Citizen Journalism and Cognitive Processing: An experiment on the perceived intent of traditional versus citizen journalism sources • Heather E Akin, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Melissa Tully, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Gerald Stoecklein, UW Madison; Hernando Rojas, University of Wisconsin-Madison • “Using a three-wave longitudinal design with an embedded web-based experiment, this study considers whether manipulating the source of a news report (citizen journalism versus traditional journalism) affects perceived thought-provoking motivations. Results show that respondents perceive a citizen journalism source as intending to be more thought provoking about food issues than a traditional news source. Moreover, previous levels of engagement suggest that those who are less engaged with an issue are the ones who are more likely to see a citizen journalism source as intending to make them think. Findings and implications for future research are discussed.”

Paper bridges: a critical examination of the Daily Dispatch’s Community Dialogues • Rod Amner, Rhodes University • “A South African commercial newspaper, the Daily Dispatch, last year facilitated a series of town-hall-like meetings called the Community Dialogues at a number of townships and suburbs in the city of East London. Drawing on theories of social capital as well as critiques of Habermas’s notion of the public sphere, this article examines the first two Community Dialogues, which took place in neighbouring locations – the middle class suburb of Beacon Bay and the informal African settlement of Nompumelelo – on consecutive days. It is critical of claims made by the newspaper that, following the precepts of public journalism, these Dialogues are effective in forming horizontal ‘connecting bridges’ within and between different geographical zones and heterogeneous social groups in the city. It also critiques the idea that the Dialogues currently provide a forum for public deliberation – and possible consensus formation – between these zones and social groups. Very little journalism has so far been produced under the banner of public journalism in South Africa and there is consequently little research on this topic in this country. This paper hopes to fill a gap in the research literature around the applicability and usefulness of the theories and practices of public journalism in the South African context and also hopes to address the gap in the global civic journalism research literature around the use of community forums in civic journalism.”

Empowering citizen journalists. A South African case study • Guy Berger, Rhodes University • “Seldom unpacked in the notion of “citizen journalism” is the convergence of “citizenship” and “journalism”. This paper examines Grocott’s Mail newspaper in South Africa, which is integrating youth participation through cellphones. This initiative operates with the assumptions that media participation in the form of specifically mobile “citizen journalism”, as distinct from broad User-Generated Content, needs explicit focus on the meanings of citizenship and journalism, and on the mindsets and skills that go with these.”

Gatekeeping and Citizen Journalism A Qualitative Examination of Participatory Newsgathering • Amani Channel, Student • “For nearly sixty years, scholars have studied how information is selected, vetted, and shared by news organizations. The process, known as gatekeeping, is an enduring mass communications theory that describes the process by which news is gathered and filtered to audiences. It has been suggested, however, that in the wake of online communications the traditional function of media gatekeeping is changing. The infusion of citizen-gathered media into news programming is resulting in what some call a paradigm shift. As mainstream news outlets adopt and encourage public participation, it is important that researchers have a greater understanding of the theoretical implications related to participatory media and gatekeeping. This study will be among the first to examine the adoption of citizen journalism by a major cable news network. It will focus on CNN’s citizen journalism online news community called iReport, which allows the public to share and submit “unfiltered” content. Vetted submissions that are deemed newsworthy can then be broadcasted across CNN’s networks, and published on CNN.com. This journalism practice appears to follow the thoughts of Nguyen (2006), who states that, “future journalists will need to be trained to not only become critical gate-keepers but also act as listeners, discussion and forum leaders/mediators in an intimate interaction with their audiences.” The goal of the paper is to lay a foundation for understanding how participatory media is utilized by a news network to help researchers possibly develop new models and hypotheses related to gatekeeping theory.”

Perceived Role Conceptions of Citizen and Professional Journalists: Citizens’ Views • Deborah Chung, University of Kentucky; Seungahn Nah, University of Kentucky • “This study aims to identify citizen journalists’ role conceptions regarding their journalistic news contributing activities and their perceptions regarding professional journalists’ role conceptions. Based on a national survey of 130 citizen journalists, four factors emerged for both citizen and professional journalists’ role conceptions: interpreter, adversary, facilitator and mobilizer. Perceptions of civic journalism values were also examined. Analyses reveal that citizen journalists perceive their roles to be generally similar to professional journalistic roles. Furthermore, respondents rated certain roles to be more prominent functions for citizen journalists. In particular, the citizen journalist role of facilitator was rated as significantly more important than those of the traditional press.”

Incremental versus Impressionistic: Seeking Credibility Differences in Online Political News • Daniel Doyle, Ohio University; Chen Lou, Ohio University; Hans Meyer, Ohio University • This study uses the research technique of online survey to gauge credibility perceptions in Internet political news during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaigns. Researchers experiment for effects in perceptions of credibility in a style of short and incremental professional news stories — a style which a popular press writer has dubbed the scooplet — and the diary-like impressionist style of long-form and somewhat informal unpaid citizen journalism. The study contains a review of online credibility research which establishes that user-generated content forges a stronger social connection between content consumer and content creator. This study tests a hypothesis that consumers of online political news perceive user-generated blog entries to be more credible than professionally-produced political news stories.

Alternative and Citizen Journalism: Mapping the Conceptual Differences • Farooq Kperogi, Georgia State University • “Although it is customary for some scholars to conflate citizen media and alternative media, I argue in this paper that they are different. In the new media literature, citizen journalism is conceptualized as online “news content produced by ordinary citizens with no formal journalism training.” Alternative journalism, on the other hand, is not merely non-professionalized and non-institutionalized journalism produced by ordinary citizens; it is also purposively counter-hegemonic and “closely wedded to notions of social responsibility, replacing an ideology of ‘objectivity’ with overt advocacy and oppositional practices.””

Can This Marriage Be Saved? The Love-Hate Relationship Between Traditional Media and Citizen Journalism • Jan Leach, Kent State University; Jeremy Gilbert, Northwestern University • “This paper examines the interplay between traditional newsrooms and non-traditional media in three different markets. It looks at how Fourth Estate journalists interact with Fifth Estate media practitioners and explains similarities and differences in how information is collected and presented online. Several examples of traditional media and new media relationships are identified. The study evaluates whether Fourth and Fifth Estate entities can co-exist and asks: What is the outlook for marriage, or at least a lasting relationship, between traditional media and new media?”

Explicating Conversational Journalism: An Experimental Test of Wiki, Twittered and Collaborative News Models • Doreen Marchionni, Pacific Lutheran • “The concept of journalism as a conversation has been richly explored in descriptive studies for decades. Largely missing from the literature, though, are clear operational definitions and empirical data that allow theory building for purposes of explanation and prediction. This controlled experiment sought to help close that gap by first measuring the concept of conversation, then testing it on key outcome measures of perceived credibility and expertise in three online contexts: Wikinews, “Twittered” news and Thorson and Duffy’s (2006) “collaborative” style of news. Findings suggest that conversational journalism is a powerful, multi-dimensional news phenomenon, but also nuanced and fickle. The conversational features of perceived similarity to a journalist and online interactivity are key, not only in distinguishing this type of news but in predicting its perceived credibility and expertise. Somewhat problematic is the conversational feature of informality, or casualness, with an audience. There, results suggest journalists can easily cross a line with readers to the detriment of trust.”

Hungry for News: How Celiac sufferers learn from media, each other • Mitch McKenney, Kent State University • “Celiac Disease, an inherited autoimmune disorder that chronically disrupts the digestive system, leads to health problems unless the sufferer avoids gluten-containing foods. As awareness of the condition has grown, so have the options for Celiacs to connect. This paper examines the online interaction and sharing of news/information among members of the Celiac “community,” using interviews with those dealing in that information, to explore the resources they turn to for news and support.”

Bloggers’ Demographics, Blogging Activities, and Identity Disclosure • nohil park, Missouri University; JiYeon Jeong, Missouri School of Journalism; Clyde Bentley, Missouri School of Journalism • “Despite the critical role that the identity of blog authors plays in making blogs credible information sources, few studies have suggested empirical mechanisms that lead to bloggers’ identity self-disclosure. This study aims to examine whether bloggers’ demographics and blogging activities (blog use, interactivity, and popularity) have influence on identity disclosure. Results from the analysis of an online survey of 906 Korean bloggers reveal that male and older bloggers who have professional jobs (journalist, lawyer, professor, etc.) are more likely to identify themselves on their blogs rather than others. Moreover, bloggers who have high levels of blog interactivities (commenting, linking trackbacks) are more likely to reveal their identity. However, the time of general blog use and number of visitors to blogs are not any association with bloggers’ identity disclosure. This study suggests that bloggers do not hide nor express their identity according to the stay and popularity in the blogosphere, but they disclose their identity depending on their individual differences and interactivities with their blogging partners.”

