and recirculated by this audience. Conclusions and implications of the interaction of these two metaphoric clusters for future war rhetoric are offered.     

News Diversity and Minority Audiences

The rapid growth of Hispanics in the United States, the parallel growth of Spanish-language media, and the difficulties that this population continues to experience in terms of important socio-demographic indicators such as education, immigration, healthcare, and criminal justice, requires research that investigates the ways in which Spanish-language news outlets are delivering the information needed by this group in terms of providing a public service and contributing to democratic notions of the press. Democratic theories of the press posit that in order for a democracy to function properly, all groups should be provided with news coverage that reflects the voices, concerns, and interests of their communities. However, it has often proved difficult for news industries undergoing rapid growth and increasing corporate concentration to serve audiences with diverse news and information needs. In order to examine the extent to which Spanish-language news outlets are providing a diverse range of news and topics relevant to their audiences, researchers used software that gathers Real Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds to archive, organize, and analyze over 10,000 news stories posted to 28 Spanish-language news websites during October 2012. The results show some diversity in the range of topics covered, but the widespread duplication of content across platforms owned by a small handful of media conglomerates found in the results raises important questions about the impact of increasing news homogenization in the digital age and the potential implications for minority audiences.     

Understanding the Social Media Audiences of Radio Stations

This article investigates the online comments of news items posted on the Facebook pages of two popular Arabic-language radio channels: Radio Monte Carlo—France24 and Radio Netherlands Worldwide (RNW). This study examines over 184,000 comments with a special focus on the most liked posts in order to understand how audiences of regular radio interact on social media. The results indicate that audiences seem to be more engaged with posts that encourage participating in broad issues, interacting with clever quotes, and entering contests and less so with reading breaking news. With regards to news events and serious issues, this study also examined how social media users of these two Facebook “radio” sites responded to postings that differed from their own opinions, and seemingly actively engaged with contrasting or oppositional views or sentiments.     

Finding Power of Hidden Radio Audiences in the Fields of Guatemala

This paper provides a case study of a radio station in Guatemala notable for making programming decisions to serve rural audiences. Sometimes these broadcasters broke with accepted practice and provided programs that some listeners might consider controversial. However, the case study reveals these programs were pitched directly at an underserved niche in the audience of these broadcasters: low-income listeners from indigenous groups. This paper will document the history of these trends and discuss some of the methods of how these broadcasters serve this underserved audience.     

Talking to Listeners: Clandestine Audiences in the Early Cold War

As ‘classical’ radio monitoring was—due to massive censorship—only of limited value for gathering uncensored information on Central and Eastern Europe, Radio Free Europe (RFE) relied in the early Cold War extensively on uncensored information brought out by émigrés. RFE interviewed fresh escapees not only to gain knowledge on everyday life but to also collect information on the practice and persecution of clandestine radio listening behind the Iron Curtain. Through the lens of RFE listeners’ testimonies and audience reports from the early 1950s, this article explores interviewing as an unorthodox method for gathering information about its own clandestine audiences in the target countries. It uses the Western gaze of individual defectors to better understand how highly subjective stories of clandestine listening were captured, narratively framed and employed in the ideological battle between East and West.     

浅谈重庆日报对外报道的有效性

本文对重庆日报对外报道的有效性进行了分析。     

全球化进程中的澳大利亚广告业

广告产业蕴含着巨大的经济、文化和社会力量 ,是支撑所有商业媒体的原动力 ,在全球经济一体化的进程中 ,这种特征犹为明显。本文探讨了澳大利亚广告业的发展历程以及经济全球化对澳大利亚广告业造成的影响 ,并对其前景作了描述。     

Egoism Versus Altruism in Television Content for Young Audiences

The model of intuitive morality and exemplars is an organizational framework that was created to incorporate theories of basic human motivations with both micro- and macrolevel media research. Thus far, literature has integrated a framework of basic moral intuitions (here labeled altruistic motivations) with the model but has yet to integrate a framework of basic egoistic motivations. The current study integrates frameworks for both altruistic and egoistic motivations with the model in order to examine depictions of motivational incongruities (e.g., moral dilemmas) in television content for young audiences. Findings suggest that the frequency of depicted motivational incongruities increases as audience target-age increases. In addition, findings show that most motivational incongruities involve both egoistic motives versus altruistic ones, rather than just egoistic or altruistic motives alone. Discussion centers on implications for research on media and morality as well as entertainment theory.     

