Framing Political Change

This article chooses a comparative approach in order to analyze the role played by mass media during the attempted coup d’état in Spain starting on 23 February 1981 and the opening of the Berlin Wall in November 1989. Both episodes demonstrate the media's capacity to articulate political change through their contextualization of particular events. The text focuses on the capacity of the media to frame political episodes, to generate interpretations and thus provide the basis for specific reactions in different audience groups or political instances. For a short period of time (limited to just some hours), the radio and the press in Spain as well as television in East Germany assumed a ‘para-political’ role and set certain events in motion that led to the end of the coup and the fall of the Wall respectively.     

A comparative study on source credibility and use in multinational nuclear talks

This study examines US and South Korean journalists' use of sources and their perceptions of source credibility in covering the six-party talks on North Korea's nuclear ambitions. In particular, this study analyzes the relationship between journalists' perceptions of source credibility and the media's source use in terms of the aggregate and individual levels. Results of content analysis of US and South Korean newspapers are compared with data from a survey of US and South Korean journalists who covered the six-party nuclear talks. Government officials are dominant sources in media coverage of the talks because of their high level of accessibility and credibility. US and South Korean journalists assigned the greatest credibility to government officials of their own country. The two groups showed significant differences in their perceptions of credibility of South Korean officials, North Korean officials, Japanese officials, and Japanese experts. Moreover, this study finds that individual journalists' perceptions of source credibility were as strongly correlated with their individual use of sources as with the news media's aggregate use of sources. Implications of the findings are discussed in the context of media sociology, in particular gatekeeping.     

Framing Falun Gong: Xinhua news agency's coverage of the new religious movement in China

Falun Gong caught the eyes of the Beijing leadership when more than 10,000 of its practitioners gathered at the Zhongnanhai government compound in Beijing on April 25, 1999. It attracted the attention of the world when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) started cracking down on the group three months later, claiming this to be the most serious political incident since the student uprising at Tiananmen Square on June 4, 1989. Scholars have attempted to contextualize the cultural, political, and economic climate in contemporary China that allowed this group to rise in a relatively short period and to assess the causes of the CCP's nationwide campaign oppressing the group. Relatively little attention, however, has been paid to exploring the media's role in supporting the government's cause in this campaign. This study examines journalistic narrative and framing of Falun Gong as a social threat in one news organization's attempt to legitimize the government's crackdown against the group. Although the economic reforms and political relaxation since the 1980s might have expanded the media's latitude, the press, especially state-owned media outlets, still functions as an agent for the Beijing regime in important political and social issues. This paper shows how journalists, through news frames, construct particular parameters within which to assess the ‘reality’ about Falun Gong.     

Media Memories: The First Cable/VCR Generation Recalls Their Childhood and Adolescent Media Viewing

Seventy undergraduates from 2 U.S. regions, the first generation raised in a media environment expanded by cable and VCRs, recalled childhood and adolescent media viewing in autobiographical essays. These recollections, considered from a symbolic interactionist perspective, reflect the media's contribution to individuals' self-development. Respondents recalled the socializing influences of mediated content that provided characters for imitative preschool play, role models, and topics for adolescent peer interaction. These recollections of childhood and adolescent experiences expressed as autobiography provide clear evidence of the media's long-term influence on development of the self.     

借助新媒体扩大科技学术期刊受众的范围

通过分析国内外知名科技学术期刊的受众以及如何借助新媒体媒介形式,实现优势互补,将其卓越的媒介优势融进学术传播中,扩大受众范围,增强学术期刊的信息传播能力,使学术期刊的发展产生质的飞跃.     

No Jack Kennedy: Mitt Romney's “Faith in America” Speech and the Changing Religious-Political Environment

In December of 2007, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney traveled to Texas to give an address on religion and politics. The speech was heralded by many as Romney's “JFK moment.” This study explores the campaign religion speeches of Kennedy and Romney by considering various issues concerning context, audience, and content of the two speeches. Guiding this analysis is Roderick Hart's work on the civil-religious contract and Kenneth Burke's work on dramatistic analysis, which are utilized to demonstrate that—despite the media's proclamations—Romney's speech represented a stark shift from Kennedy's rhetorical approach. Implications are drawn concerning the differences between the two speeches and an understanding of the confessional political style guiding the intersection of religion and politics today.     

