The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) of the late 1980s appeared to pursue its own agenda of broadcast deregulation, notwithstanding congressional pressures. The apparent power shift is evident in a case study of the interactions between Congress and the FCC on the subject of children's television. In the early 1970s, the FCC tended to…

Predicated on the assumption that organized labor has long been misrepresented by the mass media, and bolstered by a literature review, a case study analyzed in detail labor news coverage from the "Columbus Dispatch" for the month of April 1994. A total of 37 articles were gathered that related to labor issues--articles on the ongoing…

A semiological study examined the products and processes of sexual identity/identification by "reading" newspaper sports photographs from three distinct but interrelated ideological positions (the dominant heterosexual culture, a residual reading which resists the dominant interpretation and asserts equality, and an emergent reading that…

How do cable television subscribers differ from those who choose not to subscribe to cable? A study employed the uses and gratification paradigm to construct a questionnaire that solicited data from 600 television households in the Dayton, Ohio market. The sample was stratified to assure that one-third of the households had cable available but…

Media sociology in the early 1980s was "rediscovered" by sociologists and political scientists. It was a discipline whose time had arrived. In much of the work in the field at this time the level of analysis dealt with individuals working within organizations. Since that time, media sociology has gone through paradigm debates, expanded…

This report describes the significant role which the Japan Broadcasting Corporation's (NHK) educational broadcasts play within the Japanese education system. It begins by presenting an overview of the Japanese educational system and the fundamental characteristics of school broadcasting via both television and radio. The increase in the number of…

A study of the extent of the diplomatic and commercial assistance provided by the United States government to the Associated Press (AP) from 1912 to 1948 shows AP's manager, Kent Cooper, to be less a champion of the free press than an efficient captain of industry in expanding AP influence across the globe. Early in the twentieth century, British,…

A study was conducted to examine message evaluations of selected public service advertisements (PSAs) by a young adult population and to test whether local and nonlocal source attribution would influence those evaluations. In addition, the study investigated the extent to which audience characteristics such as fatalism (the degree to which a…

The constitutionality of punitive damage awards in media defamation litigation was examined through a review of federal and state libel case law since the 1964 Supreme Court decision in "New York Times v. Sullivan." Using the opinions of various courts and justices and studies of libel litigation, a number of areas bearing on the issue…

Suggests that press values for various periods might be assessed through a study of objective journalistic behavior and self-identified interests, and proposes a method of collecting data for such an approach. (RB)

Supports the hypothesis that the mass media can play a significant role in the political socialization of children. (RB)

Concludes that the press may not be successful in telling people what to think, but it is successful in telling its readers what to think about. (RB)

A survey of student and teacher attitudes toward instructional media in southwestern Michigan is described. (PF)

The concept of "objectivity" suggests that facts are selected and constructed according to formal rules by professional journalists. A comparison of American and Soviet concepts of news leads to the observation that both share similar claims to objectivity. The similarity defies whether objectivity assumes the form of facts detached from…

The ability to record sound is power over sound. Musicians, producers, recording engineers, and the popular music audience often refer to the sound of a recording as something distinct from the music it contains. Popular music is primarily mediated via electronics, via sound, and not by means of written notes. The ability to preserve or modify…