Not All Countries Are Created Equal: Foreign Countries Prevalence in U.S. News and Entertainment Media

Why do some countries appear more popular than others in mass media? Although researchers have long sought to explain foreign countries’ prevalence in the media, to date they have exclusively focused on news, leaving other types of media content unexplored. In addition, focusing on media effects and media content, the literature on entertainment and politics has largely ignored the study of agenda-building processes. Thus, this study fills these gaps by exploring factors affecting the volume of references to foreign countries in both U.S. news and entertainment media. Analyzing more than 400 U.S. television shows, four news channels, and two newspapers spanning from 2000 to 2011, we reexamine past findings on salience of foreign countries in the news and apply these findings to a new field of research, entertainment media. We further suggest that the same factors shaping foreign countries’ prevalence in the news media are applicable to both news and entertainment and that in the context of foreign countries’ prevalence, the criteria for “newsworthiness” and “fictionworthiness” is similar.     

Inter-media agenda setting in global news production: examining agenda attributes in newspaper coverage of the MH370 incident in the U.S., China,and Hong Kong

The disappearance of Malaysian Airline Flight MH370 attracted high media attention across countries. To explore how news media outlets influence each other in transnational settings, this study focuses on the coverage of MH370 by three major newspapers in the U.S., China, and Hong Kong, and examines the inter-media agenda-setting effect as an indicator of media’s mutual influence. A content analysis of 255 news articles revealed significant correlations among the issue agendas of the 3 newspapers, suggesting the existence of reciprocal, though asymmetrical, influence among the news media in the U.S., China, and Hong Kong. The findings also suggest that news media differ in power and that news media in high-power countries play a key role in shaping the global news agenda.     

Corporate communications and the rise of the network society

In an integrated media environment where news networks seek synergistic opportunities for their parent companies, news content is increasingly susceptible to promotional influence. A comparative content analysis of new and traditional news spaces on U.S. cable television news networks Cable News Network, MSNBC, and Fox News Channel examined the video screen space and the news crawl, or “ticker,” space. Findings reveal that, proportionally, more promotional content occurs within the traditional video content space when compared to the ticker space. However, it was also shown that the ticker acts as a general branding agent for 2 of the 3 networks. Content dispersion also suggests a unique “content identity” for each news brand. The study found no evidence of “covert” promotion for synergistic gain—a positive result for news consumers.     

The U.S. Military Veteran in News Photographs: Representation and Stereotypes

Commenters have expressed concern over media content related to military veterans, saying journalists fail to provide the public with an accurate understanding of what it means to be a veteran. Nevertheless, few studies have examined the representation of veterans in news media content. The present study analyzed 740 photographs shared by regional news outlets on the popular social media platform Twitter. Coders documented the representation of veteran groups (gender, race, and service period) and stereotypes concerning veterans (homelessness, charity, and trauma) in the images. Results showed that the photographs rarely communicated stereotypes about veterans. Photographs overrepresented female veterans, although male veterans remained the significant majority. Minority veterans were underrepresented. Photographs most often contained images associated with World War II.     

The News Norms and Values of Presidential Debate Agendas: An Analysis of Format and Moderator Influence on Question Content

Mediated debates provide audiences with invaluable campaign information, and the public does in fact learn from debate exposure. Debates have undergone format changes over the years, but their ability to attract a mass audience remains constant. The way news media cover U.S. presidential elections has also evolved; increasing commercial pressures drive heightened emphasis on infotainment, soft news, and electoral strategy—often at the expense of hard news and policy content. Yet little is known about the content of agendas that news professionals set in presidential debates. Through a quantitative content analysis, this study examines 20 years of general election debate questions to determine whether the commercial news values common in today's campaign coverage also influence debate agendas. The findings presented herein suggest not only the presence of these news values in debate agendas but that format and moderator also wield a degree of influence over the content of debate questions.     