What’s in a (Missing) Name? Newspaper Online Forum Participants Sound Off about Civility and Anonymity • Jack Rosenberry, St. John Fisher College” • “A survey of participants in online comment forums associated with traditional newspapers indicated that while they dislike the rude nature of the commentary made there, and consider anonymity a proximate cause of that behavior, they still are supportive of keeping the forums anonymous. However, differences in support for anonymity were found on the basis of frequency of participation and on degree of aversion to the negativity. This reflects the same mixed results found in the general literature on anonymous computer-mediated communication, which documents how anonymity’s benefits to participation and open expression are balanced off against the lack of accountability that leads to flaming.”

Blogging the Meltdown: Comparing the Coverage of the Economic Crisis in Journalistic Blogs vs. Non-Journalistic Blogs • Hong Ji, The Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism; Michael Sheehy, University of Cincinnati • “This content analysis examines coverage of the U.S. economic crisis of 2008-2009 by 25 economics blogs. The study sought to identify differences in the coverage by bloggers identified as journalists and non-journalists. The study found that journalist bloggers and non-journalist bloggers focused on different dominant topics in their blog posts, indicating different perspectives in the framing of coverage. The study also found differences in the way that journalist and non-journalist bloggers cited sources and hyperlinks.”

Reconsidering citizen journalism- An historical analysis • Justin Walden, Pennsylvania State University • “The rise of Web 2.0 publishing platforms has understandably had a dramatic impact on a number of different communication processes and fields in recent years. One area that has been profoundly influenced by the newfound ability for “regular” Internet users to self publish is citizen journalism. This theoretical paper examines current and historical perspectives on the citizen journalism movement, giving particular heed to a review of how recent Internet technologies have given amateur reporters far more reach and influence. This graduate-student produced article traces how today’s political bloggers and videographers are countering some centuries-old journalism practices and rechanneling the activism that guided Thomas Paine and other American Revolutionaries. This paper concludes that citizen journalism today is poised to follow a similar historical trajectory of legacy media from the 18th century. This article also argues that academic scholarship needs to shed further light on this trajectory and the seemingly inevitable standardization that will occur with citizen journalism newsgathering practices and presentation styles.

<< 2010 Abstracts

Esquire’s Man the Kitchenette: Representations of Men, Masculinity & Cooking • Elizabeth Fakazis, University Wisconsin Stevens Point • This paper examines representations of masculinity and domestic cooking in Esquire’s Man the Kitchenette, a cooking column for men published in the 1940s.  Using qualitative content analysis, I examine how these representations recoded an interest in food and domestic cooking  (as well as other traditionally feminine interests) as appropriately masculine, nurturing the development of the positive image of the male consumer, and paving the way for the emergence of future men’s lifestyle and culinary magazines.

Visual Framing of Patriotism and National Identity on the Covers of Der Spiegel • Andrea Pyka, San Jose State University; Scott Fosdick, San Jose State University • Patriotism in Germany has been a controversial issue since the Nazi era. A content analysis revealed that despite the fear and hesitations surrounding the idea of German pride, Der Spiegel, one of Germany’s national newsmagazines, showed an increasing visual presence of patriotic and national identity symbols on its covers following key historical events: the building of the Berlin Wall, the reunification of Germany, the adoption of the Euro, and the 2006 World Cup.

Photographic Images of Gender and Race Portrayed in Sports Illustrated Kids, 2000-2009 • Ashley Furrow, Ohio University • This study examines photographic images in a popular children’s sport magazine called Sports Illustrated Kids for gender and racial differences in the way the athletes are visually portrayed. Gender and/or racial messages in photographs may have a profound impact on children because children understand meanings in pictures before they understand meanings in text.  Since Sports Illustrated Kids caters to young, impressionable readers who are especially vulnerable to the power of photographs, it is important to study the photographic images of gender and race found in its pages.  Content analysis of editorial photographs during a 10-year period reveals that the gender inequality gap in the magazine is more skewed during its second 10 years than it was during the first 10 years of its publication.  As for a racial difference, African American and White athletes have equal coverage, but Asian and Hispanic athletes are still fighting for representation in the magazine. Overall, female athletes remain underrepresented in all editorial photographs and framed more often than men in inferior ways.

Hype Artists, Con Men, Pimps and Dopesters: The Personal Journalism of Harry Crews • Ted Geltner, Valdosta State University • During the 1970s and ’80s, novelist Harry Crews was a prolific contributor of non-fiction articles for Playboy, Esquire and a number of other publications. His work places him among the writers who defined the genre of literary journalism during this era. This study examines the content, style and innovations associated with Crews’ journalism and the author’s attitude and approach toward his craft.

Madame’s Most Excellent Adventures: US News Magazines Coverage of the 1943 and 1948 Visits to the United States by Madame Chiang Kai-shek • Daniel Haygood, Elon University • Henry Luce, a promoter of Chinese General Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist party during World War II, is accused of using Madame Chiang as part of his strategy to generate support among Americans for the Chinese. This paper reviews US news magazines’ coverage of Madame Chiang’s two trips to America in 1943 and 1948 to raise American support for China. The analysis demonstrates that Time had a more complex framing of Madame Chiang than other news magazines.

Psychological and sociological motives for fashion magazine use among Shanghai’s female college students • Zhengjia Liu, Iowa State University • This study investigates the impact of psychological and sociological motives on the use of fashion magazines among female college students in Shanghai. An online survey was conducted. Three psychological motives were found to be significant predictors of fashion magazine use. The sociological motives did not significantly influence fashion magazine use. The findings suggest that sociological motives may not directly affect media use, but are nonetheless related to psychological motivations that predict media consumption.

The Growth of International Women’s Magazine and Media Portrayal of Women in China • jingyi luo, southern illinois university • Along with the process of globalization is the growth of global media. With the wave of global economy and the spread of transnational companies, the world’s biggest global publishing groups have increasingly extended their reach into China, especially the Western publishing groups. Besides, Japanese publishing giants also enter China, including Shufunotom Publishing Group, Kodansha Publishing Group, and Shogakukan Publishing Group. Nowadays, the women’s magazine industry in China is mainly constructed of three styles of magazines: Western-style magazines, Japanese-style magazines and Chinese local magazines. Women’s magazines deliver media content through a face— the cover. Covers are advertisements of women’s magazines to attract readers. Covers are, at the same time, a media genre, which is subject to social changes and indicates social and cultural changes in a society. Through a content analysis on media portrayal of women on the covers of major magazines in China, it was found that the Western-style women’s magazine constructed its international image through characteristic global title, Caucasian models and a large proportion of celebrity stories; while the Japanese-style women’s magazine tended to portray women as young and fashion to attract readers and advertisers. Facing the competition from international media, it is found that the local women’s magazine chose to adjust their style and content but in a similar genre with the international women’s magazine. However, whether hybridity or mix was a wise strategy for their growth and how the Chinese local women’s magazine industry will prosper is pressing problem for the Chinese local women’s magazines.

Gourmet Magazine’s Depiction of the American Gourmet: A longitudinal content analysis, 1945-2008 • Lanier Norville, The University of Alabama; Jennifer Greer, University of Alabama • A longitudinal content analysis of Gourmet over its 68-year lifespan indicated that, both through topics covered and writing approaches used, the magazine largely defined the American gourmet experience as an elitist pursuit. However, the founding principle of Gourmet – making the gourmet lifestyle more accessible to the average American – was a strong sub-theme throughout the magazine’s history. Accessible topics were covered throughout, and articles were written with both elitist and accessible approaches.

The Magazine Industry 2000 to 2010 • David E. Sumner, Ball State University • Stories about the print media since 2000 have reported on closings of well-known newspapers and steadily declining circulations of others. The general public assumes that magazines have shared in the same fate. While magazines have struggled to remain profitable and some have folded, the general health of the industry remains greater than that of newspapers. The purpose of this paper is to provide a status report of the economic state of magazines between 2000 and 2010.  It reports data on magazine startups and closings, circulation trends, and revenue trends. This research uses latest available data from trade and proprietary sources not available online or to the general public.  The results note that the number of new magazines launched exceeded the number of magazines that closed or folded between 2007 and 2009. The circulation of 50 leading consumer magazines declined by six percent between 2000 and 2009.  However, 32 gained in circulation while 18 lost circulation during those years. Total magazine revenue grew 1.1 percent annually between 2000 and 2008, and then declined 5.4 percent between 2008 and 2009. The outlook for 2010 remains cautiously optimistic with some sectors and companies reporting revenue increases.  The report concludes that some magazines will have to adapt, restructure or downsize.  More may close. But print magazines will likely remain viable for generations to come. The portability, affordability and accessibility of print magazines cannot be replaced by digital mobile devices.

Seeing is Believing: Using Eye Tracking to Examine the Media’s Influence on Disordered Eating Risk • Steven Thomsen, Brigham Young University; Hannah Gibby, Brigham Young University; Joseph Eldridge, Brigham Young University • The goal of this study was to test the robustness of magazine affinity as both a direct and indirect causal antecedent to measures of eating disorder risk and empirically observable pupillary reactions (eye movement and fixation density patterns) to ultra-thin body images through a structural equation model. Data were collected from 109 college-age women whose eyes were tracked while they viewed images of ultra-thin body parts taken from popular women’s magazines. The women also completed a survey instrument to assess magazine reading habits, internalization of the thin ideal, eating disorder risk, and an inclination to make social comparisons. Findings indicate that magazine affinity, not reading frequency, is the best predictor (both directly and indirectly) of eating disorder risk and visual response to ultra-thin images.

