Contributes to scholarship on the role of mass media in breast cancer coverage. Finds extremely high, significant correlations between numbers of medical-journal articles and newspaper, magazine, and TV coverage; a two-way concurrent relationship between breast cancer funding and media coverage, and between breast cancer incidence and TV coverage;…

Examines the interaction among different news sources, individual levels of partisanship, and the hostile media effect in sports news. Explains that university students read a balanced story about their home-town college football team in one of three newspapers: the home-town, the cross-state rival university's town, or a neutral town paper.…

Presents a historiographic essay surveying the past 25 years of historical research on images of women in American mass media. Places this work into four categories of scholarship (stereotypes approach, search for alternative images, examination of imagery as ideology, and "reading" of images as polysemic texts). Finds significant…

Explores the possible relationship among issue involvement, argument strength, and the third-person effect. Finds that undergraduate students tend to believe that "others" will be more affected than themselves by a persuasive message that contains weak argumentation but that "others" will be less affected than themselves by a…

Examines the combined effects of on-air and online network news exposure, placing student and adult news consumers in broadcast news, online news, and telewebbing conditions. Indicates that perceptions of network news credibility are affected by channel used. Offers evidence for the existence of a synergy effect between on-air and online news. (PM)

Explores perceptions of media bias by manipulating expectations of bias and news topic. Explains that university students read dummy newspaper articles and then responded to a survey. Concludes that readers were more likely to designate material opposing their own views as biased. (PM)

Examines three potential factors that might mediate the relationship between reading women's magazines and body shape and size concern. Finds that health and fitness magazine reading by college-aged women was linked directly to body shape concerns, indirectly through beliefs about men's thinness expectations. Explains that beauty and fashion…

Explores how the framing of environmental communication influences attitudes and environmentally responsible behaviors. Finds that communication that discussed losses (rather than gains) to the current (rather than future) generation gave rise to the most positive responses and the highest levels of intent to participate in…

Finds that voters who ascribed an ethical interpretation to issues were more likely to use a noncompensatory decision-making strategy, which focuses on one or two key issues in the decision-making process, than voters who ascribed a societal interpretation to issues. (SR)

Contributes to research on news media impact on presidential elections. Examines relationships of exposure and attention to various news media with information learned about the issue positions of 1996 presidential candidates; level of interest in this election campaign; and intention to vote. Finds statistically significant associations only…

Identifies factors that might have influenced individual newspapers' coverage of the suffrage movement, including the personal positions of publishers and editors, political affiliations, the demographic characteristics of the readership area, circulation size, place of publication, and sources of the stories. Finds that these examples of the…

Uses survey data from a 1994 United States Senate campaign in Missouri to show that using TV news for political and government information is positively associated with knowledge about candidates and not associated with cynicism toward politicians. Notes that results run counter to the popular notion that television news causes declines in…

Finds that the nontraditional media of television talk shows and morning network shows did not contribute significantly to greater knowledge of candidate issue positions, greater intention to vote, or higher levels of interest in the 1992 presidential election campaign. (SR)

Investigates whether different measurements can significantly influence the outcome of a study. Examines whether voters learn more from political advertisements than from television news, using exposure and attention to measure television watching, confidence and accuracy to measure knowledge, and different control strategies. Finds that different…

Contributes to scholarship on sexual content and gender portrayals in advertising by assessing images of women and men in magazine ads in 1983 and 1993. Finds both genders were portrayed more explicitly and through more sexually intimate contact in 1993; images of men were more explicit in the 1990s; and portrayals were most explicit in women's…