Absurd Masculinity: Will Ferrell’s Time-Bending Comic Persona

The key to Will Ferrell’s success is his genuinely likeable comic persona that relies on overdetermined and excessively masculine and feminine traits. Accordingly, this article argues that despite criticism surrounding Ferrell’s comedic films, they actually have a great deal to tell us about masculinity and comedy in the new millennium. By discussing Anchorman, Elf, and Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, the author asserts that Ferrell’s films map changes to masculine identity in the post-9/11 era by their representations of absurd masculinity embodied in Ferrell’s comic persona.     

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.     

Movement as memory: Significant form in eyes on the prize

Eyes on the Prize: America's Civil Rights Years ranks as one of the most successful public television documentaries ever produced. Although it originally aired in 1987, the series has since been shown widely in school and college classrooms, where it arguably has influenced many students’ understanding of the civil rights struggle and, more fundamentally, of the nature and form of “social movement” itself This essay draws upon Kenneth Burke's concept of “significant form” to examine how the documentary's design works to shape public memory of the civil rights struggle as a social movement. In addition to yielding insight into the rhetorical structure of a landmark television documentary, the analysis of form in Eyes on the Prize illumines how public consciousness of “social movement” can be created and perpetuated through narrative form.     

Journalism,Moral Panic and the Public Interest

The public interest is commonly presumed to be fundamental to the practice of journalism. Journalists and the media organizations for which they work routinely assume that they are able to identify what is in the public interest, and act accordingly. This article explores notions of the public interest in the context of a particular case study, that of Sharleen Spiteri, an HIV-positive sex worker who appeared on the Australian national current affairs television programme 60 Minutes in 1989 and admitted that she sometimes had unprotected sex with clients. As a consequence of the ensuing wave of moral panic, she was forcibly detained in a locked AIDS ward and a mental asylum. After she was released she was kept under 24-hour surveillance for the remaining 15 years of her life. In 2010, the authors of this article produced a radio documentary for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation about Sharleen Spiteri's case. The authors argue that her story raises some important and difficult questions for the ethical practice of journalism. They analyse the role of journalists and politicians involved in Sharleen's case, and show that their belief that they were acting in the public interest played into well-established historical narratives linking sex workers with disease and dissolution, with disastrous consequences for Sharleen herself. The authors argue that a more reflexive and responsible conception of the public interest for journalists requires them to pay more careful attention to the voices and perspectives of people who are excluded from participation in the public sphere.     

FOUR RUMOURS AND AN EXPLANATION

Our analysis of 2207 domestic news reports in a structured sample of UK “quality” (the Guardian, The Times, the Independent and the Telegraph) and mid-market (Daily Mail) newspapers, revealed journalists’ extensive use of copy provided by public relations sources and news agencies, especially the UK-based Press Association. A political economic explanation for this reliance on news stories produced “outside the newsroom”, draws inspiration from Gandy's notion of information subsidies and presents findings from a substantive content analysis of selected UK national newspapers, interviews with journalists working on national titles and news agencies, as well as detailed archival analysis of UK newspaper companies’ annual accounts across 20 years to deliver information about newspapers’ profitability, their expansive editorial pagination as well as the number of journalists they employ. The argument here is that this reliance on public relations and news agency copy has been prompted by the need for a relatively stable community of journalists to meet an expansive requirement for news in order to maintain newspapers’ profitability in the context of declining circulations and revenues.     

Mass media,class, and democracy: the struggle over newspaper representation of the UPS strike

–This paper investigates whether organized labor can challenge the news media's pro-corporate representations of strikes and labor struggles. I studied the coverage of the 1997 UPS strike in three newspapers: USA Today, The Washington Post, and The New York Times. I found that their strike coverage, spanning about 191 articles, went through three distinct phases over the 15-day period. By studying these phases I agree that, for a brief period, public opinion and class solidarity, mobilized on the basis of a strike against corporate mistreatment of workers, played a key role in changing the tone of reporting, particularly in the Post and the Times. During this phase, the contradictions of the 1990s economic recovery and the problems of the working class became an issue of sustained interest in the public sphere. By showing how labor was able briefly to create an “open marketplace of ideas,” the paper concludes with an assessment of the democratizing potential of a politicized labor movement.     

Blogging and Journalism: Extending Shield Law Protection to New Media Forms

News-oriented bloggers have contributed much to the public sphere in recent years. Whether or not bloggers are considered journalists and thereby are protected by shield laws will be an important question for policy makers and the courts. This paper provides an overview of the law concerning the constitutional and statutory privileges accorded journalists. It then critiques proposals to create a federal journalist's privilege as applied to bloggers. Finally, the paper argues that the test articulated in Von Bulow v. Von Bulow should be adopted in federal legislation. Under Von Bulow, bloggers would be shielded from disclosing confidential sources and information when they function as journalists.     

