Using the data base provided by the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) through its literacy assessment of young adults, researchers probed the newspaper reading practices of 21-25 year olds. The 1985 survey used home interviews of 3,600 young adults in the 48 contiguous states, representative of the 21 million adults in this age…

On October 1, 1949, the Chinese People's Consultative Conference enacted the "organic law" that formally created the People's Republic of China; the following day notes were delivered to consular offices in Peking stating that the new government considered it necessary that they establish regular diplomatic relations with all countries…

To illustrate the relevance of critical communication history and theory to media ethics, this paper examines a crucial episode in the history of public relations: the American electrical industry's cooperative advertising and public relations efforts in the 1920s to sell the "electrical idea" to consumers. The paper first enumerates…

Music videos, with their characteristic visual energy and frenetic music-and-dance numbers, have caught on rapidly since their introduction in 1981, bringing prosperity to a slumping record industry. Creating images to accompany existing music is, however, hardly a new idea. The concept can be traced back to 1877 and Thomas Edison's invention of…

A meta-analysis was conducted of 29 comparative studies located primarily through computer searches of Comprehensive Dissertation Abstracts and ERIC. Studies chosen took place in actual elementary classrooms, reported measured outcomes for both computer-based education and control classes, and were free from methodological flaws. A total of 21…

A content analysis of white-oriented and black-oriented Milwaukee, Wisconsin, newspaper coverage of that city's racial riots in 1967 was conducted to test the following hypotheses: (1) the general media would rely more on "authority" sources, while the specialized black media would rely more on "nonauthority" sources; (2) the…

A large-scale pre-television benchmark survey was undertaken in five Indonesian provinces in 1976, prior to the launching of Indonesia's telecommunications satellite, to provide data for comparison with the results of a survey of the same villages to be carried out in 1982, 5 years after the introduction of television, to assess its long-term…

The popular media extensively covered Benbow and Stanley's (1980) reported finding of a major sex difference in mathematical reasoning abilities among gifted seventh-grade students. The purpose of this study was to assess the impact of that media campaign on parents' beliefs regarding their sons' and daughters' math aptitudes. Two sets of parental…

Reflecting and influencing foreign policy, the mass media are important, if nontraditional, diplomatic channels. The role the news media assume, ranging from neutral to participant, depends largely on the society within which it operates. Journalists in authoritarian governments, for example, who rely on press releases and briefings of foreign…

Although psychological studies of the mass media have been dominated by cognitivist and psychodynamic concepts, a study of the mass media using a behavior analysis method may be used to analyze the content of the mass media. By applying that analysis to fictional teacher-learner interactions an interpretation of those relationships can be made and…

The debate over the role of the press in the Third World has largely ignored questions of public perception of media roles and performance. To investigate whether an audience perceives the fundamental difference between development journalism (where the state has significant involvement in news decisions) and a free press, and whether that…

Ethnographic interviews were conducted to determine how criminals assessed their treatment by the media. Twenty-five inmates, all participants in a mass media communications journalism course at Pendleton Reformatory in Pendleton, Indiana, were videotaped while answering the question: How do you regard the treatment given you by the media during…

A case study examined employee perceptions of the communication climate within a newspaper. Using qualitative and quantitative techniques, data were collected from 150 employees in 7 departments of a small newspaper organization, "Southwestern Newspapers". Results indicated that this newspaper can improve its communications climate by…

A study was conducted to determine the effect of graphic format--bar, line, table, and line-table graph--on the interpretation of numerical data by field dependent and field independent students. Ninety-six undergraduate students were given the Group Embedded Figures Test and randomly assigned to one of four treatments. During the testing phase,…

This report summarizes information found in a survey of the literature on radio as an educational medium which covered the published literature from many areas of the world. Comments on the literature reviewed are provided throughout the text, which is organized under seven major headings: (1) Radio, Mass Medium; (2) Radio, the Medium (broadening…