Archives for January 2012

Graduate Education Interest Group

Axis of Evil vs. Sunshine Frame: U.S. and S. Korean TV News Coverage of President Bush’s Visit to S. Korea • Jong Hyuk Lee and Yun Jung Choi, Missouri • This study examines how different frames were used by the U.S. and South Korean network news in covering President Bush’s visit to three Asian countries. Authors predicted that the U.S. media would use an “Axis of Evil” frame while South Korean media would use a “Sunshine” frame, each reflecting their government’s policy toward North Korea. A total of 79 broadcasting news stories, sampled from four U.S. networks (NBC, CBS, ABC, FOX) and three South Korean networks (KBS, MBC, SBS), were content analyzed.

Learning to do What Comes Naturally: Delivery Instructions in Broadcast News Textbooks • Catherine Winter, Minnesota-Duluth • Broadcast news textbooks should draw on linguistic research to offer more principled instruction in conversational delivery. Popular textbooks offer little guidance on which words to emphasize when reading aloud. Research suggests that listeners understand copy read aloud better if the reader put emphasis where it would fall in natural speech. Textbooks should explain the systematic relationship between parts of speech and emphasis to offer students a system for marking scripts and delivering news more effectively.

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Entertainment Studies Interest Group

Entertainment Studies Interest Group Violent Music Genres on the Net: Analysis of Music Videos on BET.com, Country.com, MTV.com, and VHl.com • Debashis “Deb” Aikat, North Carolina at Chapel • NO ABSTRACT

Disposition and Ethnicity in Competition-Based Reality Television Programming: An Examination of the Effects on Viewer Enjoyment • Kristin M. Barton and Arthur A. Raney, Florida State University • The study investigates the extent to which disposition and ethnicity of contestants in a competition-based reality program are predictors of viewer enjoyment. To determine this, 149 White participants viewed photographs of White and Black males of varying dispositions, rating each as potentially successful and enjoyable program contestants. Findings support Zillmann’s moral sanction theory, but fail to support findings from the disposition theory of sports spectatorship literature (specifically, Sapolsky, 1980).

Optimistic Bias and the Media: Adolescents’ Perceptions of Violence • John Chapin, Penn State University, Stacy de las Alas and Grace Coleman, Crisis Center North • The study sought to be one of the first to explore the role of the media in the formation and preservation of optimistic bias. The study was also one of the first to link optimistic bias and third-person perception, bridging a gap between communication studies and health psychology. The intersection of the two literatures may be especially beneficial in understanding how adolescents process and interpret public health messages and subsequently engage in risk behaviors or self-protective behaviors in health contexts.

Late-night Comedy in Election 2000: The Direct Effects of Exposure on Candidate Trait Ratings and the Moderating role of Political Knowledge • Dannagal E. Goldthwaite, Pennsylvania • Throughout the 2000 Presidential election, there was much discussion among journalists, politicians and comedians alike, about the role of late-night comedy in the formation of public opinion. In a New York Times article entitled “The Stiff Guy vs. the Dumb Guy,” Marshall Sella suggested that “…part of what turns random episodes like the RATS controversy into icons, what inflates them into pivotal campaign events, is late-night comedy” (Sella, 2000, p. 72).

Gender, Violence and Victimization in Top-Selling Video Games’ • Katharine E. Heintz-Knowles, Children’s Media Research and Consulting and Jennifer Jacobs Henderson Washington • In 2000, video games were a $6 billion industry (Interactive Digital Software Association, 2001). In 2001, sales reached $9.4 billion, more than gross box office receipts for the year (Kent, 2002). It is estimated that about 145 million Americans play video games on a regular basis (Kaplan, 1999). According to Kids and Media @ The New Millennium (1999), seventy percent of children in the U.S. have video game systems in their homes, and 33% have a console in their bedrooms.