WHEN NEWSMEN MAKE NETWORKS

When news reporters connect people in a news story they essentially construct social networks in the news media. Networks through which news sources can be aligned symbolically in written, audible or visual form. This particular type of network is first defined and described with reference to the ways in which the concept of networks has previously been used by researchers and news reporters. Following this conceptualization the vision of networks in the news media and the adjacent vocabulary are then operationalized and used as a backdrop for an analysis of Danish newspapers from 1905 to 2005. This is an approach that can help delineate—and graphically visualize—how networks in the news media have evolved over the past century, and the content analysis shows that the socio-symbolic networks not only augment communicative actors and structures from parliament and other pre-existing platforms for communication, but also complement or even substitute them. The development offers people both inside and outside news rooms new potentials—and problems—when it comes to affecting the lives of people connected directly or indirectly to the networks.     

U.S. News Coverage of Global Terrorist Incidents

A slew of gruesome executions by terrorist groups in 2014–2015 renewed interest in the public relations strategies of terrorists. As a case in point, the Islamic State group’s escalating brutality reflects their efforts as a relatively nascent extremist group to ensure a high and sustained volume of media coverage, especially among Western outlets. But what characteristics of events actually prompt coverage from major U.S. news media? Using a rich data set of terrorist incidents and coverage from six major broadcast and cable U.S. networks, we model coverage of terrorist incidents as a function of event proximity from U.S. soil, target country affinity with the United States, number of total and U.S. casualties, and the characteristics of the terrorist group. Our findings largely corroborate expectations set forth by the literature on norms and routines of journalism and economics of news. When it comes to terrorism, coverage by U.S. major media outlets is largely dependent on proximity to and affinity with the United States, weapons of mass destruction, and the number of global and U.S. casualties.     

Role regulation and normative expectations: the discursive erasure of Middle Eastern forced migrants in U.S. news outlets

ABSTRACT

This thematic analysis of 510 news articles – spanning the leftist-rightist ideological spectrum – examines media rhetoric surrounding President Trump’s 27 January 2017 Executive Order (EO) 13769 barring immigrants and refugees from U.S. resettlement. In this article, I examine how both liberal and conservative news media rhetoric reinforce respectability politics that create a hierarchy of victimhood for those affected by the EO. Interrogating U.S. civil society’s discursive construction of the forced migrant, I expose expectations for appropriate roles for these communities seeking asylum, though these roles are often veiled by normative U.S. mythology. As this analysis illustrates, the news media articles’ discursive erasure of Syrian, Iranian, Sudanese, Iraqi, Libyan, Somali, and Yemeni immigrants and refugees elide forced migrant self-representation and neglect the political/historical reasons for fleeing from their nations of origin.     

How Ethnic Are U.S. Ethnic Media: The Case of Latina Magazines

In this article, I review 3 waves of ethnic media scholarship, and I describe how the dominant paradigm shifted from assimilation concerns to pluralism. I used qualitative and quantitative content analysis to examine news and features in 5 new nationwide women's magazines targeted to U.S. Hispanics. Thirty-eight percent of the manifest content mentioned Latinos and 27% mentioned specific Latin American cultures. These new English-language and bilingual Latina magazines distributed in the United States had simultaneous assimilative and pluralistic functions. One function was the ability to create a pan-Hispanic identity for members of various Latin American cultures. The magazine content does not fit within the confines of current language-based ethnic media models. I propose a revised model of ethnic media that reflects dual functions of assimilative and pluralistic expression and takes into account the possibility of more symbolic ethnic media functions.     

Framing responsibility for depression: how U.S. news media attribute causal and problem-solving responsibilities when covering a major public health problem

This paper analyzes how major U.S. print and broadcast news media framed depression causal and problem-solving responsibilities at individual and societal levels over the past three decades. Results from the content analysis showed that the media placed more causal and problem-solving responsibilities on individuals than the society. However, references to societal solutions increased moderately over time. Organizational differences emerged in news attribution of responsibilities, as print media presented more individual-level causes while broadcast media focused more on solutions at both individual and societal levels. Additionally, local newspapers put more problem-solving responsibilities on individuals than national newspapers, while a cable news channel allocated more time to the discussion of overall depression responsibilities than network TV. Findings are discussed in the context of cultural orientations, organizational constraints, changing practice and trends in health news reporting, and the broader political/social environment in which the news media operate. Practical implications for health journalism, mental health communication and advocacy, and public health policy-making are discussed.     

