An analysis of 1938 newspaper editorials about Orson Welles' notorious "War of the Worlds" broadcast reveals that they explained audience reaction on the grounds of gullibility, the ominous threat of war, and the technique of the broadcast, and that they offered radio a rather stern lecture on the relationship between freedom and responsibility.…

Discusses the acceptance and impact of a Costa Rican radio program, "Dialogo," by all segments of the population. The program deals with human sexuality, family planning, and hygiene. (JMF)

Discusses Frederick Wiseman's film "High School" in terms of the audience's perspective of the following themes: power, authority, identity, alienation, sexuality, and boredom. Illustrates how these themes relate to each other to form a structure that invites rhetorical response. (JMF)

Presents rationale and guidelines for assessing audience needs before workshops are planned. An initial checklist of appropriate information to gather is presented, and strategies for obtaining information are discussed. (BK)

Usual student seminar classes involve students presenting papers to the class. Alternatives to this approach are offered that maximize student audience involvement. The suggestions incorporate variations of sub-grouping, idea generation, discussion of important statements, and the refining, clarification, and evaluation of key statements. (JMD)

Presents a study of the effectiveness and believability of male and female newscasters among children and shows that newscaster sex does not effect believability ratings. Girls, however, learned more from a male than from a female newscaster. Newscaster sex did not affect retention of the newscast by boys. (JMF)

Examines the use of television in a critically oriented education and emphasizes the importance of codes and subcodes in the transmission of messages from sender to receiver. (JMF)

Describes a study that examined how audience differences, realized as varying degrees of intimacy or familiarity with a writer, affect syntactic and strategic aspects of style and that sought to determine the extent to which audience adaptation is developmental among fourth-, eighth-, and twelfth-grade students as well as expert adults. (DD)

Reports on a study that suggested that those who watch television news primarily to gain information recall more than others, and that casual viewers recall more than those seeking diversion or both diversion and information. (GT)

Examines how the convention of females interpreting "male" material and males interpreting "female" material affects an audiences evaluation and comprehension of performance. (MH)

Presents evaluation criteria for Internet and World Wide Web resources. Scope, content, graphic and multimedia design, purpose and audience, reviews, workability, and cost are discussed; criteria used by Internet evaluation sites are listed; and an annotated list of 10 evaluation sites on the Web is appended. (LRW)

Describes organizing a poetry "slam" (a contest in which people read their original poems and listeners cast votes for their favorites) involving 200 eighth graders from two different schools. Discusses how this experience made vivid for students the need to write for an audience and to revise. (SR)

Examines the effect of violence advisories and MPAA ratings on parent-child television viewing choices and verbal interactions while making those choices. Parents mainly made negative comments about the advisories and restrictive ratings whereas children, especially older children, were more likely to make positive comments. The presence of an…

Provides extensive reviews of two CD-ROM titles related to Native Americans: (1) Microsoft's "500 Nations: Stories of the North American Indian Experience" and (2) "The American Indian: A Multimedia Encyclopedia: by Facts on File." Evaluation criteria include content; authority; search engine; audience appropriateness; price;…

Examines persuasive text, first describing it and discussing it with reference to relevant philosophy and rhetoric, and then asking whether it is successful: do written texts change the minds of their readers? Notes that research on designing text to disabuse students of scientific misconceptions points to text features that authors could use to…