A study conducted in Columbus, Ohio, assessed the importance of voter uncertainty in motivating media use and use of specific campaign information. Data were collected from a telephone survey of 540 persons registered to vote in Columbus or surrounding Franklin County. Decisional difficulty, likelihood of vote change, and knowledge about the…

A study was conducted to discover why investigation of one of the most important trends in the newspaper industry during the past century, the decline of newspaper competition within a city, has produced conflicting results. The study reviewed existing literature to learn why this is so, and also to determine if direct daily newspaper competition…

A study examined whether mass media exposure is a unidimensional, bidimensional, or multidimensional construct as reflected in commonly used indicators of exposure. Telephone interviews were conducted with 534 households to determine media exposure. A structural equation model was proposed to account for the dimensionality of mass media exposure,…

A study examined whether the Ghanaian press sets the public agenda in Ghana, and whether Ghanaian elites show a greater agenda-setting effect than non-elites. An analysis of 1,585 subjects was conducted. Respondents were interviewed by teachers and students in teachers' training colleges. The construct of elitism was determined by measuring six…

A study was conducted to explore attitudes toward the credibility of individual media and news media in general. The first phase of the study was a series of focused group discussions, while the second involved a national representative sampling of 1,469 adults interviewed by telephone, 875 of whom were then surveyed by mail. Credibility scores…

The shaping of social reality has become the task of the mass media due to the fact that audience members base interaction and social judgments upon the information they process from the mass media. Theorists have developed various paradigms linking individual media use and interpersonal communication with cultural effects and mass media. Although…

A study examined contemporary reactions of the Black American press to the relocation and internment of the Japanese and Japanese Americans during World War II. Noting that the Black American press has been an activist press since its inception in 1827, it was hypothesized that Black newspapers would editorialize against the internment of Japanese…

A content analysis of the photographs included in four employee magazines was conducted for the period of 1978 to 1983 to investigate the manner in which the publications used photographs to carry messages about people, their relationship to the organization, and the work environment. The publications selected for analysis were all employee…

A study investigated the types of advertisements newspapers refuse as well as the attitudes of advertising managers about guidelines and laws concerning advertising refusal. Newspapers were selected from the "1985 Editor and Publisher Yearbook" using a systematic probability sampling method, and questionnaires were mailed to advertising…

To compare the ways staff and free-lance writers handle ethical issues, several writers were interviewed for personal experiences, and several daily and weekly newspapers and regional magazines were surveyed. Results indicated that the shield laws protecting staff writers do not apply to free-lance writers. Neither do the rules governing conflicts…

Results of the 1985 American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) survey--to determine public attitudes toward media credibility--are reported in this paper. Discussion is categorized according to the 12 issues explored: (1) the believability of media when news reports conflict; (2) geographic scope of topics; (3) reliability of reporting and…

If content analysis is to satisfy the requirement of objectivity, measures and procedures must be reliable. Reliability is usually measured by the proportion of agreement of all categories identically coded by different coders. For such data to be empirically meaningful, a high degree of inter-coder reliability must be demonstrated. Researchers in…

The rapid pace of improving relations between the United States and the People's Republic of China during the late 1970s has been well scrutinized by mass media scholars, but most of the research has focused on the press coverage emanating from the United States, the People's Republic of China, and Taiwan, the major nations involved in…

A case study compared United States and South Korean press coverage of the crash of the November 29, 1987, Korean Air Lines (KAL) flight 858, to examine how the press reported the terrorism angle before evidence supporting the charges of terrorism was uncovered. Stories dealing with the crash reported in four prestigious United States newspapers…

The emergence of frequency modulation or FM radio signals, which arose from the desire to free broadcasting of static noise common to amplitude modulation or AM, has produced the controversial development of stereo broadcasting. The resulting enhancement of sound quality helped FM pass AM in audience shares in less than two decades. The basic…