Measurements were taken from 8 randomly selected Gannett papers and from 23 non-Gannett papers in an effort to determine whether Gannett papers are unlike other kinds of papers. The content of every issue of every newspaper was divided and measured into eight categories: advertising, news, opinion, letters, sports, features, entertainment, and…

The annual reports of 197 publicly held American corporations were analyzed to determine the relationship of corporate social responsibility activities to boundary-spanning activities (attempts to relate the firm to the outside world). Data gathered included (1) the number of directors from inside and outside a corporation, (2) the number of…

Research and reviews of college introductory sociology textbooks reveal that most do not accurately reflect the diversity of views and perspectives in sociology and do not accurately convey the research-based knowledge of the discipline. Content analysis of textbooks published in the last 20 years indicates that most textbooks are comprehensive,…

Content analysis was used to study the values evident in televised beer and wine commercials. Seventy-seven prime time commercials, 7.6% of a week's total, were analyzed along value dimensions adapted from Gallup's measure of popular social values. The intensity of each value was coded on a five-point scale. None of the commercials in the beer and…

A study examined the possible sources for story ideas within a local television newsroom, with a special emphasis on the role of the reporter. Fifteen newscasts, comprising 227 stories that appeared on early evening newscasts of the three network affiliated television stations in Memphis, Tennessee, were coded for the original source for each…

A new readability formula is designed to work on passages that are 40 to 99 words long, while existing readability formulas require a passage of 300 words or longer. The new formula requires the passage to have at least three sentences and is reliable for the fourth through the twelfth grades. (Four figures which demonstrate the use of the formula…

A study examined whether "Sports Illustrated" offers a biased view of the sports world by focusing primarily on the eastern teams. The units of analysis were articles about Major League baseball appearing in the "Sports Illustrated" issues from late April to early October in the years 1975 to 1984. The teams were divided into…

To examine the role that items on the list of "What Literate Americans Know" (developed by E. D. Hirsch, Jr.) plays in the nation's literacy, a study conducted an electronic search of "The New York Times" to establish the frequency of occurrence for a sample from the list. A random sample of 424 terms (9% of the total list) was…

To examine how the contents of Korean television serial dramas have changed and to determine trends of their portrayals of male and female characters' lifestyles, a study analyzed Korean television dramas of 1977 and 1987. A sample of three channels' video--22 daily and 14 weekly episodes of 18 different television dramas during weekday prime time…

Jacques Ellul defined "prepropaganda" as the subtle and sophisticated use of news services to improve an authoritarian government's public image. Because its value is directly related to its being used sparingly, he predicted that prepropaganda would increase when an authoritarian government felt threatened and decrease when it once more…

Critics of international news flow characteristics have charged that news is biased toward the interests of the developed world and against the developing world, thereby giving an unrepresentative image of their countries to the United States reader. A study was conducted to examine the output and presentation of reports by foreign correspondents…

Content analysis of 5,190 news stories appearing on network weekday evening newscasts between May 1982 and April 1984 reveals under- and overrepresentations of geographic/political subdivisions and of individuals representing various social groups within the United States and internationally. More specifically, on "geographic" biases,…

A study was conducted to determine whether differences existed between national media and local media in their coverage of events that have national interest. Coverage of the riotous aftermath of the 1984 World Series in Detroit was examined by comparing Detroit's daily newspapers with other United States dailies. The hypothesis was that stories…

Author examined the development of WORDS system and attempted to place it in an historical framework. (Author/RK)