Measuring Expected Entertainment Gratifications: Developing and Validating the Expected Entertainment Value Scale • Thomas Kim Hixson, Wisconsin-Whitewater • The Expected Entertainment Value Scale identifies and quantifies the expected gratifications used by moviegoers to help select a particular movie to attend. The scale was validated using movie trailers as stimuli in two separate samples and found to a reliable and useful tool to measure the effects of trailers. Movie genre preference was found to be a significant predictor of expected entertainment value, a finding that should make the scale useful to movie advertisers.

Addictive, But Not For Me: The Third-Person Effect And Electronic Game Players Views Toward The Medium’s Potential For Dependency And Addiction • James D. Ivory, Wyoming • As video games continue to maintain a widespread following among children and adults alike, research attempts to define the addictive potential of the medium. Since much of this study involves self-reporting by game players, possible third person effects must be considered. This study’s analysis of a sample of 175 university students finds some evidence for the existence of third person effects in regular player’s opinions pertaining to electronic games and addiction.

Would the Real Reality Television Please Stand Up: An Analysis of How Viewers Understand Reality TV • Lisa Joniak, North Florida • Reality television has experienced a surge in programming and viewership. The range of what is being labeled “reality TV” has become divergent and unwieldy. Thus, it is essential, at this developmental stage, to explore what reality television truly is. This study examines how viewers interpret, understand and characterize reality television programming. In general, viewers from the present study agreed that reality programs contain the following characteristics: no script, real people, and real, unrehearsed reactions to some event or situation.

Marriage On Television: A Content Analysis • Sara Netzley, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale • This study explored the way in which television presents marriage by analyzing the content of the 14 most popular television programs of the 2001-2002 television season. Statistical analysis of chi-square tables found a relationship between television program genre and attitudes presented toward marriage, as well as a relationship between a character’s marital status and the attitude he or she expressed about marriage.

Reading Distinction On Television: Exploring Fiction and Non-fiction Alike • Jennie Phillips, Texas at Austin • NO ABSTRACT

Gratifications of Reality Show Viewing: Antecedents and Consensuses • Ran Wei and Caroline Tootle, South Carolina • Reality TV shows appear to sweep the nation. What are the gratifications sought from reality TV? What explain the gratifications? And what are the effects of reviewing reality TV? This survey study of college students found two new gratification dimensions of reality TV viewing: life-like format and vicarious participation. Further, they were found related to respondents level of thrill seeking from reality shows and viewing level of reality TV.

Wrestling With Violence: Desensitization to Violence through Viewing Professional Wrestling • Kevin D. Williams, Georgia • NO ABSTRACT

Entertaining Commercials in Sports Telecast: A Content Analysis of Commercials in XFL Football • Moonhee Yang and Brian Brantley, Alabama • In this paper, we examined the relationship between Sports program and commercials shown during their broadcasts. To this end, we performed a content analysis of 132 commercials embedded in XFL games. The results show that there was congruence between commercials and XFL games in product category, emotional strategy, and music. We also found that stereotypically masculine imaging was dominant in the commercials we analyzed, often at the expense of female image.

Effects of Success and Failure in Interpersonal Competition in Violent and Nonviolent Video games on Players’ Affect and Self-Ascribed Toughness • Hong-sik Yu and Dolf Zilmann, Alabama • This study investigated whether personal victory in interpersonal competitive play of video games would lead to an increase in postgame positive mood states, distress tolerance and self-defensive confidence, while personal defeat would result in the reverse effect. It was also hypothesized that personal victory would lower distress perception, whereas personal defeat would heighten it. In addition, this study explored whether these suggested effects were larger after violent video games than after nonviolent ones.

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Civic Journalism Interest Group

Students as Citizens: Experiential Approaches to Teaching Civic Journalism • Chike Anyaegbunam and Buck Ryan, Kentucky • As newsrooms gingerly embrace various civic journalism principles and practices, journalism schools have also started to experiment with innovative curricula and instructional models for teaching the “new journalism.” This paper presents a description and evaluation results for one of such emerging instructional models. The study departs from other descriptions of instructional models for civic journalism education because a classroom experimental design was used to evaluate the effectiveness and usefulness of the project.

