Media and Disability Interest Group

An Analysis of the Dissimilar Coverage of the 2002 Olympics and Paralympics: Frenzied Pack Journalism versus the Empty Press Room • Ann Golden, Brigham Young University • This article analyzes the differing amounts of coverage reporters gave to the 2002 Olympics versus the 2002 Paralympics (the Olympics for the disabled). A content analysis of ten newspapers, a month-long field study at the Olympic/Paralympic media centers and twenty qualitative interviews were utilized as tools to analyze the differing paradigms of selected Olympic and Paralympic reporters concerning the following disability-related issues: audience appeal and interest, pack journalism versus independent reporting, and the newsworthiness of Paralympic events.

Are Disability Images in Advertising Becoming Bold and Daring? An Analysis of Prominent Themes in U.S. and UK Campaigns • Beth A. Haller, Towson and Sue Ralph, Manchester, UK • Advertisements featuring people with disabilities have become more prevalent in America and Great Britain in the last decade. The goal of this paper is to investigate if images are remaining static (focusing solely on integration) or are expanding to show a variety of themes. This qualitative analysis revealed that several leaps forward have occurred, such as the themes of empowerment in a Cingular ad and the themes of disability pride/inclusion in Doritos, Kohler, B&Q, Marks & Spencer, and HSBC ads.

The Invisible Victims: Newspaper Coverage of Physician-Assisted Suicide and People with Disabilities • Kimberly A. Lauffer, Towson • One group of people affected by Jack Kervorkian’s crusade for legalized assisted suicide has largely been ignored by the mainstream press: people with disabilities. This paper will examine how disability and people with disabilities were portrayed in Michigan newspaper coverage of physician-assisted suicide from 1996-1999. Overall, people with disabilities were portrayed in ways that perpetuated negative stereotypes about disability.

Not Limitation, but Variation: Exploring the Effects of Media Framing on Reduction of Prejudice against Disability • Jong-Eun Roselyn Lee, Pennsylvania • This study aims at examining the effects of media framing of disability on perspective-taking and reduction of prejudice against disabled people. The findings suggest that Human Variation Frame, which defines disability as one of the various human conditions, evokes higher level of perspective-taking, which, in turn, plays a mediating role in reducing prejudice in both cognitive and affective dimensions. This study concludes that the mass media should contribute to redefining disability as human variation, and motivating the non-disabled to accept the disabled people not as “them” but as “us.”

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Internship and Careers Interest Group

The Use of Internship Supervisors for External Program Assessment • Lauren A. Vicker, St. John Fisher College •This paper describes how one communications program implemented a systematic process for the collection of feedback on its students’ performance from internship supervisors. The results demonstrated that the supervisors were a good external source for identifying strengths and weaknesses in the program as part of an overall assessment plan.

Journalism Students’ Perceptions of the Value of Internships • John E. Getz, South Dakota State University • This phenomenological study of first-person narratives written by journalism interns finds that most students view their internship experiences in a positive light, feeling most positive about meaningful duties and least positive about tedious chores. They consider both internships and coursework to be important components of the journalism education process. They perceive that experiential education has an overall value. Internship experiences validate many students’ choice of journalism as the direction of their life work.

Portfolios for Television News Careers: Recommendations from Pennsylvania News Directors • B. Gail Wilson, Indiana University of Pennsylvania • This research investigates the importance of and content of portfolios for individuals seeking entry-level jobs in television newsrooms. Twenty-two news directors in Pennsylvania were surveyed for this research. This number represents all stations in the state that currently produce a regular, nightly newscast. The results include the opinions of these news directors on the importance, the content, and the length of portfolios and audition tapes as they consider applicants for positions at their stations.

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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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