Transforming Work into Play and Play into Work within the Domestic Sphere

This paper examines representations of urban domestic sphere and communication technologies in Playboy during the 1950s and 1960s. I argue that Playboy carved out a space for a seamless relationship between work (production) and leisure/free time (reproduction) in the domestic sphere, specifically the bachelor pad, which contributed to current notions of the live–work lifestyle. Combining work, consumption, and leisure through technology within the home permits the erosion of boundaries between work and free time. Consequently, advances in communication and entertainment technologies, consumerism and Playboy's celebration of the urban bachelor pad contributed to current definitions of the good life and reflected the paradigm shift to the post-industrial economy and the subsequent emergence of the knowledge economy.     

Who are We?

This article scrutinises the usage of the words “we”, “us” and “our” by BBC radio journalists when reporting and discussing news and current affairs. By analysing reports and discussions on the “flagship” Radio 4 Today, a daily news programme whose centrality to political and public debate is widely recognised, the article raises substantive questions about clarity, accuracy and impartiality in senior broadcast journalists’ choice of language. In exploring the assumptions which may underlie the invocation, via such language choices, of an implied community, and against the backdrop of the BBC's commitment to impartiality in its Editorial Guidelines, the article identifies numerous recent examples where the choice of words and identifiers can be seen as undermining the BBC's impartiality and which show several of its senior journalists adopting the first-person plural “we” when reporting on matters of public policy. The findings therefore indicate a general need to codify norms which are seen to integrate the need for accuracy as well as impartiality, and for these norms to take into account issues which might at first glance seem to be inconsequential, micro-level features of the journalists’ language. The evidence suggests that more fine-grained guidelines on permissible circumstances for BBC journalists’ usage of “we” and “our” need revising and disseminating in the light of these findings.     

A Dialectic With the Everyday: Communication and Cultural Politics on Oprah Winfrey's Book Club

This essay explores the cultural politics of television talk-show host Oprah Winfrey's Book Club. Because women constitute both the primary Oprah television audience and the largest United States book buying public, it focuses specifically on women's involvement in the club and their modes of engagement with its selections. The Book Club's astonishing success was attributable in part to the carefully considered communication strategies through which participants, Winfrey, and Oprah producers collectively articulated the value of books and reading specifically for women. Their de-emphasizing of purely literary considerations, I contend, enabled women to strategize how to use Book Club selections simultaneously to distance themselves from and to engage more intensively with the demands of living in a patriarchal and otherwise socioeconomically stratified society – a relationship I call a “dialectic with the everyday.” This essay thus traces the communicative processes/practices through which those involved in Oprah's Book Club articulated a highly sophisticated economy of cultural value around books and reading and the implications of that economy to a possible feminist cultural politics.     

John Wesley on rhetoric and belles lettres

Students of public address have long admired the rhetorical works of two of the leading ministers of the eighteenth century—Hugh Blair and George Campbell. Little has been said, however, about the rhetorical theory of another eighteenth‐century preacher, John Wesley. The purpose of this paper is to analyze Wesley's views on rhetoric and belles lettres. Since most of the subjects covered by Blair in his Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres were also discussed by Wesley in his Journal, Letters, and essays, Blair's pattern of organization is followed here. Hence the study considers Wesley's precepts on taste, genius, style, the speaker's content and organization, delivery, poetry, and historical and philosophical writing.     

The Relationship of Competition and Financial Commitment Revisited: A Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis in European Newspaper Markets

The Cincinnati Post published its last edition on New Year's Eve 2007, leaving the Cincinnati Enquirer as the only daily newspaper in the market. The next year, fewer candidates ran for municipal office in the Kentucky suburbs most reliant on the Post, incumbents became more likely to win reelection, and voter turnout and campaign spending fell. These changes happened even though the Enquirer at least temporarily increased its coverage of the Post's former strongholds. Voter turnout remained depressed through 2010, nearly three years after the Post closed, but the other effects diminished with time. The authors exploited a difference-in-differences strategy and the fact that the Post's closing date was fixed 30 years in advance to rule out some noncausal explanations for their results. Although their findings are statistically imprecise, they suggest that newspapers—even underdogs such as the Post, which had a circulation of just 27,000 when it closed—can have a substantial and measurable impact on public life.     

Does Ownership Matter?

Does media ownership affect the editorial page? Scholars such as Tim Groseclose, Jeffrey Milyo, and Tim Groeling have offered recent empirical tests for media bias in political news coverage. This article focuses on the editorial content of newspapers to examine whether a change in publishers affects a newspaper's editorial page's support for government action on public policy questions, the attention given to the major political parties, and the tone of coverage of the parties. Our content analyses compare the Wall Street Journal's editorial page before and after Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation purchased the paper with two newspapers that did not change ownership structures over the same time period (New York Times and Washington Times). We show that Murdoch's Wall Street Journal is far less supportive of government intervention in the economy, much more negative to Democrats, and much more positive to Republicans than the paper's editorial page was under Bancroft family ownership. We also show that the Wall Street Journal's changes were unique as the New York Times and Washington Times generally did not exhibit similar changes to their own editorial pages.     