Media Bias,Public Opinion,and Policy Liberalism from 1956 to 2004: A Second-Level Agenda-Setting Study

This study aims to explore second-level agenda-setting at the national level. In particular, it examines the relationships among the citation bias of the New York Times, national level public opinion, and Congressional policies from 1956 to 2004 in order to better understand mass media's role in national policymaking. In addition, it also tests one important intervening variable of the relationships among the three attribute agendas (the media agenda, the public agenda, and the policy agenda)—the president's policy liberalism.     

The pulpit in time of crisis: 1865 and 1963

Researchers have ignored the role of mass communication in the process of political socialization. Research on the media's influence in the election process stem from classical studies largely reported prior to the political use of television. Recent evidence suggests that mass communication may have direct effects on political behavior. Though the literature fails to resolve the question of media's influence in the election process, previous pronouncements of “limited effects” need to be re‐assessed. Suggested hypotheses for that assessment are presented.     

Knowledge as a Measure of News Reception in the Agenda-Setting Process

This study investigates the role knowledge plays in the agenda-setting process, conceptualizing public affairs knowledge as a measure of news reception. Comparing content analysis data and opinion survey results of 2 election campaigns in Canada and the United States, this study finds that, on the individual level, knowledge better predicted media's agenda-setting effects than traditional self-reported exposure items. Furthermore, these findings demonstrate that knowledge mediated the effects of interest on the variance of agenda-setting effects. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

When ideology meets bottom line: analysis on market competition and ideological bias in newspapers

This study investigated how newspapers adopted partisan branding as a product differentiation strategy under pressure of intense market competition, through cases of conservative dailies in South Korea. Despite academic interest in news media's partisanship, only a few studies attempted to conduct analysis at the organizational level. Drawing on the hierarchy of influences model as a main theoretical framework, the present study examined how partisanship of newspapers was related to the social and economic forces. Evidence demonstrated that conservative bias increased as market competition intensified. Conservative bias was positively associated with the ideological mood of the conservative group, and the revenue decreased as conservative newspapers carried stronger conservative bias. These results will add insight into the prevalence of partisanship in today's media environment.     

Ideology and foreign news coverage: Propaganda model re‐examined

By comparing and contrasting the New York Times and Newsweek's coverage of the 1980 South Korean student demonstrations and the 1989 Chinese student demonstrations, this study set out to examine two important concepts of Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model: political ideology and national interest. While the original model did not address situations where both factors are present, and at the same time contradicting each other, it is the purpose of this study to test the applicability of the model in general, and to clear up this issue in particular. Dichotomous treatments of the two student movements were found in the New York Times and Newsweek's coverage. Important findings of this study further suggest that in a cold war context, ideology serves as a more important news factor than national interest in influencing the American media's foreign news coverage.     

Problems and Solutions for American Political Coverage

Drawing on Shoemaker and her colleagues’ five levels of analysis, i.e. the individual, routine, organization, institutional, and social system levels, this study examines news media’s post-election self-examination. This study uses natural language processing-related techniques to analyze a corpus of news articles published 10 days after the election day to understand the nature and distribution of identified problems and proposed solutions at the five levels. This study finds that news media's inward reflections focused more on the routine level while problems at individual and organizational levels were not prominently examined. Outwardly, more discussions were pointed to institutions that share the media ecosystem with the news industry. This study serves as an empirical contribution to metajournalistic discourse analysis. Findings reveal the discursive struggle to construct and reconstruct the journalistic field.     

Need for Orientation,Selective Exposure,and Attribute Agenda-Setting Effects

This study explores the ability of an interaction between need for orientation (NFO) and selective exposure to explain citizen's motivations to seek information from specific media sources and the consequences of this behavior for attribute agenda-setting effects. It draws important conceptual distinctions between the two moderate NFO categories, distinguishing active involvement NFO (high relevance and low uncertainty) from passive involvement NFO (low relevance and high uncertainty). The results suggest that in a political context, people with active involvement NFO are more likely to seek ideologically congruent media sources and more likely to adopt the media's attribute agenda. This study implies that at the second-level agenda setting, the salience of issue or object attributes on the media agenda is more likely to strengthen preexisting attitudes for people with high political interest and strong partisan identity.     

