A study examined the relationship between an individual's community ties to place and the use of media. Data were collected from residents of Austin, Texas, by means of mail and telephone surveys. Among the variables examined were community ties (home ownership and length of time in community), political variables, demographics, and use of…

Concludes that the news media report less favorably on deviant political groups but not less prominently. Suggests the findings support the theory that the media act as agents for social control. (FL)

Intended to aid theory building in the study of influences on news content, this paper examines how five basic theoretical approaches to studying news content can be integrated into J. Herbert Altschull's assertion that mass media content reflects the ideology of those who finance the media. The paper notes that Altschull's theory accounts for the…

Reports that more than three-fourths of surveyed Hispanics never read Spanish-language publications. Finds mixed evidence on the relationship between use of Spanish language media and acculturation. (FL)

A study was conducted to determine the effect on perceived meaning of the way a photograph is reproduced and to discover whether there would be an interaction between the complexity of photographic subject matter and the complexity of reproduction method. Each of 160 college students in a sophomore-level American history course was given a packet…

Journalists view the left-right continuum as a dimension on which political entities array themselves in order to vie for a similarly arrayed public. Such a spatial measuring device is useful, since it allows journalists to compare political entities on a common scale that readers supposedly understand and on which they can relate their own…

Shows how different kinds of involvement measures can add to the ability both to explain differences between people's knowledge of election information and to investigate whether the way that knowledge is measured affects conclusions about involvement with television and newspapers. (MS)

Two experiments were conducted in November 1980 and March 1981 to study media effects on the perceived legitimacy of political groups. The first experiment was a pilot study designed specifically to explicate legitimacy by factor analysis. The second experiment was designed to validate the factor analysis performed in the pilot study, to expand…

Examined the concepts of legitimacy and deviance. Investigated the hypothesis that U.S. media support centrist political groups by delegitimizing deviant political groups. Found some supporting evidence that media coverage of deviant political groups makes them seem ridiculous and eccentric. Discussed implications for journalists and journalism…

A study was conducted to test the hypothesis that the mass media act as agents of social control by varying the coverage of political groups in relation to how deviant they perceive the groups to be. Editors from the 100 largest daily newspapers in the United States were asked to rate 11 political groups on four scales thought to measure political…

To better understand the effects of the media on audiences, five media sociology theoretical approaches to the study of influences on media were investigated by looking at tests of the approaches in three journals over the last 10 years. The mirror approach predicted that the media would accurately represent reality, but, while accurate, the media…

A study examined how use of different kinds of "involvement" measures (behavioral, cognitive, or affective involvement, gratifications sought, and cognitive effort expended) could help explain differences between people's knowledge of election information and whether the way that knowledge is measured affects conclusions about…