Teaching Students How to Analyze and Adapt to Audiences

Goal: To provide students with an opportunity to understand, practice, and evaluate audience adaptation

Courses: Persuasion and Public Speaking     

新时期戏曲观众审美心理探析

本文认为,在中国传统戏曲孕育、发展、成熟过程中,构成了戏曲观众审美心理中以善美合一为主导的稳定的定势,且具有极强的传承性.但在戏曲观演双方的互动演进中,戏曲观众相对稳定的审美心理定势在不同的历史条件下发生着变化,进入新时期以来尤为显著.但这种变化又是渐进式的,"变"中有"常","常"中有"变",并在此基础上形成了新的民族性审美心理定势.在经济因素的介入下,讲究表层感官享受和内在文化品位相结合的审美风尚逐渐形成主流,因此,精致典雅的舞台风范和全面细致的宣传策划,是当下戏曲在都市生存的一种必然选择.     

网络传播时代受众对抗式解读的辩证分析

受众通过网络对抗式解读主流媒体信息已成为一种普遍现象,受众的对抗式解读源于转型期现实利益的冲突、网络环境推波助澜、舆论领袖刻意推动以及网络受众有心发言或盲目跟随.要辩证地对待受众的对抗式解读:一是开放包容与坚守底线相结合;二是倾听众声喧哗与打捞“沉默的声音”相结合;三是寻求认识的最大“公约数”与理性引导相结合;四是解决现实问题与解决思想问题相结合.     

全球化 华夏文明传播的新机遇

在经济全球化中 ,各国不同文化的传播与碰撞 ,凸现出中华优秀民族文化的内在活力和人文价值 ,成为解决文化冲突和医治各种社会疾患可资借鉴的良方之一。文章还分析了中华文化在新世纪多元化格局中的价值取向 ,指出在实现现代化过程中 ,弘扬中华文化自身的整合与重构强势 ,吸纳、借鉴、融合外来优秀文化 ,是创造中华民族新文化的有效途径     

新媒体时代主旋律电影与受众间的建构与解构关系

新媒体环境下,主旋律电影与受众间的关系受意识形态、资本市场、媒介技术的影响而发生诸多显著变化.一方面,主旋律电影在新的传播环境下,借助新的传播理念和媒介技术,从主体性和群体性两方面继续加强对受众的积极建构;另一方面,社会价值的多元化导向和信息来源的多样化方式使得受众群体对主旋律电影的解读呈现差异化特征,一定程度上反作用于主旋律电影的建构过程.传受双方试图在试探、协商、妥协的互动关系中建立新的共生模式,寻求新的创新之路.     

Informatization,globalization, and privatization in the new Millenium

Informatization is the process through which the new communication technologies are used as a means for furthering socioeconomic development as a nation becomes more and more an information society. The informatization strategy in very recent years has provided an alternative to previous strategies of development communication. India is an example of such a shift, as the New Economic Policy of 1991 opened the nation's borders to global competition and encouraged a change from state‐owned institutions to private businesses. Several high‐technology cities like Bangalore and Hyderabad helped India become a major player in the computer software industry. The privatization of Indian television promoted consumerism, capitalism, and other Western values. One result of informatization is a growing digital divide between the majority of India's population versus the 100 million urban, elite information workers. Comparisons are made with Singapore's road to informatization.     

Culture,communication, and the challenge of globalization

This essay deals with the problematics that globalization poses for critical communication scholarship. Globalization challenges our understanding of culture and identity in ways that both open up new directions for communication scholarship and invite a rethinking of current ones. First, we discuss how difference is unsettled and re/staged in the context of globalization. Second, we address how uneven patterns of global processes are enacted through cultural practices produced by the transnational flows of images and capital. This essay explores several areas of contemporary global growth with the overall objective of demonstrating the urgency of rethinking the study of culture in critical communication studies.

One of the most important implications of globalism is simply that there is no longer a space elsewhere. This means that instead of thinking in terms of displacements, a movement elsewhere, it is important for cultural studies to think in terms of dis-location, which is the transformation of place. –Ackbar Abbas (1997, p. 312), “Cultural Studies in Postculture.”

To think globality is to think of the politics of thinking globality. –Gayatri Chakravorti Spivak (1999, p. 364), A critique of postcolonial reason.     

Transformative Radio and Stubborn Audiences: A Tale of Two Cities

A decade ago the regional programming of CBC Toronto successfully transformed itself with a new notion of community reflection that utilized a range of emerging digital platforms but put narrative radio storytelling at its centre. With the launch of CBC Hamilton in Spring 2012, as Canada's sole digital-only public broadcasting outlet (no over-the-air TV or radio), audio storytelling was conspicuously absent from the equation. Based on the only publicly available research conducted with CBC users and community leaders prior to and following both launches, the authors raise questions about audience conceptions and the enduring value of audio storytelling in an era of digital broadcasting and social media.     

Finding Audiences for Our Research: Rethinking the Issue of Ethical Challenges

This essay is a fleshed-out version of a presentation to the 2011 COST Action workshop on the challenges of audience research. In it, I explore what I see as some overlooked problems in research ethics protocols, relating to the assumptions and models about our relations with research participants which resonate with wider “figures of the audience,” which occur widely. In place of these, I outline a notion of “trust” as the proper goal of researcher-participants relations.