Increased litigation and rising litigation costs threaten the future of newspapers and magazines. A case study was conducted to determine the costs and effects of "United States v. 'The Progressive,'" a prior restraint case over the publication in 1979 of an article on the hydrogen bomb. "The Progressive," which operates at a…

A survey was conducted to determine the extent and content of newspaper coverage of foreign policy issues in the 1980 United States presidential campaign. Fifty daily newspapers from every region of the country were selected randomly based on circulation. A list of 757 news events was divided into party and nonparty events, and the party events…

A survey of 379 adults was used to assess the extent to which television news credibility scores were a function of researcher operationalizations of the concept. Underlying this effort were published reports suggesting that single item measures of television news credibility were either biased or inadequate indicators of a more complex…

In February 1942, a letter to the editor of the Pittsburgh "Courier," the nation's largest black owned newspaper, started the "Double V" (for victory at home and victory abroad) campaign, which stressed the right of blacks to have equality in the United States since they were fighting inequality abroad. As the…

A study examined the use of cable television in the context of general patterns of media use and habits of media users. Data came from telephone interviews with approximately 600 household heads, a third of whom did not subscribe to cable television. Information gathered included respondents' use of newspapers, television, and radio. Cable…

To examine the ways in which aspects of foreign news content are linked together, an analysis was performed on the data collected during a content analysis of foreign news in major national daily newspapers and broadcast news programs over 12 days. The analysis included the identification of (1) up to four topics from an all-inclusive descriptive…

The two sections of this report focus on recent research in the newspaper industry. The first section describes changes implemented in the design and layout of a Minnesota daily newspaper and the methodology and results of two surveys of readers' favorable reactions to the changes. The second section is designed to familiarize newspaper people…

A study examined whether editorial involvement of magazine editors could be predicted by various personal and professional characteristics. Questionnaires completed by 170 editors of magazines elicited information about the extent of their involvement in editorial operations and their personal and professional characteristics, including age, sex,…

Based on data gathered in a larger study of audience response to the debates held during the 1976 campaign for the presidency of the United States, a study examined the validity of uses and gratifications measures and explored how these measures were affected by differing levels of audience media activity. The data was drawn from telephone…

This study focused on the psychophysiological reactions of viewers seeing such selected cinemagraphic elements as varying camera distances, tracking shots, panning shots, and zooming shots. Subjects (N=29), randomly selected from introductory speech courses, viewed five films that varied in the presence or absence of the selected filmic elements.…

The way the attractiveness of an average female is rated can be significantly changed by exposing the rater to media females, even for very short periods. In one study, subjects were exposed either to a series of advertisements containing female faces or to a control series of average females. Subsequent ratings of a target female's attractiveness…

In an attempt to understand nonreader attitudes toward the daily newspaper, 576 non-newspaper reading adults were queried in three waves about their reasons for avoiding newspapers. In the first wave, the major findings were that nonreaders avoid newspapers because of lack of time, preference for another news medium, newspaper cost, and lack of…

The content of pretrial crime stories in a national sample of 29 newspapers was analyzed to discover the extent of violations of the voluntary free-press fair-trial guidelines of the American Bar Association (ABA), which have been adopted by 23 states. The investigation also considered the relationship between violations and several relevant…

A review of the current situation regarding the media flow between the United States and Australia shows that the traditional pattern--American content dominating the Australian media--still holds, but that there is evidence of movement by the Australians to establish their own media identity. An analysis of the television ratings for Australia's…

A study to formulate a communication model by which sex role images are projected by magazine publishers and to test the implications of this model involved 321 college students enrolled in various communication classes. The students rated magazine covers on a seven-point scale that measured their degree of interest in reading each magazine.…