What Black Women Need to Know? Breast Cancer Coverage in African-American Magazines • Kim Walsh-Childers, University of Florida; Heather Edwards, SAIC-Frederick • This paper describes an analysis of breast cancer articles from Essence, Ebony and O, the Oprah Magazine. Of 55 articles about breast cancer published during the 6-year period, only three mentioned age as the most important risk factor for breast cancer. The articles were four times as likely to mention family history of breast cancer as a risk factor, and only 40% of articles mentioning the need for regular mammograms were coded as fully accurate.

The Consumer-Citizen: Life Magazine’s Construction of the Ideal American • Sheila Webb, Western Washington University • This paper examines the first decade of Life and places it in the current debates on citizenship and consumption. As a new definition of citizen developed that related active consumption to participation in democracy, Life visualized this change by tying consumption to the American way of life. Selected photo-essays show how the editors shaped middle class culture through consumption scenarios that informed their audience of taste standards. Methodology: archival research, textual analysis, content analysis.

<< 2010 Abstracts

The Associated Press as Common Carrier? • Stephen Bates, University of Nevada, Las Vegas • From the late 1860s until Associated Press v. United States (1945), critics contended that the AP ought to be regulated as a common carrier or public utility. This paper analyzes the common-carrier concept as advocates (and sometimes legislators and judges) have applied it to the AP and other media, including Jerome Barron’s arguments for a right of access. It also discusses the doctrine that the government can sometimes regulate the press in order to advance First Amendment interests.

Disciplining the British Tabloids: Mosley v. News Group Newspapers • Stephen Bates, University of Nevada, Las Vegas • In 2008, Max Mosley, the head of Formula One racing, won an invasion-of-privacy suit against News of the World. The tabloid had published articles, including hidden-camera photos, charging that Mosley had participated in a Nazi-themed S&M orgy with five prostitutes. This paper criticizes the Mosley ruling. Among other flaws, the ruling reflects a crabbed and elitist view of the press, and it diminishes the role of the media in articulating and enforcing public morality.

Conceptualizing the Right to Environmental Information in Human Rights Law • Cheryl Ann Bishop, Quinnipiac University • During the last two decades, there has been increasing understanding that access to environmental information is a key to sustainable development and effective public participation in environmental governance.  This research identifies and explicates the human right to environmental information by analyzing documents and legal rulings from the Inter-American, European, African and UN human rights regimes. It finds that the right to environmental information has broad support; nonetheless, the articulations of this right are not always consistent.

The Constitutional Right-to-information on the Individual Level • Kathryn Blevins, The Pennsylvania State University • The constitutional right to government-held information is a muddled legal right, especially in light of government abuses of the Freedom of Information Act in the past decade. This paper provides an overview of the First Amendment jurisprudence regarding an individual’s right to government-held information before ultimately arguing that perhaps the right to information should be conceptualized as a constitutional rather than statutory right in light of strong Supreme Court support.

Every Picture Tells A Story, Don’t It? Wrestling With The Complex Relationship Among Photographs, Words & Newsworthiness In Journalistic Storytelling • Clay Calvert, University of Florida • Using the 2009 opinion by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Toffoloni v. LFP Publishing Group (and the Supreme Court’s March 2010 denial of a petition for a writ of certiorari) as an analytical springboard, this paper focuses on the complex relationship in journalistic storytelling among images, text and newsworthiness and the implications of it for press freedom.  The paper pivots on a key research question: If pictures are crucial to journalistic storytelling, from news to entertainment, then why should judges be able to usurp from the press the First Amendment-protected role of editor and place themselves in the position of arbiter of what counts more in storytelling – words or images – when ruling on a story’s newsworthiness?

Free Speech, Fleeting Expletives & the Causation Quagmire:  Was Justice Scalia Wrong In Fox Television Stations? • Clay Calvert, University of Florida; Matthew Bunker, University of Alabama • This paper analyzes the U.S. Supreme Court’s approach in 2009 in FCC v. Fox Television Stations to the issue of harm to minors allegedly caused by fleeting expletives.  Dissecting Justice Antonin Scalia’s language in the case on causation of harm, the paper examines the quantum of evidentiary proof needed by a federal agency to demonstrate causation sufficient to justify restricting the speech in question.  The paper suggests how Scalia’s analysis begs the law for an infusion of research from social science fields, including communication.  It also contextualizes the causation issue within a broader framework, illustrating how Scalia’s remarks demonstrate doctrinal inconsistency and judicial incoherence on speech-related questions of both causation and redress of harm in areas of law other than indecency, namely with laws targeting video games, commercial speech and trademark.

One Click to Suicide: First Amendment Case Law and its Applicability to Cyberspace • Christina Cerutti, Boston College • Websites counseling dangerous activity such as suicide represent uncharted legal territory.  To date, most legal scholarship regarding these sites considers whether they incite imminent lawless action.  As an alternative to incitement, this paper argues that these websites are more productively characterized as instruction manuals that aid and abet unlawful activity.  In support of this approach, this paper proposes a three-tiered legal test for distinguishing between protected and unprotected instruction manuals under the First Amendment.
Charting The Right to Publish and the Right to Privacy: Reconciling Conflicts Between Freedom of

Expression and the Disclosure of Private Facts • Erin Coyle, Louisiana State University • Legal scholars have suggested the Supreme Court’s narrow, fact-tied rulings have favored free expression and provided little clarity on privacy rights.  Little is known, however, about whether lower courts have discussed any free expression values or privacy values when ruling on disclosure of private facts claims since 1989. This paper examines if and how state high court and federal appellate court decisions filed after the U.S. Supreme Court’s Florida Star v. B.J.F. ruling have analyzed clashes between free expression and privacy arising in disclosure of private facts cases. During the past twenty years, four states’ high courts have clarified for the first time that the common law of their respective states does recognize invasion of privacy by the disclosure of private facts in the past twenty years.  On the other hand, during the 1990s, two states’ high courts suggested their states’ common law did not recognize the disclosure branch of invasion of privacy.  The courts in those six states reached different conclusions about the constitutionality of the tort.  Most state supreme and federal appellate courts that have considered disclosure cases since 1989, however, have not discussed the constitutionality of the tort.  Almost half the relevant rulings focused on the failure of disclosure of private facts plaintiffs to demonstrate that defendants gave widespread publicity to matters not of legitimate public concern. Few courts suggested that they attempted to reconcile conflicts between freedom of expression and privacy, or even acknowledged the tension between First Amendment interests and privacy interests that Justice Marshall mentioned in Florida Star. In one sense, courts followed the U.S. Supreme Court’s practice of relying on principles that sweep no more broadly than the appropriate context of the case. Most state high courts and federal courts of appeals did not balance free expression and privacy interests. Several rulings referred to at least one individual value undergirding privacy law—most commonly the liberty value— and the marketplace of ideas, self-governance, and checking values for freedom of expression.  Some suggested the free expression interests outweighed the privacy interests at issue, but only gave lip service to the traditional concept of balancing competing interests. Most of those rulings engaged in definitional balancing, suggesting that publishing information on a matter of public interest automatically outweighed any privacy interests at stake.

Avoiding the Prisoners’ Dilemma: Economic Development and State Sunshine Laws • Aimee Edmondson, Ohio University; Charles Davis, University of Missouri • This paper looks at the nexus of freedom of information and local and state governments’ economic development negotiations with private business, reviewing all 50 state codes to determine whether officials are free to negotiate and woo private business behind closed doors in the name of job growth for their communities. There has been a push to bring unprecedented secrecy to the process in a state-eat-state battle for jobs with private business insisting upon millions in tax breaks and other incentives. A tire factory or even a private prison could pop up next door and community members may not know about it until after the deal is signed. At least 15 states exempt such negotiations in their sunshine laws. Even more troubling, at least 11 states are hiding those exemptions outside the sunshine law, in the codes that govern economic development agencies themselves. Courts have responded to such secrecy in a mixed manner, ruling that quasi-governmental, nonprofit and private economic development agencies working on behalf of the government are often subject to state sunshine laws. However, in some states, courts have deferred to state statues mandating closure. This paper also offers recommendations for legislative and other types of public policy change to insure transparency in such negotiations.

Motivations for Anonymous Speech: A Legal Realist Perspective • Victoria Ekstrand, Bowling Green State University • This paper is interested in the role courts are playing in assisting plaintiffs who want to sue anonymous online speakers. Specifically, it is interested in how courts are interpreting and defining the cultural value of anonymous speech, particularly in online environments. Using a legal realist approach and an interdisciplinary study of the literature in literature studies, communication, history and political science, this paper looks to address why we seek the mask of anonymity in our speech and identify the beneficial and/or harmful motivations for speaking anonymously. It then looks at two recent U.S. Supreme Court decisions on anonymous speech to address whether the law reflects those cultures and traditions of anonymous speech. It concludes that while some motivations for anonymity have been addressed by the U.S Supreme Court, some of the key motivations for anonymous speech online – such as fun and spontaneity – are not central to the Court’s discussions.