Science in American Life,National Identity,and the Science Wars: A Curators View

The simmering controversy over the Smithsonian's Science in American Life exhibition that led to the ensuing visitor study by the Institutional Studies Office is reexamined in terms of issues of American identity. A brief historical overview reveals that, for most of the twentieth century, the American scientific community received enthusiastic public support for its perceived service to national goals and ideals. In the past decade, however, after experiencing unexpected budget cuts to research, scientists have questioned the depth of that public support in what has become known as the Science Wars. Science in American Life was soon engulfed by that broader, often acrimonious debate about science and society which involved notions of pure and applied science. The role of American identity in the dispute over the exhibit is analyzed in terms of scientists' criticisms of three of the exhibition's case studies.     

THE WAGES OF SYNERGY

In the current economic environment, message synergy may result in a perceptible manifestation of ownership's impact on media content. That influence raises ethical issues: journalistic independence and access to the media marketplace for a variety of messages. This project analyzes the “soft news” content of the two most popular morning television news shows, The Today Show and Good Morning America during November 2007 sweeps. The analysis demonstrates that “soft news” story topic selection appears to be strongly influenced by economic connections to the parent corporation. The potential impact of this distortion of the cultural public sphere for journalists, viewers, creative artists and advertising at the institutional level are analyzed. The wages of synergy include a restriction of journalistic autonomy, confining viewers to a role that is exclusively consumption oriented, and, at the institutional level, jeopardizing the credibility of news programming which could have a long-term impact on advertising revenues.     

Disposition versus situation: Neurocommunlcology and the influence of trait apprehension versus situational factors on state public speaking anxiety

Research indicates that individuals with elevated levels of public speaking anxiety report significantly different mental representations of the public speaking context, when compared to individuals with lower levels of anxiety. To examine the effect of the differences in mental representations, narratives for three public speaking contexts were developed. Results indicated that disposition (i.e., trait apprehension) was a better predictor of state anxiety when giving an impromptu speech. Situational factors (i.e., importance, skills, impression), however, were better predictors of state anxiety when either giving a speech to a 5^th grade class or giving a speech to friends.     

Palin,Saturday Night Live,and Framing: Examining the Dynamics of Political Parody

This work investigates dynamics of political parody through a framing analysis of Saturday Night Live sketches that spoof former Governor Sarah Palin. It is posited that parodies of political figures can be fruitfully understood as reflecting, refracting, and creating political realities, as suggested by the identification of 4 dominant frames in Saturday Night Live sketches. Furthermore, the author argues that the framing approach can serve as a point of convergence for contrasting epistemological approaches to political humor research.     

Ethics of robotized public services: The role of robot design and its actions

Public administrations invest heavily in the development of ‘smart’ public services, including autonomous public service robots. Since public service robots are designed to operate unsupervised, robots must interact in an ethically acceptable way with citizens. Robots are often designed to provide a comfortable interaction with citizens, which can be achieved by making the robot's appearance and actions more human-like. This raises the question whether a human-like design affects the ethicalness evaluation of a robot's actions. In a laboratory experiment with eye-tracking (n₁ = 156) and a representative, online vignette experiment (n₂ = 1339), we find that a more human-like robot design draws more visual attention than a robot with a less human-like design. However, the robot's appearance does not affect the ethicalness evaluation of the robot's behavior. In contrast, our results show that it is not the more human-like appearance that influences evaluations of ethicalness, but a robot's ethical actions influence the extent to which it is perceived as human. We frame our findings in the scientific and practitioner debates on ethical rule-setting for (public) service robots.     

Testing the rhetoric of China's soft power campaign: a case analysis of its strategic ambiguity in the Six Party Talks over North Korea's nuclear program

China's soft power campaign has spawned many scholarly studies on it, but few have examined its rhetorical aspect. Through keyword analysis, this research examines strategic ambiguity in China's public affairs rhetoric surrounding the Six Party Talks over North Korea's nuclear program. The two keywords, ‘the Six Party Talks’ and ‘da ju’ (big picture, overall view), are semantically open and central to China's rhetoric in defining ‘What is it?’ and ‘Why is it?’ with regard to the talks. Analysis shows that strategic ambiguity contributed to some of China's goals. However, it was not adjusted when it stopped working. Its effectiveness was undercut by certain inconsistent messages, and da ju failed to differentiate between domestic and international political context and was also culturally maladaptive. This research contributes to public diplomacy and public affairs rhetoric research.