Source Prominence and the Unaffiliated: Testing a Primary Tenet of Civic Journalism • David D. Kurpius, Louisiana State University • Research studies consistently demonstrate a disproportionate use of elites as sources. Previous research demonstrated that civic journalism used much higher percentages of unaffiliated sources compared to traditional journalism. Civic journalism is a decade-old, foundation-driven effort to encourage journalism organizations to alter their coverage routines to better reflect communities and the public dialogue on issues. Civic journalism encourages greater depth of knowledge of communities, alternative framing for stories and developing sources within layers of civic life (from officials to private individuals).

Tale of Two Cities: Connections Between Community, Corporate Culture and Public Journalism • David O. Loomis, North Carolina at Chapel Hill • A decade after public journalism was coined to identify a reformist set of press practices, little evidence of its goals has been found and confirmed, although audience awareness of public journalism’s populist intent has been found. Research by Meyer and Potter theorized that something in the organizational culture of the newspapers they studied may contribute to this audience awareness. This quantitative and qualitative study of two nominally public-journalism newspapers confirms the Meyer-Potter prior-cause theory.

Crime and Violence in Charlotte, NC: The Impact of a Civic Journalism Project on Knowledge, Mental Elaboration, and Civic Behaviors • Esther Thorson, Jae Shim and Doyle Yoon, Missouri-Columbia • Few studies have attempted to evaluate the impact of civic journalism on readers and viewers of these projects. This study examines the impact of exposure to a crime-focused civic journalism project in Charlotte, NC on knowledge about the content of the project, people’s mental elaborations about the crime situation in Charlotte and what might be done about it, and behaviors including belonging to an organization involved in issues related to high-crime neighborhoods, talking to others about high crime neighborhoods, and seeking further information about how to deal with crime in urban neighborhoods.

Clinging to Tradition, Welcoming Civic Solutions: A Survey of College Students Attitudes Toward Public Journalism • Kim Trager, Jennifer Rauch, and Eunseong Kim, Indiana • Based on a survey of 405 journalism students from six colleges, this study shows support for “modest” and “bolder” practices associated with civic journalism but found resistance to more “radical” or activist forms. This suggests that while journalism students are loyal to traditional news values such as objectivity, they are open to new communitarian approaches to journalism. It appears that students most removed from traditional news environments are most receptive to civic journalism.

How Public Sphere Theorists Have Influenced Civic Journalism, Communication Department • Sherrie L. Wilson, Nebraska at Omaha • Civic journalism has grown out of a number of philosophical and theoretical traditions, including the writings of 20th-century theorists of the public sphere, particularly John Dewey, James Carey, and Jurgen Habermas. This paper begins by outlining the views of these three concerning the role of journalism in relation to the public and democracy. It then discusses how these views have influenced civic journalism as expressed primarily by its leading academic proponent, Jay Rosen.

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Visual Communication Division

Jane Campion’s The Piano: The Female Gaze, the Speculum and the Chora Within the H(y)st(e)rical Film • Jaime Bihlmeyer, Southwest Missouri State University • This paper presents a glimpse into the traces (semios) of the female gaze in Jane Campion’s historical film, The Piano. Campion’s filmic text creates a space in mainstream movies where cinematic enunciation intersects with the linguistic and psychoanalytical innovations of the last half-century. The Piano presents an overwhelmingly clear demonstration of the female gaze and does so within the limitations of mainstream film conventions.

Where We’ve Been — Where We’re Going: An Analysis of Visual Communication Research in Communication Journals • Kimberly Bissell, University of Alabama • This study analyzes the inclusion of visual communication research articles in journals published with a journalism, mass communication or visual communication focus. It is the beginning of a larger project that may give visual communication researchers some insight into the acceptance of our field under the umbrella of mass communication research. All of the issues published under 22 different journals in the last 10 years were analyzed.

