Presidential vetoes and American Indian affairs, 1789–2000

Between the years 1789 and 2000, nineteen Presidents of the United States vetoed 114 bills or resolutions concerning matters related to Indian affairs. These executive actions are collected in a new digital resource, and are presented with their supporting Congressional documents. A brief history of Presidential veto power and activities is included.     

Negro use of television and newspapers for political information, 1952–1964

An almost unheralded, but very important, communications phenomenon of the past couple of decades is the massive shift of Negroes from a “low media use”; pattern to a “high television use”; pattern for information gaining activity. The development is particularly clear with respect to the obtaining of political information by Negroes, as is shown in this secondary analysis of four Survey Research Center national probability samples, from 1952 through 1964. Maxwell McCombs, formerly on the faculty of UCLA, is presently assistant professor in the School of Journalism at the University of North Carolina.     

The functional approach to presidential television spots: Acclaiming,attacking, defending 1952–2000

This study examined the impact that instructional technology use, course design, and instructor and student sex differences have on students’ initial perceptions of affect toward the course and the instructor. Participants included 864 students who were randomly assigned to read one of 16 scenarios that manipulated the amount of instructional technology use across two types of courses with either male or female instructors. A factorial analysis of variance revealed a significant main effect for technology use on students’ initial affect, as well as a significant two‐way interaction effect of technology use by student sex. Planned cell comparisons revealed that technology use has primarily a curvilinear effect, whereby students in the minimal and moderate technology use conditions reported higher levels of initial affect than students in the no technology and complete technology conditions. For the two‐way interaction effect, planned cell comparisons revealed that female students reported higher levels of affect as the amount of technology use increased from minimal to moderate amounts of use, whereas male students reported lower levels of affect across the same two conditions. Overall, the results highlight the importance of using instructional technology within a framework of pedagogical methods designed to achieve specific instructional objectives.     

Rating competition and the patterns of South Korean public television programming, 1990–95

This research note presents an analysis of TV programming in south Korea over a period of five years. The paper is concerned with the changing face of public service broadcasting due to the effects of the new commercial situation. It includes a brief summary of Korea's TV history and a comparison of the programming strategies employed by the public broadcasting network and its commercial rivals. The author concludes by suggesting that Korean public broadcasting needs to reappraise its current response to the multi‐channel environment, and to develop a service aimed at promoting a sense of national community.     

Critics’ and public perceptions of violence in television programs

The following article is one of the first fruits of a million dollars’ worth of research by some two dozen investigators that was sponsored by the Surgeon General's Scientific Advisory Committee in an attempt to examine the possible links between the mass media and violence. The research upon which this particular publication is based was performed pursuant to Contract No. HSM 42–70–32 with the National Institute of Mental Health, Health Services and Mental Health Administration, U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare. Dr Greenberg, associate professor in the Department of Communication at Michigan State University, and a frequent contributor to the Journal, was the principal investigator. Mr. Gordon, a Ph.D. candidate, was senior research assistant in the same department.     

Counting the house in public television: A history of ratings use, 1953–1980

This study explores the evolution, diffusion and application of audience research in public television from its origins through the 1970s, the formative period for the system. Shifts in funding structures for public TV and the rise of cable and satellite competition are reflected in the changing practice of such research.     

Colleges and universities offering course work in radio and television, 1957–1958

In the near future, the Journal expects to publish most of the major study briefly introduced in the following article. Only a bare start has been made in analyzing the data. Volunteers with suggestions for further analysis are urged to write Dr. Glenn Starlin, c/o the Journal. Mr. Hulbert, who supervised the data processing to date, is Manager of Broadcast Personnel and Economics for the National Association of Broadcasters.     

A bibliography of studies of radio and television program content, 1928–1958

Unlike a telephone or telgraph cable, a broadcast, once sent out over the air, can only be “stopped” at the receiving end. If the potential listeners have radio receiving sets able to pick up the broadcast, it can only be stopped by causing such radio interference as to make it difficult or impossible to listen to the original broadcast. Over the years, several nations have assumed the large cost of producing such interference, or “jamming,” so as to prevent their citizens from listening to the broadcasts of other nations. An expensive and often inefficient technique, jamming was then believed preferable to allowing unrestricted and uncensored international communication by radio. Mr. Ranjan Borra, who was associated with All India Radio and with the Voice of America for several years and is currently on the staff of the Library of Congress describes both the background and some of the encouraging recent developments in the field of jamming and other impediments to international broadcasting.     

Fourth annual survey of colleges and universities offering course work in radio and television, 1959–1959

The possibility that one mass medium might be used to stimulate another has been only imperfectly explored. For instance, a campaign by radio personality Jean Shepherd some years ago led to the birth of the monumental spoof that was the novel I, Libertine by “Frederick R. Ewing.” The delight of Shepherd's “night people” at being able to demonstrate their numbers was matched by the consternation of booksellers all over the city who impotently thumbed through their catalogs . . . until Shepherd took pity on them and arranged for the book to be written and published. In another instance, a participant on a late‐evening network program casually commented on a book that had caught his eye—and it was a national best‐seller within 24 hours.