Effects of entertainment media framing on support for gay rights in China: Mechanisms of attribution and value framing

This study investigates the framing effects of gay-themed entertainment media in China. Specifically, the study explores the mechanisms underlying attribution framing and value framing, through two separate experiments. The results of the first experiment indicate that exposure to attribution frames had considerable influence on the participants' perceptions of the controllability of homosexuality and their emotional responses. In addition, fictional entertainment media's framing of the origin of homosexuality indirectly influenced the participants' opinion through anger. Those participants exposed to a program homosexuality as a type of ‘controllable’ sexuality were likely to express anger and thus were not likely to support gay rights. The results of the second experiment indicate that the core values reflected in a gay-themed program affected the participants' opinions by changing their perception of the importance of value-related beliefs. Those participants exposed to a frame reflecting family values were likely to consider beliefs about family values to be important, which facilitated their support for gay people's personal dignity and equal rights to jobs, housing, and freedom of expression, among others.     

The Enigmatic Lynndie England: Gendered Explanations for the Crisis at Abu Ghraib

This essay examines the gendered explanations for the prisoner abuse scandal at Abu Ghraib. Specifically, I examine how mainstream news media's selective focus on Lynndie England encouraged the public to read Abu Ghraib primarily as a gender crisis rather than as a crisis in US military culture. This framing not only deflected attention away from the other soldiers involved in the scandal (particularly the men who were involved) but also diverted criticism away from more comprehensive discussions regarding the US military's use of abuse and torture, the unlawful detainment of suspected terrorists, and the erosion of civil liberties in the post-9/11 era. Moreover, these representations of Abu Ghraib as a gender crisis prompted new criticism regarding gender integration in the military and constructed feminism as the new villain in the American melodrama.     

Celebrity Athletes,Soft Power and National Identity: Hong Kong Newspaper Coverage of the Olympic Champions of Beijing 2008 and London 2012

The modern Olympic Games have been regarded as vehicles for governments to use elite athletes to promote soft power agendas and build national cohesion. Adopting textual analysis, the present study examined the global sports events within a specific sociocultural context, by analyzing and comparing the reportage of 2008 and 2012 Summer Olympics in four Hong Kong newspapers. All the news articles were probed to discern pervading themes regarding the Olympic champions as celebrities, and three discursive formations were identified: national heroes, rags-to-riches figures, and stars in the entertainment industry. The findings make visible both the instances that nurture the perception of national identity and Hong Kong media's alternative responses to the party-state's propaganda. Although the Olympics can play a positive role in articulating national pride and fostering national identity, the study also shows the complexities of the construction of Chinese nationalism and patriotism in postcolonial Hong Kong.     

The Changing Role of the Local News Media in Enabling Citizens to Engage in Local Democracies

Using Leeds City Council in the United Kingdom as a case study, we analyse comparatively the changing role of local journalism in the public communications and engagement strategies of local government. Drawing on over 20 semi-structured interviews with elected politicians, Council strategists, mainstream journalists, and citizen journalists, the article explores perceptions of the mainstream news media's role versus new modes of communication in engaging and communicating with citizens. We evaluate the Council's perceptions of its online and offline practices of engagement with different publics, and focus in particular on their interactions with journalists, the news media, and citizen journalists. The article considers how moves towards digital modes of engagement are changing perceptions of the professional role orientations of journalists in mediating between the Council and the general public.     

Effects of Media Use on Audience Framing and Support for Welfare

In this study, I examined cognitive structures consisting of frames that people used in the open-ended responses to a survey question about cuts in welfare benefits. The study shows that patterns of individuals' entertainment and news media use are important sources of frames that people adopt in thinking about an important public issue. In turn, those frames partly derived from the media shape the public's policy preferences beyond controls for individuals' social location, ideology, interpersonal communication, and knowledge. Frames that are related to particular patterns of media use (e.g., increase in differences between poor and rich, need for specific approaches, some will go hungry) have power to alter even deep, ideologically motivated welfare preferences. However, the results suggest that the media's most important role may be in spreading out the field of thinkable solutions to public problems rather than making any particular position dominant in policy decision making.     

Webcasting Business Models of Clicks-and-Bricks and Pure-Play Media: A Comparative Study of Leading Webcasters in South Korea and the United States

This article identifies the business models of leading Webcasters in the United States and South Korea and proposes a cross-cultural framework to analyze the determinants of business models. The file transmission methods, content strategies, and revenue sources of clicks-and-bricks and pure-play Webcasters were compared in the study. After analyzing the business practices of 48 leading Webcasters--using a content analysis of their sites--we found that the content aggregator model and the branded content model are the 2 most commonly used business models of leading Webcasters in the United States and South Korea. Although clicks-and-bricks and pure-play Webcasters in both countries have a similar reliance on advertising as their major source of revenue, they employ different content strategies to their own media's advantages. Korean Webcasters are more likely to use pay-per-view as a revenue source than U.S. Webcasters.