Responding to Outreach and Training Challenges in Health Information: A Case Study from Africa

This article shares the experience and lessons learned by Information Training and Outreach Center for Africa (ITOCA) in rolling out an on-line distance learning course. Key objectives were to explore the efficacy of online courses in increasing skills and awareness of electronic resources access initiatives. This is in the context of responding to limited funding alongside low awareness and usage of the resources. The initiative involved several stake-holders including ITOCA, Research 4 Life (R4Life), and the World Health Organization (WHO). The process used to set up the course and the results are described. Challenges and lessons learned are highlighted. Various recommendations for improving future courses are proposed. It is concluded that on-line learning is the fastest, least expensive, and most convenient mode of training and outreach, especially when compared with face-to-face delivery. It should be acknowledged that this mode of training requires much time, planning, and effective communication between the different parties.     

Militarism and Memorializing at the Pro Football Hall of Fame

More than ever, entertainment industries work in concert with the US armed forces in the rhetorical production of militarism. This is especially the case in sport, where leagues such as the National Football League routinely make war imagery and military personnel a focal point of football culture. One such iteration of this relationship is the “Pro Football and the American Spirit” exhibit that is part of the Pro Football Hall of Fame. Understood as an example of public memory, this exhibit reveals sport's capacity to normalize war and reduce the available models of citizenship in the United States.     

Community Structure and Social Protest: Influences on Newspaper Coverage

Research on news coverage of social protest has yielded evidence of a “protest paradigm,” a framework of common news attributes that contribute to the marginalizing of protesters as social deviants. Analysis here investigates whether adherence to the protest paradigm varies by structural characteristics of the communities in which news organizations originate. More specifically, news organizations in less pluralistic communities may exhibit lower tolerance for social conflict than news organizations in more pluralistic communities. This research compares newspaper coverage of social protest from communities with varied levels of pluralism. Results showed that newspapers in less pluralistic communities were more critical of protesters when local government was the target and were less likely to quote protesters in stories. Further, newspapers in less pluralistic communities were more critical of protesters when stories were on the front page than those appearing elsewhere in the newspaper. Implications for understanding the protest paradigm and influences of community structure on news coverage patterns were explored.     

Managerial rhetoric as the metaphor for the World Wide Web

–This article explains how metaphors influence how we experience events, and how the Web, viewed through a different metaphor or lens, currently appears a little less valuable as a tool of education or democracy. Although the Web constitutes a new communication milieu, possessing the potential to revolutionize communication in the next millennium, its rhetoric is currently one of consumerism and capitalism–economic not political ideologies pertain. This article conducts a metaphorical analysis of the World Wide Web positing that the Web might be understood best through a managerial metaphor rather than the current spatial/relational metaphor. Using Sproule's 1988 categories of managerial rhetoric, this article critiques contemporary Web practices in an effort to better understand the Web and its communicative potential.     

The relationship of supportive communication to sex discussion in the home

Supportive communication was examined as a component of mothers’ sex discussion with children. Results demonstrated that mothers who communicated supportively were more open and disclosing when discussing sex and were more likely to provide sons with birth control information and instruction than mothers who communicated nonsupportively. The study concludes by raising several issues for future research and sex education pro‐ams for parents.     

Public interest programming: Taxation by regulation

This study examined the relationships among viewers’ family communication patterns, sex and pregnancy experience, music video viewing motivations, and viewers’ cognitive processing of a music video about teenage pregnancy. Respondents were high school students, who watched a music video and filled out questionnaires on two occasions. Results of a path analysis demonstrated different paths for girls and boys: For girls, family communication patterns and sexual/pregnancy experience were directly related to the activity with which they processed the video; for boys, family communication patterns had a direct path to activity, but also had a path through observational goals. Results suggest that family communication patterns may operate as enduring general cognitive structures that predict viewer activity.     

The Influence of Television News Depictions of the Images of War on Viewers

Results of an experiment about the influence of network television news coverage of combat in Iraq on viewers indicated that, compared with a control condition which featured news stories about combat operations in Iraq described by news anchors, news reports also featuring footage of combat operations increased viewer involvement levels about the war and reduced viewer support for continued military presence in Iraq. Television news footage of combat operations also reduced viewers' pride in U.S. military presence but did not affect other emotions. However, regardless of how news stories were packaged, women experienced greater emotional response to network news stories about combat operations than men. The results also shed light on the potential of inoculation to deflect such influence.     

The Behaviorist in the Boardroom: The Research of Frank Stanton,Ph.D.

In 1946, at the age of 38, Frank Stanton was named President of CBS. While much of Stanton's work as a corporate executive has been chronicled, his accomplishments as one of America's earliest scholars of radio audience measurement remain neglected in media scholarship. This article reviews Stanton's research efforts between 1933 and 1942, and in doing so it places his work within the contexts of contemporaneous social and psychological media inquiry. Discussions of Stanton's methodological approach, his innovative dissertation, his scholarship, and his collaboration with key figures in the history of communication research are informed by primary and secondary sources.