Social media,legacy media and gatekeeping: the protest paradigm in news of Ferguson and Charlottesville

ABSTRACT

This study investigates the site of intersection between legacy and social media, whereby it asks how local legacy media (St Louis Post-Dispatch and Richmond Times-Dispatch) invoked social media (Facebook and Twitter) discourse within their coverage of the Ferguson (2014) and Charlottesville (2017) events. It thus explores how gatekeeping is manifested and, consequently, how the protest paradigm emerged in a news landscape of proliferating social media. Thematic textual analysis indicates that coverage of Charlottesville and Ferguson clearly relied on indulging the social media sphere in important ways. Common themes of social media as multipurpose platforms, as interfacing with law and order, and as reconciling material and digital modes culminating in social activism were revealed. The study shows that the protest paradigm that has long characterized legacy media’s coverage of social protest is not as “pure” as it may once have been, since a social media component is helping define the contours and content of legacy media’s landscape.     

Teacher characteristics and teacher performance

This study investigated effects of seven demographic and psychological characteristics of teachers on their performances during student teaching. Student teachers' performances were examined in relation to their ages, prior student teaching experiences, scholastic aptitudes, attitudes toward teaching, moral reasoning abilities, conceptual levels, and degrees of ego development. Results indicate that student teachers' performances were dependent in a nontrivial way on their ego development and to a much lesser degree on other characteristics.     

Sibling interaction: Evidence of a generational effect in maltreating infants

Theorists have long assumed that an individual's style of child-rearing was based, in large part, on his or her parents' style of parenting. The strongest evidence of such a generational effect comes from retrospective studies of disturbed adults. The present study is an attempt to provide some prospective evidence. Infants, aged 6 to 11 months, were videotaped interacting with their mother, with a sibling, and with a second adult. At each sibling age (from 2 to 10 years) one abused, one neglected, one problematic, and one normally reared infant was seen. The adult/sibling patterns of interaction were coded as abusive, neglecting, inept, or sensitive. Infant patterns were difficult, passive, and cooperative. Siblings were found to interact with the infant in a manner similar to that of their mothers suggesting that they had learned their style of interaction from their mothers. Although adequately reared siblings increased in sensitivity with age, maltreated siblings did not. The possibility that infant temperament had influenced both the mothers' and the siblings' style of interaction (and, therefore, accounted for their similarity) was tested using a second adult interactant. Adults were found to influence infants more than the reverse. These data provide evidence of a generational effect in the learning of parenting styles appearing as early as the third year of life. Moreover, they suggest that the effect is not attributable to infant temperament.