Archives for January 2012

Religion and Media Interest Group

Catholicism and Public Opinion: A Study of the Church as a Source of Political Information • J. Connor Best, Louisiana State University • This paper explores the role of the Church as a disseminator of political information through priests and media. Using data gathered from Catholics about where they gather political information this study determined whether the Church is an important influence on political behavior. This study finds that no particular source of information source within the Church dominates. Rather, Catholics use multiple information sources to synthesize their own understanding of what the Church teaches on political issues.

Consecrating the Bully Pulpit: A Presumed Media Influence Model of Evangelical Christians’ Attitudes Toward President George W. Bush • Ken Blake and Robert O. Wyatt, Middle Tennessee State University • Based on telephone polls in 2005 and 2006 of random adults in a Southern state with a high concentration of evangelical Christians, this study applied logistic regression and the presumed media influence model to explain evangelicals’ approval of President George W. Bush. Findings robustly linked evangelicals’ approval of Bush to their presumption that he would both enact religiously conservative policies and influence people to take religious faith more seriously. The model behaved rationally over time.

Building the Pure Land on Earth: Ciji’s media cultural discourse • Chiung Hwang Chen, Brigham Young University • With its resourceful media practice and insistence on a neo-Buddhist this-worldly theology, the Buddhist Compassion Relief Foundation (Tzu Chi or Ciji) has constructed a unique cultural discourse, one that competes against the mainstream media culture in Taiwan. This paper employs a cultural studies approach to analyze Ciji’s media cultural discourse.

The Missing Link: A Content Study of Religion as a Navigational Element on the Home Pages of U.S. Daily Newspapers • Mary Carmen Cupito, Northern Kentucky University • A content study of every U.S. daily general circulation newspaper with a website indicated that 14 percent or 187 of the 1,355 newspaper home pages had direct links or sublinks to news about faith or spirituality. Among these newspapers, few included multimedia or interactive dimensions. A regional analysis showed that more southern papers had home page links or sublinks to religion content than elsewhere in the country.

The 3R’s of El Salvador’s Civil War Revolution, Religion, and Radio • Juanita Darling, California State University • In the overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country of El Salvador, Church leaders were often quoted and one priest regularly spoke on rebel radio, supporting the insurgency. This collaboration lasted throughout a twelve-year struggle that ended in 1992. This paper examines that collaboration based on oral history interviews, memoirs, and analysis of tapes of the broadcasts. It also posits that the alliance contributed to expanding the public sphere and laying a foundation for democratic decision-making.

The Second Text: Missionary Publishing and Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress • David N. Dixon, Malone College • With surprising regularity, missionaries in the l9th and early 20th centuries choose The Pilgrim’s Progress as one of the first texts to translate. This paper seeks to explore why a then 200-year-old allegory was held in such high esteem by the missionaries that they considered it second only to the Bible as a necessary work. It suggests that the book embodied a complex, sometimes paradoxical missionary ideology that still affects Africa today.

Jihad and Crusade in International Media Discourse • Mark Hungerford, University of Washington • A content analysis was conducted on newspapers in four countries to determine how media discourse interpreted and framed the terms jihad and crusade. While newspapers across the different countries interpreted jihad in similar ways (violent, committed by Muslims, without historical context), there was greater diversity between English-language and non-English language newspapers on usage of the term crusade. Overall, each newspapers used these terms to depict a violent other waging violence upon the national self.

Priests And Public Opinion: Assessing The Effects Of Framing The Catholic Church’s Sexual Abuse Scandal • Ally Ostrowski, University of Colorado • Since the early 90s, news media have brought stories of sexual transgressions by Catholic clergy into the public eye. This study examined the framing of the Catholic priest sexual abuse scandals to ascertain how audiences were potentially affected by the presentations they are shown.

The Effects of Religious Outdoor Advertising: An Experimental Study • Jefferson Spurlock, Troy University • This study examines the effectiveness of outdoor religious messages. In other words, does exposure to roadside advertisements displaying religious messages, particular church services or prayer, increase one’s intent to attend church services or to engage in active prayer? Three hundred thirty-five undergraduate and graduate students from a large southern university took part in the study’s experiment (Seventeen students did not complete the experiment so their responses were eliminated).

