Cultural dependency has become a serious international issue over the past two decades, especially as it relates to the news media. If charges that the Latin American media are subservient to foreign interests have any truth, then the content of their media should closely resemble that of the foreign wires to which they subscribe. The news can be…

An investigation was designed to test the proposition that people who are apprehensive about crime will exhibit a greater preference for crime drama that features the restoration of justice than will those people who are less apprehensive about crime. Undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory mass communications course served as subjects.…

Coverage of two Third World countries, Mexico and Lebanon, by "Time" and "Newsweek" magazines was analyzed by comparing the cultural differences in meanings attached to words used in the magazines to describe the two countries. Stories were collected about the countries from each issue of the magazines published in 1979. The…

The first article in this report discusses how psychographic measures can be used to describe newspaper readers' life styles and to distinguish readers of different newspapers in a market. It reports the findings of a study revealing that in three markets, different psychographic profiles emerged for readers of morning and afternoon newspapers.…

Library historians and historians of literacy have been more creative than journalism historians in using individual-level historical data such as deeds, wills, depositions, surveys, and census figures to study reading behaviors of the past. For example, the series of family cost of living surveys conducted in the United States by state and…

Two hundred fifty residents of a southern California city responded to a telephone survey designed to assess audience interests in and preferences for local television newscasts. The respondents were asked to rank, in order of their preference, six major news catagories: issues, unexpected events, entertainment, sports, weather, and banter between…

As part of a research project studying ways in which police "culture" is socially constructed and displayed in police talk, six members of a research team rode on patrol with officers of a small community police department, during all three shifts, for a period of four months. Conversations during the rides were recorded. Analysis of the…

Designed to assess the motivations viewers have for watching public television (PTV), the gratifications they derive from programs they enjoy, and their expectations of PTV, the pilot study described was conducted to provide information for program decision-making and efforts aimed at attracting different types of audiences. The research strategy…

Defining "taboos" as laws, norms, or personal beliefs specifying situations in which behaviors or topics should not be performed or communicated about, this paper provides a conceptual and theoretical communication perspective governing the movement of taboos in social change situations. Applying Joseph Woelfel's message-oriented linear…

The responses of 36 publishers and editors of city magazines--magazines such as "Chicago,""MPLS," and "Texas Monthly" that are published primarily for a local or regional market--provided data for an analysis of the positioning of these magazines in the media marketplace, factors leading to their success, their…

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…

The selection matrix is an attempt to provide an efficient, effective, and practical basis for selecting the instructional medium possessing more specific learner-situation-task attributes than others. The selection matrix provides three important capabilities by (1) identifying a number of appropriate media and isolating them, (2) reducing the…

This collection of 26 articles, written by mass communication experts from 12 countries, investigates various aspects of entertainment as communication, focusing on entertainment as provided by its currently most important source, mass media. The premise behind the essays is that there is no such thing as "pure entertainment," but that…

Intended to provide a single reference source for the most significant statistics describing communication industry trends in the United States since 1900, this book is a collection and assessment of the currently available quantitative descriptive information on mass media industries. The core of the book is its more than 300 tables of data on…

Print journalism and journalism research have contributed many concepts, principles, and communication techniques to the field of political communication. An examination of the indexes of "Public Opinion Quarterly,""Journalism Quarterly," and the "Journal of Communication" through the mid-1960s indicates the evolution of the study of print media…