Assessing the Need for More Incentives to Stimulate Next Generation Network Investment • Rob Frieden, Penn State University • Incumbent carriers often vilify the regulatory process as a drain on efficiency and an unnecessary burden in light of robust marketplace competition.  Some claim that regulation creates disincentives for investing in expensive next generation networks (NGNs), and even accepting subsidies for broadband development if the carrier must provide access to competitors. In the worst case scenario, incumbent carriers secure unwarranted and premature deregulation, despite an ongoing need for governments to guard against anticompetitive practices and to promote sustainable competition.   Once a subsidy mechanism is in place, government may not easily wean carriers off such artificial compensation.  In rare instances government may find some key carriers unwilling to accept subsidies and in turn disinclined to pursue expedited NGN development, as is currently occurring in the U.S., because incumbent carriers do not want to provide interconnection and access to competitors.This paper will examine how incumbent carriers in the United States have gamed the incentive creation process for maximum market distortion and competitive advantage.  The paper suggests that the U.S. government has rewarded incumbents with artificially lower risk, insulation from competition, and partial underwriting of technology projects that these carriers would have to undertake unilaterally.   The paper also examines the FCC’s recently released National Broadband Plan with an eye toward assessing whether the Commission has properly balanced incentive creation with competitive necessity.  The paper provides recommendations on how governments can calibrate the incentive creation process for maximum consumer benefit instead of individual carrier gain.

Network Neutrality and Over the Top Content Providers • Rob Frieden, Penn State University This paper considers whether the Federal Communications Commission has legal authority to impose so-called network neutrality rules on producers of content, applications and software delivered to users via the Internet.  The paper asserts that the FCC lacks jurisdiction and cannot generate compelling policy justifications to expand its regulatory wingspan to include content providers whose products ride on top of a bitstream offered by Internet Service Providers.  The paper provides insights on the line between lawful and reasonable Internet nondiscrimination and transparency requirements and unlawful intrusion of content providers’ First Amendment rights.  The paper also provides an assessment of whether governments must regulate or adjudicate network neutrality conflicts related to content as opposed to access via the Internet to content.

Fairey v. AP: Is the Obama Hope Poster a Fair Use or a Copyright Infringement? • Laura Hlavach, Southern Illinois University Carbondale • About Jan. 30, 2009, The Associated Press learned that a 2006 Barack Obama photo taken by an AP photographer was the visual reference artist Shepard Fairey used to develop his iconic Obama Hope posters. Fairey found the photo on Google and did not seek any license to use the image. Fairey considered his use fair under U.S. copyright law; The AP did not. Their legal battle continues. What would U.S. Supreme Court precedent hold?

When Does F*** Not Mean F***?:  FCC v. Fox Television Stations and Protecting Emotive Speech W. Wat Hopkins, Virginia Tech • The Supreme Court of the United States demonstrated in its current term that it doesn’t always deal cogently with non-traditional language.  In FCC v. Fox Television Stations, the justices became sidetracked into attempting to define the f-word and then to determine whether, when used as a fleeting expletive rather than repeatedly, the word is indecent for broadcast purposes.  The Court would do well to avoid definitions and heed Justice John Marshall Harlan’s advice in Cohen v. California to provide protection for the emotive, as well as the cognitive, element of speech.

The Attack Memorandum and the First Amendment: Adjudicating an Activist Role for Business in the Marketplace of Ideas • Robert Kerr, University of Oklahoma • Decades after leaving the Supreme Court, Justice Lewis F. Powell, Jr., remains as well known for a once secret memorandum as for many influential opinions. This analysis of his jurisprudence in relation to his memorandum on advancing business interests in the marketplace of ideas suggests that although he indisputably did so in First Amendment law, he also strove more than popularly believed to maintain limits on those protections in order to preserve other societal interests.

The impact of competition on universal service in Korea: A case study • Sung Wook Kim, Seoul Women’s University; Krishna Jayakar, Penn State University • A substantial body of theoretical and case study literature exists about the relationship between competition and universal service in developing countries. On the one hand, many scholars have argued that state-owned monopolies in developing countries are not able to mobilize the capital needed for network expansion: the resulting unmet demand for services becomes a motivator for liberalization. On the other hand, the introduction of competition jeopardizes the internal and external subsidies through which the state-owned monopoly kept subscription rates low: the heightened concern about loss of subscribership incentivizes the creation of explicit universal service statutes and funding mechanisms concurrently with or soon after competition is introduced. We show in this case study that universal service in Korea had a unique evolutionary path, which did not conform to either of these expectations. We argue that the outcomes predicted by theory and observed in the case study literature are not intrinsic to the monopoly condition per se, but derive from the strategic choices made by telecommunications managers, regulators and lawmakers in developing countries.

Show Me the Money: The Economics of Copyright in Online News • Minjeong Kim, Colorado State University This paper examines copyright in online news through an economic perspective of copyright law. The paper asks: To what extent are news publishers entitled to reap any economic benefits from the online distribution of news? In its analysis, this paper distinguishes between different types of news uses and relies upon the following three branches of law: (1) the fair use doctrine, (2) the hot news doctrine, and (3) laws related to the retransmission of copyrighted programs by cable television.

When Even the Truth Isn’t Good Enough: Confusion by the Courts Over the Controversial False Light Tort Threatens Free Speech • Sandra Chance, University of Florida; Christina Locke, University of Florida • Journalists are taught that truthful reporting is the best defense to a lawsuit.  However, Florida journalists who reported the truth lost an $18-million false light lawsuit.  The verdict was ultimately overturned by the Florida Supreme Court, but within two months, a Missouri court specifically recognized the tort in a case involving the Internet.  Using recent appellate cases, this paper examines the potential for false light to stifle the media, especially when truthful news is targeted.

Balancing Statutory Privacy and the Public interest: A Review of State Wiretap Laws as Applied to the Press • Jasmine McNealy, Louisiana State University • Press organizations have been accused of violating state wiretapping and eavesdropping laws most often in situations involving hidden cameras or microphones.  In these investigations, the news media have turned up truthful information regarding illegal or unethical activities that the press finds newsworthy and the public finds interesting.  Ethics aside, the courts have not always granted First Amendment protection to hidden camera and other surreptitious surveillance investigations by the press.  This article reviews state wiretap laws as they have been applied to the press.  Specifically, this article examines the application of state wiretap laws to the press in light of the Supreme Court’s decision in Bartnicki v. Vopper in which the Court found that the First Amendment guarantee of freedom of speech outweighed the privacy interests of those whose private conversation was intercepted without permission.

Plaintiff’s Status as a Consideration in Misrepresentation and Promissory Estoppel Cases against the Media • Jasmine McNealy, Louisiana State University • Both fraudulent misrepresentation and promissory estoppel require that the plaintiff have reasonably relied upon statements made by the defendant. But what of an additional inquiry into the status of the plaintiff in relation to the journalist in these cases, as a consideration for whether the plaintiff could have reasonably relied upon statements made by the journalist?   Such a consideration could significantly change the jurisprudence surrounding cases involving false statements made by journalists. This paper examines the influence that the status of the plaintiff in misrepresentation and promissory estoppel cases against journalist could have.

Obscenity is in the Eye of the Beholder:  Use of Demonstrative Evidence to Delineate Community Standards in Obscenity Cases • Rebecca Ortiz, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Courts have long struggled with the requirement that materials in obscenity cases must be measured against contemporary community standards from the perspective of an average person as determined in Miller v. California. The U.S. Supreme Court failed to provide a specific definition or geographic dimensions of community standards for fact finders to consider. Determining whether something is obscene based upon such a requirement is particularly difficult at the federal level where the community may be defined as the entire nation. Pornographers may, therefore, be uninformed about whether their materials are obscene, namely because the specific community in which a court may find their materials exist and relevant standards are left undefined. Use of demonstrative evidence in obscenity cases may be a crucial tactic for counsel to demonstrate the standards of a particular community, but courts are typically tentative about admitting such evidence. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the use of demonstrative evidence in recent obscenity cases for establishing contemporary community standards and examine court rationales for admission or exclusion of evidence. The paper reveals that courts’ acceptance or rejection of demonstrative evidence was unpredictable. Courts were more likely to exclude evidence than admit it for wavering rationales. Findings reveal that by disallowing admission of evidence, the courts may be shifting the burden of proof onto the defense and creating a chilling effect on sexual expression.

Public Access to Criminal Discovery Records: A Look Behind the Curtain of the Criminal Justice System • Brian Pafundi, University of Florida Levin College of Law • This research provides a survey of federal and state law regarding access to criminal discovery records. The public availability of criminal discovery records implicates three important pillars of American jurisprudence: public access to the judiciary, a defendant’s right to a fair trial and the protection of individual privacy. Florida’s public records law opens discovery records to public inspection once exchanged between the opposing parties. This paper determines whether any other jurisdiction grants similar access.