Media and Religion: The Promise of Cultural Biography • Daniel A. Stout, University of South Carolina • This paper argues that cultural biography is an important method for the developing subfield of media and religion. Based on examinations of biographies of mass communication theorists, it is concluded that religious thought often plays a strong role in secular theoretical development about media. The cultural biographies studied also revealed rigor and effectiveness as an exploratory method.

Jesus Christ, Movie Star: Exploring the Power Embedded in Evangelical Responses to The Last Temptation of Christ and The Passion of the Christ • James Y. Trammell, St. John Fisher College • This paper compares the evangelical Christian use and interpretation of The Last Temptation of Christ and The Passion of the Christ in order to explore how evangelicals use mainstream movies as a means to secure social power. Through Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of social power embedded in the use and interpretation of media texts, this paper interprets how evangelicals create dominant meanings of the movies, and use film releases as a call to defend evangelicalism.

Coverage of Faith-based Activism: The ADL, MPAC, and CAIR in the News • James Christian Zvonec • California State University-Northridge • This study examined newspaper coverage of faith-based activism, looking at how the ADL, MPAC, and CAIR were portrayed over a five-year time period. The newspapers constructed three main identities for the Jewish group (watchdog, defender of Jews, and expert source) and the two Islamic groups (watchdog, terrorism apologist, and voice of American Muslims), leading to the conclusion that the newspapers were working from a secularized Judeo-Christian ideology.

<< 2006 Abstracts

Media and Disability Interest Group

Advocacy oriented behavior and health care access: A conceptual model of health communication used in coordinating care for children with juvenile arthritis • Michael Grinfeld, Brian Hensel and Robin Hoecker, Missouri • JAHelp, a Web site development project (www.JAHelp.org), funded through a grant from the National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research, hypothesized that by providing parents, caregivers and others with the information they needed to advocate for children’s access to health care, self-efficacy and associated health outcomes would improve. This paper describes a conceptual model that argues that advocacy oriented access behavior can be encouraged through new media and constitutes a form of health care communication.

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s silent campaign: Public communication regarding disability issues in the early 1990s • Julie Lellis, North Carolina • This paper describes the nature of a university’s efforts to communicate about the importance of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in relation to the disability civil rights movement. Research was designed to review internal communication practices and news coverage at UNC Chapel Hill. Analysis indicates that a campaign to acknowledge not only the impact of the ADA in the early 1990s, but the importance of civil rights for the disability community, did not exist.

From invisibility to national symbol: Contrasts in Paralympic coverage around the world during 2004 • Nan Yu and Marie Hardin, Penn State • Previous research on newspaper coverage of the Paralympic Games has revealed framing that diminishes the sporting accomplishments of Paralympians and has instead presented them as pitiful in relation to able-bodied athletes. Further, analysis of (non)coverage of the Paralympics in the U.S. press has suggested that athletes with a disability are invisible in U.S. culture.

<< 2006 Abstracts

Internship and Careers Interest Group

Preparing Students for Convergent Journalism: A Nationwide Survey of Medium and Small Market TV Producers and Reporters • Andrea Tanner and Laura Smith, University of South Carolina • This nationwide survey studies the impact of convergence on reporters and producers in small and medium-sized local television markets. It examines the practices of news workers in DMAs 50 and below – markets in which journalism students usually obtain their first job. Data revealed nearly 70 percent of respondents personally perform convergent tasks and found significant differences between workers in medium versus small market newsrooms. Findings are interpreted in light of training expectations for educators.

Supervisors Speak Out: What They Think of Interns • Mary Jean Land and Valerie Andrews, Georgia College & State University • This study examines the on-site supervisors’ evaluations of mass communication interns over a five-year period. Evaluations were found to be very positive. Supervisors rate interns highly on academic preparedness and performance factors. Female interns receive higher evaluations than male interns. Supervisors report interns are strongest in their ability to work independently, enthusiasm, and ability to learn quickly. They report that interns need improvement in the amount of experience the intern has had, their writing ability, and the intern’s level of assertiveness.

<< 2006 Abstracts

Graduate Education Interest Group

Cultivating Political Activism Online: A Case Study of Democratic Meetup Groups in the 2004 Presidential Election • Carole V. Bell, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill • Political interest groups and candidates are increasingly turning to the Internet for a variety of political communication functions, from fundraising to volunteer mobilization. Much of this renewed attention results from the successes of the 2004 presidential primaries, most spectacularly the growth of Meetup.com, an online service that enables people with common interests to meet.