Solidarity Through the Visual: Healing Images in the Brussels Terrorism Attacks

This study applies a semiotic lens to argue that news media are not only conveyors of images of terrorism but, through a combination of photographs, editorial cartoons, and anchoring texts, have the potential to serve as facilitators of healing and solidarity in both the local and the global media arena. This anchoring function is essential for audience decoding—especially in the global—because many photographs and cartoons are culturally bound and therefore not readily accessible to the broader audience. Through the information they provide, written texts help to anchor meanings of the visual texts, conveying a sense of solidarity against terrorism.     

Gatecheckers at the Visual News Stream

Over the past 65 years, scholars have reframed the original model of gatekeeping to reflect the changing dynamics of news creation, distribution, and curation. In recent years, communication technologies have opened digital news gates to a proliferation of images captured by professionals and amateurs alike. Anyone with a camera or cell phone can shoot and distribute photographs and videos on the internet. Social media facilitates audience-to-audience sharing through tools such as Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Vine, and Snapchat. This stream of visuals, along with the ease with which citizen journalists, bloggers, and tweeters can create and publish content, has changed the gatekeeping process. Few scholars, however, have addressed the impact that visuals have on the gatekeeping model, which was developed using text and broadcast stories. To address the changing role of the visual journalist and the audience, the authors conducted two studies. First, qualitative elite interviews with key visual decision-makers in Europe and the US provided questions for further exploration in the second study—an online cross-sectional survey of visual journalists who belong to three leading US organizations. The questions in this quantitative survey were also influenced by Shoemaker and Reese's hierarchy of influences and Bennett's multigated model. Findings indicate changes in the way visual journalists conceptualize their role and that of the audience. Based on these changes, this article proposes a new model of visual gatekeeping—the twenty-first-century visual news stream where “gatecheckers” select, verify, and curate visuals but no longer solely control their distribution the way traditional gatekeepers did.     

Culture and comparative media research: Narratives about Internet privacy policy in Chinese,U.S., and UK newspapers

This article compares American, British, and Chinese news coverage of Internet privacy policies. Specifically, we examine media discourse about the “real-name” policies established by Facebook and Weibo. We find that U.S. and UK news coverage of Internet privacy policy is broadly similar, when compared with the more authoritarian–corporatist media system in China. British and U.S. newspapers were much more independent from state control, and were able to maintain a more critical stance than the Chinese newspapers. But there were additional factors that shaped the patterns in news discourse in complicated ways, which are related to (a) the difference between domestic and international news genres, (b) specific narratives about national identity, and (c) more general discourses about civil society, democracy, and the public good. We suggest that the range of comparative media research can be extended by paying attention to how these cultural factors interact with media system dynamics.     

George W. Bush,Television News,and Rationales for the Iraq War

Popular sentiment holds that President George W. Bush was able to successfully “spin” the news during the early stages of the Iraq War. Research on the president-press relationship gives some reason to believe this sentiment but leaves ample room for skepticism. This article clarifies the relationship between presidential and press rationales for the Iraq War, focusing on whether Bush's emphasis on certain rationales influenced the extent to which news media emphasized these same rationales. Using computer-assisted content analysis to analyze a year's worth of presidential communications and television news, the study provides insight into the interaction of these important discourses.     

Intermedia Agenda-Setting and Political Activism: MoveOn.org and the 2008 Presidential Election

This study tested for intermedia agenda-setting effects among explicitly partisan news media coverage and political activist group, citizen activist, and official campaign advertisements on YouTube—all in support of the same candidate. The setting for this investigation was the political activist organization MoveOn.org's “Obama in 30 Seconds” online ad contest, which was held during the 2008 U.S. presidential election primaries. The data provided evidence of first- and second-level agenda-setting relationships. Partial correlations revealed that the citizen activist issue agenda, as articulated in the contest ads, was most strongly related to the partisan media coverage, rather than to the issue priorities of the official Obama or MoveOn.org ads on YouTube. These results extend the intermedia agenda-setting framework to political activist communication efforts and consumer-generated content.     