Internet Service Provider’s Liability for Defamation: South Korea’s Balancing of Free Speech with Reputation • Ahran Park, university of Oregon • ISPs in the United States have been totally immunized from publishers’ liability for online defamation under the Communications Decency Act § 230. But as the recent Google lawsuit in Italy illustrates, American ISPs are confronting the threat of defamation lawsuits abroad. Therefore, more understanding of ISP policy in foreign countries is necessary, and South Korea provides a noteworthy example of ISP jurisprudence exactly contrary to the U.S. immunity. Statutory laws and courts in South Korea have burdened ISPs with heavy liability for defamation by online users. For instance, the Communication Network Act in Korea punishes online defamation as a crime and compels ISPs to delete allegedly libelous postings promptly. The Korean Supreme Court also held that ISPs should be liable for defamation by third party even when ISPs did not receive any notification related to defamatory postings. This paper discusses ISP liability in the comparative law perspective and maintains that burdening ISPs with strict liability would chill freedom of speech in cyberspace.

Libelous Language Post-Lawrence: Accusations of Homosexuality as Defamation • Laurie Phillips, UNC • Just as imputations of race or political affiliation were once defamatory, judges – both within and between states – are returning competing rulings concerning imputations of homosexuality. Functioning as a post-Lawrence v. Texas update to Koehler’s (1999) The Variable Nature of Defamation, this paper examines cases between 2004 and 2009 involving imputations of homosexuality. Findings indicate that in 88% of the forty two cases analyzed, defamatory claims failed, yet most judges neglected to directly address the issue.

Gay Labeling and Defamation Law:  Have Attitudes Toward Homosexuality Changed Enough to Modify Reputational Torts? • Robert Richards, Penn State University • This paper analyzes the issue of whether labeling someone gay should still be considered defamatory per se.  It traces the history of, what one court called, this far more subtle and difficult question and examines societal attitudes towards homosexuality.  The paper concludes that society has not yet reached the point where homosexuality is no longer viewed, by significant populations, with some level of scorn or ridicule, given such recent events as individuals being physically attacked merely because they are perceived to be homosexual, organizations whose sole purpose is to defeat the rights of same-sex couples to marry, public schools where gay and lesbians can sense the scorn of their fellow students by reading messages on t-shirts, and religions whose members would rather defect than accept homosexual congregants.

The convergence policymaking process in South Korea • Dong-Hee Shin, Sungkyunkwan University • In 2009, South Korean government reformed its communications sector through legislation that addresses convergence services. This study traces the policy-making process of the convergence in terms of politics and regulation, and it also examines how the stakeholders’ interests are aligned and coordinated in the policymaking process of convergence in Korea. This study investigates the socio-political construction of Korea’s strategy for convergence reform with two research questions: (1) what social and political factors influence strategy formulation and (2) how do different interests stabilize ideologies in which actors formulate their strategies based on their interests. Despite the dynamic interactions, the actor-network around convergence has yet not been effectively stabilized, as the politics of convergence is complex and marked by paradoxical features. This study provides a theoretical basis for understanding why the convergence debate in Korea has so far been problematic.

A Web of Stakeholders and Strategies in the Digital TV Transition: • Dong-Hee Shin, Sungkyunkwan University • This study investigates the development of Korean digital TV transition by tracing the interaction between social and technological entities from various perspectives at different developmental stages. A socio-technical analysis examines the dynamic interactions among the stakeholders in the switchover to digital broadcasting, showing how the various actions taken by leading stakeholders affect diverse groups of stakeholders. In addition to the qualitative analysis, a structural-equation model examines the perceptions and expectations of digital TV consumers in Korea. Consumers’ perspectives and expectations suggest the factors that will lead them to adopt DTV, as well as the barriers to adoption. The overall findings show that Korean digital TV transition is the outcome of a proactive strategy by industry players and the Korean government’s top-down policy of supporting such a transition. It is argued that the policy of a top-down transition, which overlooks coordination among stakeholders, harms consumers and hinders effective and sustainable development. The case of Korea has implications for other countries that are pursuing digital transition strategies.

The Framers’ First Amendment: Originalist Citations in U.S. Supreme Court Freedom of Expression Opinions • Derigan Silver, University of Denver • As a mode of constitutional interpretation, originalism holds judges should construe the U.S. Constitution according to framers’ intent.  Focusing on rational choice theory, this paper examines the strategic use of originalist citations by Supreme Court justices in First Amendment freedom of expression opinions.  The paper quantitatively examines when justices use originalist citations to strategically advance their policy preferences, insulate their decisions from criticism or persuade other justices to join their opinions.  In addition, it qualitatively explores the content of the justices’ originalist citations to determine how the justices are describing the original meaning of the First Amendment.  Thus, the paper adds to the strategic citation literature, advances understanding of how the justices have interpreted the original meaning of the First Amendment and illuminates how originalist arguments have shaped current free expression jurisprudence.

Evaluating Public Access Ombuds Programs:  An analysis of the experiences of Virginia, Iowa and Arizona • Daxton Stewart, Texas Christian University • The author conducted case studies of ombuds programs monitoring open government laws in Virginia, Iowa and Arizona.  The offices largely comported with the major tenets of ombuds programs – independence, impartiality, and providing a credible review process – but weaknesses in perceptions of impartiality hurt the development of the Iowa and Arizona programs.  The program with the most perceived success, Virginia’s FOI Advisory Council, appeared to embrace the tenets of Dispute Systems Design the most.

Mother knows best: Can lessons from the Ma Bell breakup apply to net neutrality policy? • Tom Vizcarrondo, Louisiana State University • The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on October 22, 2009 seeking input from the public regarding network management policy commonly known as net neutrality. The request is the latest step in an ongoing and protracted debate among lawmakers, regulators, Internet industry leaders, and consumers over whether additional regulation is required to ensure that the Internet remains free and open. The different views are almost always defended as being in the best interest of the consumer, although individual motives and benefits often belie such statements. This paper examines many of these arguments, but also focuses on the network management debate within the context of an existing legal framework of court opinions. This paper examines many of these arguments, but also focuses on the network management debate within the context of an existing legal framework of court opinions. In particular, the court-ordered divestiture of AT&T shares many of the issues which are being considered today as part of the net neutrality debate. This paper examines whether lessons learned from this divestiture can be applied to the current debate in order to reach the best possible outcome. This paper finds such lessons, and concludes that these lessons argue for an incremental approach to any new network management policy; further, policies that encourage competition and private sector solutions is desirable over sweeping government regulations.

Implications of Copyright in the Context of User-Generated Content and Social Media • Amber Westcott-Baker, University of California Santa Barbara; Rebekah Pure, University of California Santa Barbara • Business models for generating revenue from user-generated content (UGC) are still developing.  In the meantime, many tensions exist between the business interests of companies providing the platforms for user-generated content and the interests of content producers (users). This paper will outline the conflicting interests—users want to create and share content in a way that they control, while companies want to make money and be protected from liability—and the resulting copyright and ownership issues that arise from these tensions.

Obama Administration Lifts the Dover Ban: Is the New Policy on Press Access Constitutional? Jason Zenor, University of South Dakota • A corollary of the right to publish must be a right to gather news.  However, in times of war, one of the first rights to be abrogated is the freedom of the press. One of the wartime restrictions has been the Dover Ban, a policy which has restricted press access to arrival ceremonies for fallen soldiers of war. The Dover Ban has been criticized by the press and by veterans, and challenged in court-but was never overturned. In February 2009, the Obama Administration changed the policy so that the press could have access if they received permission from the family of the fallen soldier. Though this change is progress for the free flow of information and is clearly less violative of the Constitution than was the prior outright ban, this article argues that it is still unconstitutional. First, the Dover arrival ceremonies have been traditionally open to public and the press and the history of Dover Ban’s creation and enforcement illustrate that it is a content-based regulation. Therefore, the restriction must survive the strict scrutiny test. Accordingly, neither the government’s public relations interest nor the privacy interest of the family of a volunteer soldier, are compelling.  Furthermore, the new policy is a de facto license where the family acting as a surrogate for the government decides the whether the press has access based upon whether the family perceives the content of the coverage will be acceptable. Finally, the policy is not permanent and an outright could be reinstated.

<< 2010 Abstracts

Bob Stevenson Open Paper Competition
Presidential Candidate Preference Based on Issue Salience and Homophily: A Cross-Cultural Analysis • Iti Agnihotri, University of Louisiana at Lafayette; William Davie, University of Louisiana at Lafayette; Lucian Dinu, University of Louisiana at Lafayette; Philip Auter, University of Louisiana at Lafayette • The 2008 U.S. presidential election was significant to the extent in which international issues came to the fore and two major candidates contrasted culturally with each other. An international survey of 249 students from the Middle East and the United States compared the effects of issue competency and homophily toward the two candidates. Findings showed Middle Eastern students preferred Sen. Barack Obama on both dimensions, while American students favored Sen. John McCain for different reasons.

