Twenty years ago, many leading political scientists advised their colleagues to focus only on the policy-making process and eschew the content of policy because, they argued, the scientific discipline did not have normative standards by which to judge policy contents, and because political scientists could not become experts in the many…

A study examined reports of the American invasions of the Dominican Republic (1965) and Grenada (1983) to determine whether there were substantive differences in coverage as a result of differing journalistic conditions. First-day New York Times reports of both invasions were analyzed both quantitatively (number of stories published, amount of…

A study examined whether the media in Louisiana have reflected current media trends of emphasis on crime news, focusing on crime news content in the 24 Louisiana daily newspapers. Since a key part of the research was the comparison of trends in newspaper accounts of crime and the reported crime rate, the 22 communities with daily newspapers were…

Intended to provide a comprehensive conceptual framework to serve as a scaffold for past, present, and future research on "scholastic journalism" (journalism in the secondary school), a topical content analysis of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) Secondary Education Division research, teaching,…

First Amendment students were unhappy to see Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart retire because his voting record demonstrated a favorable attitude toward freedom of speech and press. His replacement, Sandra Day O'Connor, was predicted to be a conservative or moderate who probably would vote consistently with Stewart in other areas, but her…

Eight Chinese daily newspapers were content analyzed to determine the role and functions of the Chinese press in the United States. The papers studied were based in New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, and were dated from Novemer 1 to November 6, 1982. The results indicated that the Chinese press did not pay much attention to the local…

A study examined the conserving tendencies of the established political party press during the early stages of the antislavery movement. Eighteen partisan newspapers--from both northern and southern states--were examined for their coverage of the July 30, 1836, mob violence against James G. Birney and his Cincinnati "Philanthropist," and…

An examination of letters left at the Vietnam Veteran's Memorial in Washington, D.C. between November, 1984 and April, 1986 revealed that the memorial serves as a rhetorical situation that urges its visitors to eloquence. The memorial is an excellent proving ground for situational theory because the interaction of site and perception is vital to…

Examples from the data of a study of television programing for adolescents in Sweden illustrate some of the differences in the ways programs address their male and female viewers. Whereas boy and girl characters in television programs are roughly equal in number, the distribution changes when only leading roles are considered. A marked imbalance…

Noting that efforts of governments to control newspapers are more problematic where news photographs are concerned, a study compared the news photos printed in an English-language Argentinian newspaper during and after a period of totalitarian rule. The study sample was a simulated "week" of issues, consisting of one day from each month…

A study was conducted to examine the journalism work of James Gordon Bennett, who founded the "New York Herald" in the 1830s, and to determine the nature of his coverage of religion before, during, and after the "Moral War" waged in 1840 against Bennett's popular newspaper. In addition, the study analyzed what Bennett's…

In addition to presenting the results of analyses of written texts from a linguistic perspective, this book proposes productive methods for discourse analysis and identifies new directions for work on written communication. The studies presented in the book illustrate the importance of text linguistics and discourse analysis for research on…

Social studies documents were collected from teachers in the Tucson, Arizona area and examined using three theories of culture as a way to explore the interrelationships between social studies curriculum and United States society. Malinowski's functionalist position suggests that culture is composed of traits each of which provide a specific…

Media content analysts seldom observe the principle that editorial omissions are as telling as what is published or broadcast; hence, the purpose of this paper is to explore, and thus stimulate debate about, editorial omissions or "strategic silence." It is observed that as a concept, strategic silence embraces both tact and…

A study examined whether intercity competition affects the content of daily newspapers and whether the content profile is consistent with the umbrella competition theory elaborated by James N. Rosse. Rosse's theory hypothesized four layers of newspaper competition--large metropolitan dailies, satellite daily papers, suburban dailies, and weekly…