Some aspects of broadcast news coverage and riot participation

It has often been said that the commercial rating services are “the only game in town.” Thus far, the academic researchers usually have left it up to the operators of the “game” to test and refine their methods. The following article is one of the exceptions: an interesting methodological study of how people respond when queried in different ways about their viewing. Dr. Green‐berg is associate professor of communication at Michigan State University; Miss Dervin and Mr. Dominick are graduate students in the same department.     

A review of text and image retrieval approaches for broadcast news video

The effectiveness of a video retrieval system largely depends on the choice of underlying text and image retrieval components. The unique properties of video collections (e.g., multiple sources, noisy features and temporal relations) suggest we examine the performance of these retrieval methods in such a multimodal environment, and identify the relative importance of the underlying retrieval components. In this paper, we review a variety of text/image retrieval approaches as well as their individual components in the context of broadcast news video. Numerous components of text/image retrieval have been discussed in detail, including retrieval models, text sources, temporal expansion methods, query expansion methods, image features, and similarity measures. For each component, we conduct a series of retrieval experiments on TRECVID video collections to identify their advantages and disadvantages. To provide a more complete coverage of video retrieval, we briefly discuss an emerging approach called concept-based video retrieval, and review strategies for combining multiple retrieval outputs.     

Political bias in the news coverage of Taiwan's first presidential election: A comparative analysis of broadcast TV and cable TV news

This research examines how TV reported the campaign and the candidates during Taiwan's first‐ever presidential election in 1996.

A content analysis of evening news coverage of six TV stations indicated that the state‐owned broadcast TV stations were far more likely than the privately owned cable TV stations to give a greater amount of coverage and soundbites to the ruling party presidential and vice presidential candidates, using the ruling party officials as principal news sources. The TV Stations’ coverage also contained more news favourable to the ruling party candidates than to other candidates.

The future may well see a turning point in TV election coverage as well as in general news coverage in Taiwan. The three state‐owned broadcast TV stations face competition from privately owned cable TV stations and may soon be confronted with the loss of public trust and audience, unless they can provide fair and balanced news free from government control.     

Resignifying Alan Kurdi: news photographs,memes, and the ethics of embodied vulnerability

The Turkish photojournalist Nilüfer Demir’s photograph of the drowned refugee child Alan Kurdi attained worldwide recognition as a media spectacle, initially prompting humanitarian responses and political action, but later morphing into online memes and inciting public backlash as “war porn.” The author argues here that the ethical motivations of photojournalism and memes are oppositional with regard to their representations of embodied vulnerability. While photojournalistic depictions of vulnerable bodies are motivated by an ethics of care intended to generate empathy and progressive social change, memes disrupt those affective connotations through processes of mimicry and replication. By means of a comparative semiological analysis, this paper examines the way the sign system of Demir’s photograph was mutated into memes, radically changing the ethical connotations of the former. The differing ethical affordances of news photos versus memes, and their relationship, explain the reversal of the cosmopolitan humanitarianism initially sparked by the Alan Kurdi photograph and tell us more about the ethical frictions and contrapositions at work in the contemporary media environment.     

Social media and corporate reputation during crises: the viability of video-sharing websites for providing counter-messages to traditional broadcast news

Exemplification, or the use of highly emotional and arousing messages to elicit responses based on impression formation, has been shown to influence perceptions of events, individuals, and organizations. News coverage concerning the use of lean finely textured beef (LFTB) is one such example, and anecdotal evidence suggests that this coverage may have had a negative impact on public perception of the manufacturers producing LFTB. The current study examined the use of social media (specifically video-sharing sites) as a means of combating the negative effects of exemplars concerning LFTB. Respondents reported their perceptions of threat severity, susceptibility, behavioral intentions to avoid LFTB, and perceptions of organizational trust and reputation associated with the manufacturer. The findings are consistent with exemplification theory and indicate that message ordering can influence exemplification effects. Results are discussed in terms of implications for public relations and risk communication.     

Achieving practical broadcast experience

The fundamental purpose of higher education is to expose the student to the theories, processes and literature of one or more fields of study. However, there is no doubt that thorough training in the applied aspects of that field will be of great help both to the student and the industry he plans to join. A thorough knowledge of broadcasting as an art, a business, and a profession should fit the student both for obtaining his first position and rising up the ladder with greater ease than someone without such training. Without slighting in any way the academic study of broadcasting, it is evident that any methods for obtaining practical experience to complement and supplement the classroom are worth consideration.     

Television news is government news in Taiwan patterns of television news sources selection and presentation

Based on a content analysis of evening newscasts by the three television stations in Taiwan, this study examines the patterns of news sources selection and presentation in television news. The results of this study show that television news relies heavily on government officials who are primarily middle‐aged men in executive positions located in the capital city of Taipei. These findings suggest that the central government officials in Taipei appear to be the primary definers of social reality. TV news portrays only a very limited view of the society. In conclusion, this study suggests that with the management and content tightly controlled by the state, Taiwan's television news consists primarily of official rituals.     

新闻频道的诞生与新闻观念的变革

央视新闻频道的诞生使人们看到了中国新闻事业改革的新希望 ,体现了中国新闻概念变革的倾向———受众观念的进一步强化 ,民主观念的进一步深入 ,市场观念的进一步强化以及变革观念的确立等等。文章批评了目前存在于电视新闻报道中的不足 ,分析产生这些不足的原因所在 ,针对政府和媒体提出了改进的建议。