From the Periphery to the Center: a Historical Account of ideas Crossing Structural Distance. • Marco Briziarelli, University of Colorado at Boulder • This paper intends to re-assert the value of history in approaching international communication matters. This historical approach will serve here two main objectives: -to give more visibility to a very meaningful historical case, exemplary of what I consider a more ideal model of communication in development compared to the existing one; -as a hermeneutic tool, to make a meta critique of development and communication theory and, at the same time, recuperate the original value of two great thinkers: Gramsci and Freire.

From Heritage to Horror: Five newspapers’ crisis coverage of the 26/11 Mumbai terrorist attacks • BRIDGETTE COLACO, TROY UNIVERSITY • This study examines media coverage of the November 2008 Mumbai terrorist attacks that left 188 civilians killed and 308 fatally wounded. It analyzes 2,119 stories published in 10 daily editions of five English newspapers, examining variables of media frames, content orientation, and 3,794 reporters’ sources. India has a booming print media and this study of newspapers in the world’s largest democracy makes significant contribution to literature on framing theory and media functions during a crisis.

Transnational News Media Role in Building Consensus about Muslim Communities in the EU • Vanessa de Macedo Higgins Joyce, Southern Methodist University • This study explores the influences of transnational media’s reporting about 9-11 on European population’s feelings about the Muslim population, with a second level agenda-setting analysis. It focuses on how transnational media reduced differences on how demographic subgroups perceived this community. It found support for increased consensus for those using transnational television, weaker support for those using transnational press. Differences arise within the comparison of the 15 EU countries and the specific demographic analyzed.

Framing the Sichuan Earthquake on U.S. Television • Daniela Dimitrova, Iowa State University; kejun chu, Iowa State University • This study content analyzed coverage of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake on the top three nightly television news programs, ABC World News, CBS Evening News and NBC Nightly News. Specifically, we looked at how the U.S. media portrayed this international disaster by examining the tone, frames and sources used. The findings indicate that the human interest frame dominated the coverage, which was mostly neutral and often relied on eyewitness accounts.

The Art of Criticism: How African Cartoons Discursively Constructed African Media Realities in the Post-Cold War Era. • Lyombe Eko, University of Iowa • African newspaper cartoons are critical journalistic texts that have spearheaded the struggle for democracy and freedom of expression on the continent. Actually, the African satirical press in general, and cartoons in particular, are the most visible manifestations of the post-Cold War political liberalization of the African continent. This article is concerned with African editorial cartoon narratives of the realities of the African media in the post-Cold War era. It was found that African cartoons are irreverent counter discourses that use African mythic idioms to portray a somber picture of media realities on the African continent, deterritorialize authoritarian leaders for purposes of criticism, and boldly resist abuses of power. It was also found that the Mohammad cartoons affair had an impact on African cartoons.

One Profession—Multiple Identities: Russian Regional Reporters’ Perceptions of the Professional Community • Wilson Lowrey, University of Alabama; Elina Erzikova, Central Michigan university • This study examines perceptions of the journalism professional community by reporters, who work for state and private newspapers in a Russian province. The study found that newspapers with powerful government and oligarchical owners had clear missions, while the paper that struggles to survive as independent lacked clearly articulated goals. Regardless of the type of paper ownership, reporters believed that the journalistic community is disjointed because of the different journalistic values deriving from the professional competition.

Analyzing the Spell of War: A War/Peace Framing Analysis of the 2009 visual coverage of the Sri Lankan Civil Conflict in Newswires • Rico Neumann, University of Arizona; Shahira Fahmy, University of Arizona • The goal of this study was to analyze the extent to which the visual coverage of the final stages of the long-lasting Sri Lankan Civil War relied on war and peace frames. Based on the conceptual work of Norwegian scholar Johan Galtung, who viewed war and peace journalism as two competing frames in covering conflicts and wars, we tested his concept empirically by content analyzing news photographs of the conflict in the three leading newswires.

Dimming Lights and Deepening Shadows over Press Rights in Kyrgyzstan • Eric Freedman, Michigan State University • In March 2005, a relatively nonviolent uprising ousted an authoritarian president in the former Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan. In the aftermath of that Tulip Revolution, press rights advocates and journalists welcomed the promise of greatly enhanced freedoms. However, the new regime proved to be as authoritarian and corrupt as its predecessor, and little liberalisation of the press system is evident five years later. The record shows continued physical assaults including murders, of journalists, harassment and libel suits, impediments to access to information, license denials, self-censorship, and only slow movement toward privatising state-owned media. Independent and oppositional media area also remains at financial risk due to the country’s weak economy and high poverty level. Thus twenty years after independence and a half-decade after the Tulip Revolution, Soviet propaganda model for a press system is dead in name but many of its major attributes survive, with significant implications for the continuum of authoritarianism in other post-communist nations.

Adapting Business Communication to A Culturally Diverse Online Marketplace: Exploring the Effectiveness of Cultural Appeals in Internet Advertising • Gennadi Gevorgyan, Xavier University • With communication accommodation theory and Hofstede’s model of cultural dimensions as its main conceptual framework, this study experimentally investigates the role of culture in online marketing communications. By exploring the attitudinal effects of culturally congruent online advertisements, we aim to develop and test a model for bridging the cultural gap in today’s online marketplace. Our study builds on previous cross-cultural business research by going beyond traditional channels of communication and by focusing on the effects of culturally congruent marketing messages in online environments. To have a particularly rigorous test of the cultural congruence effect, we manipulated cultural appeals in two distinct samples: American and Chinese. A randomized block experiment with 240 American and 235 Chinese participants revealed significant attitudinal patterns underlying individual reactions toward culturally oriented marketing messages. Our results showed that culturally congruent advertising, while producing favorable ad and brand attitudes, enhances Web-based communication. Cultural appeals are particularly persuasive when targeting consumers with strong ethnic identities.

Transborder Journalism: Bypassing the Nation to Engage Europe • Kevin Grieves, Ohio University • Previous research indicates the absence of European journalism, hampering the development of a European public sphere. This empirical study examines regional journalism, largely neglected by earlier research, for signs of European journalism that engages directly with neighbors across the border. Qualitative analysis of transborder broadcast content from the Saar-Lor-Lux region reveals that journalists bypass national centers to cover Europe regionally. This paper addresses what has been described as a blind spot in European journalism research.

The Structural Embeddedness of Global News Flow: A Social Network Analysis Approach to International News • Seung Joon Jun, Korea University; Ju-Yong Ha, Inha Univ., Incheon, Korea • This study examined the network of international news flow based on World-Systems theory. Using social network methods, this study attempted to identify the structure of international news and its embeddedness in socio-economic environments of the world-system. It confirmed that the structure pattern of international news flow is similar to what World-Systems theorists have argued. As many communication scholars have argued, the pattern of international news flow is still strongly centered on a few Western countries. Using QAP multiple regression technique this study also found that the structure of the world news is strongly embedded in international economic, political, and cultural contexts. Especially, the economic, diplomatic and interpersonal connections among countries are significant predictor of international news flow.

Journalism in a Complicated Place: The Role of Community Journalism in South Africa • john hatcher, University of Minnesota Duluth • One of the great challenges in a world that is becoming more culturally complex is how media can build community between groups with strong cultural cleavages. In no country are these challenges more pronounced than in South Africa, where a new democracy is making concerted efforts to foster media that will help to overcome a history of oppression based on difference. A qualitative analysis that includes interviews with more than 60 journalists and experts in community media found that journalists in South Africa see themselves as community educators whose role transcends simply reporting the news. The results suggest the greatest obstacle in this country is to find a way to encourage media that serve historically marginalized communities.

Predicting international news coverage: How much influence do gatekeepers have? • Beverly Horvit, University of Missouri; Peter Gade, University of Oklahoma; Elizabeth A. Lance, University of Missouri • Regression models using a content analysis of 2,500 news stories produced by The New York Times, Associated Press and four other newspapers, paired with a dataset for 191 countries, show U.S. coverage of other countries is highly predictable. Logistics factors (e.g., U.S. economic and military relations) predict coverage much more than gatekeeping variables. Together, the variables explain more than 90 percent of the wires’ coverage and 96 percent of the variance in the newspapers’ coverage.

Rural Use of Internet Technology and Economic Development in Nigeria • Primus Igboaka, Bowling Green State University; Louisa Ha, Bowling Green State University • This study identifies the characteristics of Internet users in a rural population of southeastern Nigeria.
Results revealed that among the three innovation attributes (relative advantage, compatibility and complexity), compatibility scored the highest, indicating these users’ acceptance of the technology for individual and community use. An analysis of the activities and the users’ impetus shows that Internet is used primarily for activities related to economic development, although many began with just communicating by e-mails with friends and family.

Agenda Building and the Politics of Regime Legitimacy in East Africa • Yusuf Kalyango, Ohio University • This study examined how the governments of Kenya, Uganda, and Tanzania influence public attitudes to legitimize their regimes through the media. It is based on a survey of 1,395 citizens in 15 provinces of East Africa who were selected using a stratified multistage cluster sampling. We examined whether public attitudes towards regime legitimacy vary between users of the state-owned and the privately-owned media, accounting for education levels. Government influence on public attitudes towards regime legitimacy had a negative influence within provinces and had no significant positive influence across provinces when education levels were high. We find that the EAC governments build their political influence by taking advantage of citizens who are less educated, and who lack the basic understanding of their political rights. The utility of this research and its implications are detailed.