The Media’s Role in Declining Voter Turnout in Presidential Elections, 1960-2004 • Andrew Kaplan, University of Maryland • Voter turnout has declined precipitously in the past 45 years for presidential elections, from about 73% of the non-South in 1960 (the South is not counted due to discriminatory practices) to 54% in 2000 and 60% in 2004. In 1996, nearly half the country did not vote. For decades, scholars asserted that as education levels rose, voter participation would also increase. Yet, it has sharply declined.

Triple play competition in U.S. telecommunications industry: Exploring factors affecting cable operators’ adoption of triple-play services • Sangho Seo, Penn State University • The primary purpose of this study is to estimate empirically factors affecting adoption of triple-play bundled services of a cable operator in U.S. local telecommunications market and discovered what factors are important in order to lead to additional convergence in the future.

“Hidden cameras” in Bollywood: Indian responses to the journalistic ethics of undercover reporting of celebrities • Jaya Shroff and Mansi Tiwari, Ohio University • The paper discusses the serious and the ethical issues associated with the methods of investigation and news gathering namely the hidden cameras and changed identities. It looks at several cases from India and the United States with a focus on the IndiaTV controversy of March 2005 and analyses the responses from across the media to the newsgathering methods involved. The main concerns raised in the article deal with deception and invasion of privacy.

Supervision and Accuracy in an Online Newsroom: A Pilot Study • David Stanton, Diane Hickey and Keith Saliba, University of Florida • The current study examines supervision of a Web-driven news production and editing course at a large, southeastern university. The course, which has been taught for over a decade, recently transitioned from a static HTML Web site to a dynamic site driven by a relational database and XML. Content management systems (CMS) allow journalists to remotely input content, edit and deliver the final product to print and Web-based publications.

“I’m confident I’ll vote for you, but only if you go to church with me:” Motivated message processing, religious ideology and evaluation of political candidates • John Wirtz and Penelope Sheets, University of Minnesota • The current paper examines the relationship between commitment to religious beliefs, need for closure (Kruglanski, Webster, & Klem, 1993), and the level of confidence individuals place in the inferences they draw when given limited information about a political candidate. A statistically significant relationship (F(1, 74)=4.103, p<.O5) was found between participants’ commitment to Christian orthodox beliefs and the level of confidence they placed in their inferences about a political candidate.

<< 2006 Abstracts

Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender Interest Group

The Construction of Queer Memory: Media Coverage of Stonewall 25 • Guillermo Avila-Saavedra, Temple University • Through discourse analysis of the media coverage of the Stonewall 25 celebrations in 1994, this paper examines the role of memory in shaping a collective queer identity and constructing a founding mythology for the queer social movement. This paper examines media uses of memory and considers their cultural consequences. It argues that the media are complicit in shaping a memory of Stonewall that reflects the political goals of the American queer movement in the 1990s.

Structuring the Status Quo: The L-Word and Queer Female Acceptability • Rebecca Kern, Temple University • This paper argues that The L-Word sustains the dominant ideals of femininity and hetero-normativity in Western society. The L-Word makes queer females visible in the mass media; however, the structure of the episodes, themes, and characters encourage femininity and eroticize lesbian sexuality. This is significant in that the resistant possibilities for a text such as The L-Word may subsume under the need for audience appeal by the network and the media industry in general.

Person Perception in the U.S. Ban on Gays in the Military: A Content Analysis of News Photographs in The Advocate and Newsweek • Nicole Elise Smith, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill • When considering media messages, a vital area of inquiry is media images, specifically news photographs. Based on the theory of person perception, this study compares images of gay men and lesbians within articles about the U.S. ban on gays in the military in the leading gay newsmagazine, The Advocate, with images in a leading mainstream newsmagazine, Newsweek. Findings indicate that Newsweek did not present images of gay men and lesbians as favorably as did The Advocate.

Soap — A Gay Man Comes to American Television • Rodger Streitmatter, American University • This paper examines and analyzes the groundbreaking television program Soap, which aired on ABC from 1977 to 1981, as a milestone in the increasing visibility of gay men and lesbians in the media. The study begins with a description of how the nation – first journalists and then social conservatives – responded to the news that a television network was creating a program that featured a gay character in a recurring role.

<< 2006 Abstracts