Visually Framing Press Freedom and Responsibility of a Massacre: Photographic and Graphic Images in Charlie Hebdo's Newspaper Front Pages Around the World

This research examines 441 front-page images published in 367 newspapers on the day following the shooting in Paris of 12 people at or near the Charlie Hebdo office. The aim of this study is to understand how mainstream media visually framed responsibility for the Charlie Hebdo massacre and how these visual frames coalesced to represent collective narratives about press freedom. Through a collaborative visual analysis, this study attempts to understand how the selected visual frames worked to communicate the causes, effects, and responses to the massacre and also to press freedom—an ideological construct that news media had a vested interest in advancing.     

News framing of the U.S. immigration debate during election years: Focus on generic frames

This study examined the frames used in the news coverage of the U.S. immigration debate during election years. Stories from four major U.S. newspapers, the Los Angeles Times, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the St. Petersburg Times, and The New York Times, were content analyzed. The analysis revealed that the conflict frame was the most dominant frame in the news coverage of the U.S. immigration debate whereas no significant changes in the framing of the U.S. immigration debate were found over time. The human interest frame was more likely to have a pro-immigration tone compared to other frames. The findings of immigrant characteristics showed that the “illegal” characteristic was the most frequently used to identify immigrants.     

The Effect of Emotionally Arousing Negative Images on Judgments About News Stories

Two experiments investigated the influence effects of negative photographs on people's attitudes after reading a news story. Experiment 1 presented an online news emulation to participants showing a story and images (high-emotion/low-emotion/no image) about African famine relief efforts. Experiment 2 replicated the design with a story and images about U.S. involvement in the Afghanistan War. As anticipated, using the predictions of the Affect Heuristic model of judgment formation, the addition of pictures with strong emotional activation had a diminishing effect on people's support for the war in Afghanistan and their support for famine aid. Additionally, decreasing effects were observed in broader attitudes concerning participants' support of a militaristic national policy in Experiment 2. These results are discussed regarding their implications for theories of judgment formation and journalistic practice.     

Partisan Patriotism in the American Presidency: American Exceptionalism,Issue Ownership,and the Age of Trump

This study employs issue ownership theory to examine the partisan dynamics surrounding the idea of American exceptionalism in presidential discourse. We conducted a content analysis of invocations of American exceptionalism in all major U.S. presidential addresses—domestic and foreign—from the end of World War II through Trump’s 1st year in office. We find that even though Republicans have traditionally claimed ownership of American exceptionalism, patterns in presidential discourse tell a very different story. Specifically, our results show (a) in domestic contexts, Republican and Democratic presidents were very similar in their invocations of American exceptionalism during the Cold War but that Democrats have held a substantial advantage over Republicans throughout the post–Cold War era, including on issue areas that Republicans are perceived to “own” (e.g. national security); (b) in foreign contexts, Democrats have been much more outspoken in their embrace of American exceptionalism throughout both the Cold War and post–Cold War; and (c) President Trump has diverged significantly, both in substance and frequency, from his Democratic and Republican predecessors in his invocation of American exceptionalism. We reflect on the implications of these findings on our broader understanding of issue—and trait—ownership, presidential discourse, and American exceptionalism in American politics.     

Second Generation Net News: Interactivity and Information Accessibility in the Online Environment

This study assesses the ways in which local television news operations and major metropolitan newspapers in the top 40 U.S. media markets are making information accessible and structuring interactive experiences online as the industry transitions into a third generation of Internet news. As Net news approaches its first decade of existence, online news sites are assumed to be evolving from a noninteractive, passive model of information delivery into an environment of increased immediacy, content richness, and user control. To investigate this question, a content analysis was performed in 2 waves, once during fall 1998 and again during fall 2000. For comparative purposes, differences across years are examined. In addition, the efforts of local television news sites are contrasted with the online activities of dominant newspaper sites, which have assumed a commanding lead in building a local online audience. The analysis argues for valuing Net news sites less from a profit-loss standpoint and more for the nonmonetary contributions they make in relation to the broader news mission, namely, enhanced coverage, brand loyalty, and news credibility.