The Korean Netizens’ Online & Offline Collective Activism • HyunMee Kang, Louisiana State Universtiy; Daekyung Kim Kim, Idaho State University • The main concern of the study is the role of internet’s mobilization in collective activism and factors to motivate the internet users to partake in collective activities through the candlelight movement in South Korea. As predictors of the Korean netizens’ participation in collective activities, the study examined social identity and collectivist orientation as well as reliance on news media, use of the internet, political attitude, and issue involvement. A total of 241 Internet users participated in online survey and the linear regression was employed. The results showed that social identity, collectivist orientation, and reliance on news media are significant predictors of the participation in collective activism.

Competition and the Decline of Foreign Television Program Popularity in Indonesia during the 1990s • Tuenyu Lau, self; David Atkin, University of Connecticut • This paper seeks to examine the impact of competition on the popularity of foreign programs in Indonesia during the mid-1990s. Analyzing 1995-1997 ratings data from a television ratings service, the paper suggests that competition has given rise to the popularity of local programs, while foreign program popularity has declined during the same time period. The findings also suggest that cultural proximity is a factor of the popularity of programs. Between 1995 and 1997, Asian programs outnumbered Western programs on the top 100 highest rated program list in Indonesia. Despite the country’s population base of 240 million, Indonesian television broadcasting has not been explored in academic and professional venues. The paper explores implications of study findings for filling this void in the literature.

Reinforcing Functions of Attention to Affective Coverage and Partisans for Attitudes toward the U.S. Policy of Iraq • Jeongsub Lim, Sogang University • Attention to affective coverage and partisans could reinforce the public’s attitudes toward international issues. The present study examines this question by combining a public opinion poll and major media’s affective coverage of Iraq. Results show that people who pay attention to affective coverage hold more positive attitudes or more negative attitudes toward the U.S. policy of Iraq, compared to those who do not pay attention to the coverage. Partisans in combination with attention to the Iraq coverage reinforce these nonneutral attitudes toward the policy. Theoretical implications are discussed.

Sustainability of Organizational Change in the Newsroom: A Case Study from Australia • Brian Massey, East Carolina University; Jacqui Ewart, Griffith University • Organizational-change concepts were applied in a three-year survey study of the sustainability of an ambitious, ongoing newsroom-change program at a group of corporate-owned regional newspapers in Australia. The results suggest a sustained level of change-based momentum for the program in terms of journalists’ openness to change, and their judgments of the goals of change and its effect on their newsrooms. The implication of attitudinal ambivalence toward change as a contributor to momentum for change is discussed.

Culture and Metaphors in Advertisements: France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United States • Pamela Morris, Loyola University Chicago • Culture and language are intertwined. Metaphors, based on culture, are ubiquitous in thinking and language. As social artifacts reflecting culture, advertising messages provide the opportunity to compare metaphors in different nations. The goal of this paper is to understand how and why metaphors are used and how they differ across countries, as well as how cultural characteristics are used to create compelling ad messages. Using a content analysis of 87 French, German, Italian, Dutch, and American magazine advertisements, variations in metaphor usage and cultural attributes were examined from four culture-bound product groups: food and beverages, automobiles, insurance and finance, and personal care. Findings provide examples for how culture is reflected in language and symbols. The study shows metaphors are exploited in headlines to capture attention throughout all five countries. However, metaphors and cultural attributes are used differently within nations and employed strategically to capture attention, gain interest, and deliver a persuasive message. The study is important in the context of globalization and the debate for whether or not culture is important in advertising. The exploratory project provides theory in culture, language, metaphor, and advertising, and offers a guide for further research about culture.

From Heavy-Handed to a Light-Touch: Protecting Children through Media Regulation in Singapore • Temple Northup, The University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill • Singapore, the small city-state in the hub of Southeast Asia, is one of the most diverse and connected countries in the world. It also has a reputation, in Western media, as having strict laws coming from a government that rules with an iron fist. In light of this, it would seem likely that the Singapore government would try to heavily regulate all media in order to control what messages are seen and heard by its people. However, this is not actually the case. Through an analysis of government codes and reports about television and the Internet, two very contrasting styles of regulation are used by the Singapore government. With television, strict legislative restraints exist that control exactly what can and cannot be broadcast. In contrast, for the Internet, very few guidelines exist and the government relies more on self-regulation through indirect measures like educational programs. These findings are discussed in light of the government’s continued use of children as a justification for any regulations and programs that exist. Through the analysis of the regulations, it becomes clear that the government is interested in passing along the values of social order and social decorum to children.

Effect of a Public Service Announcement for Couple Testing for HIV on Beliefs, Understanding, and Intent to Act • Jyotika Ramaprasad, University of Miami • This paper presents results of an effectiveness test for a PSA to encourage HIV couple testing. Participatory formative research in Uganda identified disclosure of HIV positive status between partners as the major issue and couple testing as the solution. A largely text-based with voiceover PSA was created and tested in Uganda, using a pre-post design. Results indicate effectiveness of the PSA, which will be distributed for use in Uganda.

International Attitudes Toward America: Relationship Status – It’s Complicated • Olga Randolph, Oklahoma State University; Jami Fullerton, Oklahoma State University; alice kendrick, Southern Methodist University • A survey of 67 international students regarding their attitudes toward America, U.S. brands and consumption of U.S. media suggests that their relationship with matters U.S. is, in the words of Facebook syntax, complicated. Respondents felt slightly more favorably toward the U.S. people than the U.S. government, and their region of origin was related to their attitudes. On average, respondents reported that more than one-third of their time with media is spent with U.S. media. Respondents spent the greatest amount of media time with Internet, music, television, books and video. Consumption of U.S. media, and specifically U.S. music and books, was related to attitudes toward Americans. U.S. brands most liked were Apple and Coca Cola; McDonald’s was the most disliked brand; and Nike was named as both a most liked and a least liked brand. Four out of five respondents said, however, that they buy branded products and services that they like, irrespective of country of origin.

Do journalists have information access? Exploring news media freedom and colonial heritage in 42 nations • Jeannine Relly, University of Arizona, School of Journalism • This cross-national exploratory study examined the environment for journalists in a census of developing nations with access-to-information laws (N = 42). At the end of the 12 years studied, less than one-third of all of the countries (29%) had a news media that was free and independent. The greatest proportion of nations with freedom of the news media were common law heritage countries and these nations had the greatest proportion of positive change in the enabling environment for journalists to work and access information under the access-to-information law. By the end of the study, one in five developing nations with access laws had a context that was not free for the news media to practice journalism; and nearly a third of the nations had negative change in this environment, making it clear that adopting an access-to-information law did not necessarily parallel the diffusion of other democratic norms.

A Cross-National Study of Social-Networking Services between the U.S. and Korea • Dong-Hee Shin, Sungkyunkwan University • This study investigated users’ underlying motivations for engaging in social networking through social-networking sites and their relationships with behavior. It examined cross-national differences in motivations for participating in social networking between American and Korean users. The design methods were based on the modified Technology Acceptance Model and structural equation modeling was applied to the data gathered. The TAM factors of social-networking services were analyzed cross-nationally, in a comparative fashion, focusing on the differences in the composition of motives in the two countries. While the results illustrate the importance of both extrinsic and intrinsic motivation, the two countries show different sets of motivations. Based on the results of this study, practical applications for marketing strategies in social-networking service markets and theoretical applications for cross-country studies are recommended accordingly.

A comparative analysis of earthquake-relief public service announcements in China and the United States • Xiaopeng Wang, University of South Florida St. Petersburg • This content analysis examined Chinese PSAs for Wenchuan, China, earthquake relief in 2008 and U.S. PSAs for Haiti earthquake relief in 2010. China is a high-context culture and the United States is a low-context culture. The U.S. PSAs contained more information than the Chinese PSAs. U.S. PSAs were more likely to feature celebrities and explicitly command the viewers to perform an action, while Chinese PSAs used more symbolic associations and emotional appeals.

Market-Driven Sensationalism in Global TV News: A Comparative Study of 14 Countries • Tai-Li Wang, National Taiwan University • A recent theme in discussions about the quality of television news is its pursuit of commercial interests, which cause broadcasters to attract viewer attention by sensationalizing news. Previous sensationalism studies have focused on the formal presentation of TV news in a single country. The impact of packing TV news in sensational ways was also investigated. However, in terms of a more global picture, how prevalent are sensational topics and presentation formats? Can the relationship between news competition and news professionalism be established? Currently, very limited empirical research exists, in terms of global perspectives, to study how and why TV news has grown to be so sensationalized in recent years. This study conducted a global TV news content analysis of 14 countries. Additionally, a survey was conducted of TV news researchers for those countries, which gauged the news competition levels and professionalism. The results of this study intend to portray a more global picture of sensationalism in TV news, and to disentangle the long-time speculated relationship between news competition and professionalism.