At Ground Zero: How Photojournalists Survived the September 11th Terrorist Attack on the World Trade Center • Brandon W. Bollom, Texas at Austin • During the September 11th attacks on the World Trade Center, while most people were trying to escape chaos, a few were running toward it. Included in that group were photojournalists, but in the weeks and months following that day, little research appeared as to why they were willing to risk their lives for their profession. This project attempts to fill that gap in coverage with personal interviews, research, and historical data.

Perceptions, Exceptions, and Stereotypes: Visual Representation and the Monster’s Ball • Yolanda R. Cal, Texas at Austin • This paper explores the film Monster’s Ball as an example of stereotypical media images of Black women in contemporary society. Halle Berry’s performance is the first to break both the color and gender barrier in the Academy Awards seventy-four year history. The author examines the visual representation of difference as well as how current notions of race form a discourse with which to investigate stereotypical representations of African-American women.

Sex Appeals that Appeal: The Moderating Role of Women’s Sexual Self-Schema in the Accessibility of Sexual Constructs in Memory • John Davies, He Zhu & Brian Brantley, Alabama • Priming methodology has shown that media exposure can increase women’s accessibility of constructs in memory. While prior research has focused on pornography’s effects on subsequent cognitions and behavior, little research has focused on the effects of sex appeals in advertising. In this study, the authors measured the effects of exposure to magazine ads using sexual appeals. Results indicated that exposure to sex appeals increased accessibility of sexual constructs in memory. Sexual self-schema moderated priming effects.

Evaluating animated Infographics: A step toward Multimedia Research: An Experimental Approach • Klaus Forester, Sabine Stiemerling & Thomas Knieper • Visualization and animation can be seen as two main characteristics of multimedia applications. In our study we compared animated infographics with their still versions and textual representations of the same information. According to our results it is not always appropriate to visualize and animate certain topics but in most cases visualization can enhance information transfer. The results are indicating that animations should be preferably used in complex fields of knowledge.

A Virtual Extension of Public Art: An Analysis of Municipal Websites as Public Art Venues • Tamara L. Gillis and John Syphrit, Elizabethtown College • According to research by the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), public art projects commissioned by local communities and corporations give the community or organization a common expression and identity. These installations are often tied to community events, history and lore. As communities enter the virtual environment with the construction of websites, do these websites representing the communities serve as public art installations in the virtual environment?

Newspaper Photo Editors? Perceptions of Women Photojournalists • Ken Heinen and Mark Popovich, Ball State University • With an increasing number of women photojournalists streaming into the newsroom, this study was concerned with how newspaper photo editors would perceive their abilities in comparison with their male counterparts. Nineteen newspaper photo editors replied to a 57-statement Q Sort asking them to rate their perceptions about the skills of women photojournalists. Two patterns of perceptions emerged. One group was labeled as the “professionals,” and the other group as the “pragmatists.”

Television News and the Palestinian Israeli Conflict: An Analysis of Visual and Verbal Framing • Rasha Kamhawi, Indiana University • The presentation of international events on television news has often been criticized for oversimplification and stereotyping. This study is a content analysis of the presentation of one international conflict on the evening network news. It identifies the frames, both verbal and visual, through which the Palestinian/Israeli conflict is presented and any leaning for either side of the conflict. While overt bias is not found, episodic frames that give little or no context are found to be dominant.

Visual Components of Source Credibility for Non-Profit Organizations on the World Wide Web • Linda Jean Kensicki, Minnesota • Limited research has examined the impact of visual communication on the web and none has explored how wired visual constructions influence an organization’s credibility. This research tested a model of visual credibility on 133 individuals through sample web pages for two types of non-profit organizations. Contrary to previous work, a structured design was not uniformly seen as more credible than an organic design.

Framing the Presidential Candidates in Editorial Cartoons • Hyoungkoo Khang & Eyun-Jung Ki, Florida • In the 2000 election campaign, the character and competency issues of the presidential candidates emerged as the most dominant agenda. This result indicates that the agenda of personal character and competency of a presidential candidate could have more influence on the public than did a candidate’s issue stance of policy. Many cartoonists use exaggeration and dishonesty frames to portray Al Gore. Accordingly, the frames in the editorial cartoons could overshadow the image of Gore as a viable presidential candidate.