The research reported in the following article attempts to discover whether this “touting” function of the broadcast media can be used systematically. A number of informal observations following “book review” or “library” programs on both radio and television would tend to support this idea. However, the following study was specifically designed to generate data that would demonstrate to broadcaster and librarian alike whether radio programs could be used by librarians (and presumably booksellers as well) to promote selection by the audience of pre‐determined books.     

American political rhetoric and the jeremiad tradition: Presidential nomination acceptance addresses, 1960–1976

The nomination acceptance addresses of recent presidential candidates constitute a significant aspect of an American political ritual. These addresses might be termed a “modern jeremiad”; because they conform to the jeremiad tradition in American rhetoric. Like the Puritan jeremiad which was central to a religious ritual, the modern jeremiad continues to function rhetorically as a means for interpreting the meaning of America's past and unifying the audience around a shared vision of America's future.     

European public service television and the cultural‐educational logic: A comparative analysis of children's and youth programming

One of the most recurrent themes in studies on European television trends, is that the policies of liberalization and deregulation have caused the industry to follow a more market‐oriented or crass commercial logic. New technologies and policies have led to an explosion in the number of commercial channels; new financial, organizational and programming strategies; increasing pressure from advertising and multinationals; and a decreasing role of the state in production and distribution.

This paper looks at how such pressures have affected the policies of European public service broadcasters (PSBs), by concentrating on their traditional commitment to education in an analysis of children's and youth programmes as an index of this change.     

Government public relations when trouble hits: exploring political dispositions,situational variables,and government–public relationships to predict communicative action of publics

Government agencies may face a crisis due to their inappropriate responses to natural or man-made disasters. However, crisis communication in government public relations has not been extensively researched. This study aimed to explore a segmentation framework to predict the communicative action of citizens by using political dispositions, situational variables and organization–public relationships (OPRs). Ideology, voting history, trust, and problem recognition were significant factors to predict pro-government megaphoning, whereas referent criterion was a significant factor to predict anti-government megaphoning.     

The Russian intelligentsia in the public sphere: The mass‐circulation press and political culture, 1860–1917

An independent, commercial mass‐circulation newspaper industry boomed at the end of the tsarist era, one analogous in most respects to that which evolved in the West during the nineteenth century. The Russian press, however, differed significantly from the Western press in the manner in which it functioned politically. Russian journalism, too, helped to open a public sphere in the autocratic environment, in concert with a series of social and political reforms in the 1860s. However, when those reforms failed to create a political order guaranteed by a constitution, the press reconstituted that sphere in a way to actually thwart the evolution of Western liberalism. The pivotal event in this process proved to be the failure of the 1905 Revolution to secure the postreform decades of incremental gains. Like most of the rest of society, journalists became so disappointed by the limited concessions exacted from the government that they lost hope that the autocracy could be reformed. Newspapers sought new political symbols in Russia's past; they found an equally disillusioned intelligentsia, whom they historicized and manipulated so as to undermine whatever substantive part they could have played in using the press as a genuinely transformative institution central to the public sphere.     

Queer in Your Ear: Connecting Space,Community, and Identity in LGBT BBC Radio Programs, 1992–2000

This article analyses two long-running gay and lesbian radio programs from the BBC from the 1990s to highlight different approaches to notions of identity and definition, based on items that focused on interactions with physical space, both public and private. The weekly program Gay and Lesbian London broadcast in London on BBC GLR94.9 contained items that constructed a different relationship between gay identity and locations, compared to Gaytalk on BBC GMR, and its relationship with Manchester. By exploring the significance of gay and lesbian radio in relation to ideas around community, and its relationship with the editorial narrative, the paper argues there is fluidity between community and identity. The subsequent analysis of the radio output in the two programs focuses on the intersection between spatial relationships and sexuality. Content from the Manchester program foregrounded the prominence of the city’s commercial area, the Gay Village, in queer lives, while in London, domesticity and dispersed community apart from the gay scene dominated the narrative. The way these two programs mediated the relationship between communities of listeners and their locations throws light on gay and lesbian experiences during an important period of social and political change.     

Public service broadcasting,children’s television,and market failure: The case of the United Kingdom

Domestically produced children’s television is frequently highlighted as both an area of market failure, and also as an area where children’s changing consumption habits necessitate new and different ways of thinking about funding children’s content across a range of platforms. In the light of a recent U.K. proposal to set up a Public Service Content Fund to support “genres” under threat, including children’s programming, this article considers how you fund diverse high-quality children’s content in a more challenging media environment where children’s content is arguably still a market failure “genre.” The first part of the article provides context by outlining the market failure characteristics of children’s content as a framework for analyzing the validity of market failure arguments across a range of platforms. It then investigates the causes of perceived market failure in the U.K. children’s television production market. The final part examines the implications of recent U.K. policy responses to provision for children that seek to address market failure through (1) the possible introduction of a contestable fund for public service content; (2) more stringent obligations on the British Broadcasting Corporation; and (3) the re-imposition of quotas on commercially funded public service broadcastings (ITV, Channel 4, Five). Drawing on regulatory and stakeholder responses, it concludes that attempts to overcome market failure in U.K. children’s television appear unsuited for funding the longer-term curation, distribution, and discovery of new types of content on platforms other than broadcasting.