Reports findings of surveys of people's evaluations of press behavior during the Watergate period; concludes that the most important determinants of press criticism were in support of Nixon, party affiliation, and ideology. (GW)

Most of the research on motivations and media use has assumed that there is some general motivation that directs habitual media behavior. Recent work on motivations, however, suggests that it may be valuable to distinguish between general needs and more specific needs, both of which may direct media behavior. For example, regular media use might…

Agenda setting provides an analysis strategy for linking press coverage and voter perceptions of front runners, and underscores the importance of studying the primaries early in an election year. Two studies were undertaken in 1976. The first study, in Onandaga County (New York), involved telephone interviews of 335 registered Democrats in late…

An earlier phase of a research project proposed a theoretical model linking the key concepts of community commitment, media use, knowledge about community, community evaluation, and community pride as well as a series of social locator variables. The present phase of the study concerned itself with the central part of the model, ignoring the…

A survey of 548 male and female household heads in Columbus, Ohio, was conducted in 1977 to discover the effects of dependency on different media on levels of trust toward government, knowledge about government, and perceived knowledge about government at both local and national levels. It was hypothesized that newspaper dependency is positively…

This study examines data from several national polls about press coverage during the Watergate scandal, in order to assess the origins of press criticism. The polls were conducted between 28 September and 6 October 1973, during June 1974, and in August 1974. The data suggest that political variables--particularly support of Nixon, party…

The political scandals known as Watergate provided an unusual opportunity to study the importance of attitudinal and cognitive variables in media research. In order to assess the impact of Watergate during the months preceding the 1974 Congressional elections, 339 personal interviews were conducted during October with a probability sample of…

In order to determine if media dependency has effects on audience members, a study was conducted among 460 randomly chosen household heads in Syracuse, New York. The respondents were asked to answer questions designed to measure media dependency in terms of use and of reliance on the various media. The questionnaire included a measure of audience…