Photography Editors as Gatekeepers: Choosing Between Publishing or Self-Censoring Disturbing Images of 9-11 • Renee Martin Kratzer & Brian Kratzer, Missouri • Photography editors are gatekeepers who decide what visual images appear in print. This study examines how these gatekeepers chose whether to publish disturbing images of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. In-depth interviews with 22 newspaper photography editors were conducted to gain an understanding of the decision-making process. The results show that many of the photography editors published the images despite the graphic content because they helped communicate the horror and devastation of that day.

Seeing and Believing: A Case Study of Weber’s Schema of Charisma and institution Building as Seen in Visual Images of students at a Christian Liberal Arts College, 1900-1940 • Michael A. Longinow, Asbury College • This study uses the template of Max Weber’s notion of charisma and institution-building to examine visual depictions of students at a Christian liberal arts college in Central Kentucky as these visuals appeared in a nationally-distributed religious newspaper. The analysis compares the images of these students with visual images of those same students in the campus weekly newspaper.

Vision of a New State: Israel as Celebrated by Robert Capa • Andrew Mendelson, Temple University and C. Zoe Smith, Missouri • As we show in an analysis of primary sources, photojournalist Robert Capa’s photographs of the birth of the State of Israel reveal the rightness/naturalness of the Jewish state, arguing that the Israelis were creating a state ex nihilo by turning a desolate, unpopulated strip of land into both an urban and agricultural oasis. His images tap into the reclamation of what the settlers thought was rightly theirs and their spiritual connection to the land.

Of Photographs and Flags: Uses and Perceptions of an Iconic Image Before and After September 11 • Meg Spratt, April Peterson & Taso Lagos, Washington • After the September 11 terrorist attacks, media pundits summoned the memory of Joe Rosenthal’s classic “Flag-Raising on Iwo Jima” photograph, comparing it to a new image of a flag raising at Ground Zero. Such use of an iconic photograph reflects a widely held belief: Photographs have a direct and powerful effect on public consciousness. However, this powerful effects approach has not been supported by empirical evidence.

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Scholastic Journalism Division

Kincaid v. Gibson Revisited: The Incompatibility of the Public Forum Doctrine and Academic Freedom • Laurence B. Alexander and Rocky M. Cabagnot, Florida • This paper reviews the recent student expression case of Kincaid v. Gibson by critically examining the use of the public forum doctrine. Although the deciding court delivered a correct decision, the public forum analysis it utilized is ill suited for application to student press cases. An enlightened approach to future student press cases requires consideration of the role of academic freedom and the First Amendment in a campus setting.

Media Convergence: Industry Practices and Implications for Journalism Education • David W. Bulla, Florida • The purpose of this study is to survey contemporary media practitioners about how convergence is affecting their professional routines and practices, and to find out how journalism educators are addressing convergence in their programs. The paper makes recommendations about how journalism educators can take advantage of the Internet to teach some of the skills and attitudes that are essential to converged media operations.

Is it the Grades or the Goods? Instructor and Course Ratings: A Self Determination Theory Perspective • Vincent F. Filak and Kennon M. Sheldon, Missouri-Columbia • Two hundred and sixty eight undergraduates were asked to recall a course that was important to them and their goals (n=268). They were then asked to rate the instructor and the course as well as respond to several items the measured psychological needs. Sex, age, size of the class and grade received in the course were controlled for in hierarchical regressions.

Why Subscribe? The Win-Win of Classroom Newspapers for Indiana High School Journalism • Mary Arnold Hemlinger and T.J. Hemlinger, Ball State University • The decline in adult readership accounts for much of the recent media attention paid to high school journalism by the newspaper industry. Newspapers also want to tap the “talent pool” of future employees high school journalism can provide. This paper addresses how this current attention can benefit student newspapers as well. Data collected from a mail survey of Indiana high school journalism teachers points to a win-win model where students, advisers and professional newspapers all benefit.

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