A Comparison of Consumers’ Reactions to Cause-Related Marketing in the US and China • Ye Wang, University of Missouri School of Journalism; Weiping Hu, University of Shanghai • A survey was conducted to investigate the influence of cultural orientations, perception of charitable giving as a social norm, and local culture on CRM-related attitudes and behaviors, under the theory of individualism and collectivism by Triandis and Gelfand (1998). The results indicated that the collectivism orientation and local culture were significant predictors, while the influence of charitable giving as a social norm was often through the influence of cultural orientations.

Procedural Justice Matters More than Distributive Justice: How the Saddam Hussein Trial Became a Show Trial • Jin Yang, University of Memphis • This study analyzed the New York Times and the Washington Post’s coverage of the Saddam Hussein Trial from the justice frame perspective. It found that procedural justice frame was the dominant frame in the trial stories over distributive, interpersonal and informational frames. The identified two negative relationships (between defense sources and procedural justice, between human interest and procedural justice) demonstrated how the procedural justice frame was developed and constructed and pointed to the future research potential.

Al Jazeera: Walking a Fine Line Between a Pro-Western Government and Terrorists • khalaf tahat, Arkansas State University; Lily Zeng, Arkansas State University • Al Jazeera, the pan-regional Arab-based network, has been mired in controversy since it was launched by the government of Qatar in 1996. It gains its reputation in the West mostly because of its airing of videos from the militant terrorist group Al Qaeda. Although Al Jazeera attempted to become self-sufficient through advertising during the first few years, the advertising revenue it generated proved insufficient for its operation. The addition of Al Jazeera English (AJE) in 2006 only worsens the financial situation of the network, since Western cable carriers refuse to include it and it thus remains a marginal voice in the Western media market. Till today, Al Jazeera relies heavily on the financial support of the Qatari government, which maintains an excellent relationship with the U.S. This study asks the question: Why does the pro-Western Qatari government support a network that provide coverage that the Western audience sees negative about or even threatens the West? Through an analysis of the relationships involving Al Jazeera, terrorist groups, the Qatari government, and the West, this study seeks to provide an understanding of how Al Jazeera operates amongst a complicated series of relationship.

Markham Student Paper Competition
Proud, sexy, and highly intoxicated – An expatriate blogger’s conceptions about Finns and Americans • Sanna Ala-Kortesmaa, University of Oregon • The primary purpose of this study was to examine how Finns and Americans were represented in a blog written by an expatriate blogger, what kind of discursive practices were used to create these representations, and if the representations differed based on which nationality he was describing. The results of critical discourse analysis suggest that the representations were mostly negative and focused on Finns. Stereotyping, generalization, and over-lexicalization were used in representations, but the use of interdiscursive superstructures steered the interpretation of them from a negative to a humorous level.

Making the Case for War: CNN and BBC coverage of Colin Powell’s 2003 presentation to the United Nations • Seth Ashley, University of Missouri-Columbia • This paper offers a comparative analysis of news coverage by CNN.com and BBC.com of Colin Powell’s speech to the United Nations on Feb. 5, 2003. Ethnographic content analysis examines the coverage, and an institutional analysis examines the news outlets in broader cultural and economic contexts. The paper concludes that the BBC is better situated to enhance rational-critical dialogue and democratic self-governance through inclusion of a greater diversity of sources and a wider array of opinion.

Understanding Orientalism: The construction of the ‘other’ • Adrienne Atterberry, Syracuse University • Because of the changing relations between the East and West, and the fact that formerly unrepresented people now have to ability to represent themselves, this necessitates revisiting the concept of Orientalism. This paper examines the term Orientalism as it has been used since Edward Said’s initial definition. This paper includes discussion of the subaltern, globalization, and new media as it concerns the importance of continuing to examine instances of Orientalism and the concept of representation of the Other in general. This paper specifically engages with concepts of self, internalized, Aesthetic, commodified, and techno Orientalism as a way to understand the different instances of Orientalism.

A Content Analysis of the New York Times and CNN Coverage of the 2009 Iranian Presidential Election • Kanghui Baek, University of Texas at Austin • This study examines how the New York Times and CNN covered the 2009 Iranian presidential election.This study, in particular, content analyzes the type of events reported and the sources used by the two news entities during the event’s time span. This study contributes to an understanding of how the negative and deviant nature of the international event that was covered by the U.S. media that played a leading role in setting agenda in the international context.

Festival de Viña del Mar: Articulating Chilean Identity Through a National Media Event • Claudia Bucciferro, University of Colorado at Boulder • This study is an analysis of the Festival Internacional de la Canción de Viña del Mar (Viña del Mar’s International Song Festival), which recently celebrated its 50th anniversary in Chile. Within a Cultural Studies framework, it argues that the Festival can be understood as a secular tradition, a media event, and a media ritual conveying meanings that are legitimized by its social and media significance. Using a qualitative approach to review the last three editions of the Festival, this paper explores how issues such as national identity, gender, class, and commodification are presented onstage. It also considers how the Festival constitutes a place for the articulation of a meta-narrative that is relevant for understanding Chilean identity today.

Media freedom and corruption: Media effects on governmental accountability in 133 countries • Lindita Camaj, Indiana University • Relying on Transparency International surveys on corruption perceptions and Freedom House surveys of media freedom, this study measures the relationship between media freedom and corruption, accounting for elements of vertical accountability [electoral competitiveness, civil society and voter turnout] and horizontal accountability [judicial independence and political system]. Hierarchical multiple regression results suggests a strong association between media freedom and corruption that runs from more media freedom to less corruption. The significance of the media freedom coefficient is robust even after controlling for vertical and horizontal accountability, confirming previous studies that regard mass media among the most important determinants of political accountability. Further, this study implies that media freedom might have a greater indirect effect on corruption when coupled with strong institutions of horizontal accountability. The data suggest that media freedom have a greater impact on corruption in countries with a parliamentary political system than in those with a presidential system, and that this impact increases as the judiciary independence increases.

Understanding media frames that cover an ethnic minority group in a homogeneous country: Expanding a generic frame in minority studies • Moonhee Cho, University of Florida; Jaejin Lee, University of Florida; JIN SOOK IM, University of Florida • The purpose of this study was twofold: 1) to examine how the media portray the minority group of international married migrant women in Korea, an ethnically homogeneous country, and 2) to reveal whether the proximity characteristic in news value criteria influences the media coverage in terms of volume, frame selection, and tones. By employing both qualitative and quantitative analysis, the study expanded Semetko and Valkenbug’s (2000) generic frames by adding new frames such as the integration and victim frames. Among seven media frames, the integration frame was the most frequently used in news articles covering an ethnic minority group in a homogeneous country.

How Two Irish Newspapers Framed the 2007 British Military Withdrawal From Northern Ireland • Dave Ferman, University of Oklahoma • Frame analysis has often been used to study how the media has described and interpreted conflicts, displays of cultural affinity with audiences, and uses elite sources, as well as the relationship between news coverage and editorial stance on an issue. This paper examines these aspects of framing by studying how two Irish newspapers, the Belfast Telegraph and the Dublin-based Irish Independent, covered the withdrawal of British military forces from Northern Ireland in the summer of 2007 The end of the 38-year Operation Banner was a watershed moment in the Troubles and provides an excellent opportunity for framing analysis, given the two newspapers’ divergent histories, audiences, and long-standing editorial stances on the conflict and the relationship between Ireland and England. Content analysis of both news and opinion stories printed in a four-month period before and after the withdrawal reveal significant differences in coverage.

Pandemic as a Global and Local Health Emergency?: H1N1 News Frames and Its Determinants • Hyejoon Rim, University of Florida; Jinhong Ha, University of Florida • This study examined the message frames and information sources used in H1N1 news coverage between April 1, 2009 and February 28, 2010. Quantitative content analysis of 940 newspaper articles was conducted to examine how message frames and information sources appear differently in H1N1 news media coverage in cross-cultural (i.e., United States and South Korea) and cross-medium contexts (i.e. liberal, conservative and business newspaper). The results show that severity and human interest were the two most prominent frames, and government and health authority sources were most frequently used in the pandemic coverage. We found a positive relationship between frames and sources, which suggests journalists routinely approach certain sources depending on the story frame. U.S. newspapers were more likely to present an attribution of responsibility frame than Korea newspapers, whereas Korea newspapers were more likely to present an action frame. The prominence of frames varied with news institutions. Liberal newspapers were more likely to present the attribution of responsibility frame than conservative newspapers and economic newspapers, while economic newspapers presented the economic consequences frame more frequently than others. Implications of the study are discussed in terms of determinants of news values and their influences on news frames.

Social Media and Social Movements: Facebook and an Online Guatemalan Justice Movement that Moved Offline • Summer Harlow, University of Texas-Austin • In 2009, the Guatemalan president was accused of murder, prompting the creation of Facebook pages calling for his resignation. Using interviews and a content analysis of Facebook comments, this study found that the social network site was used to mobilize an online movement that moved offline. Users’ protest-related and motivational comments, in addition to their use of links and other interactive elements of Facebook, helped organize massive protests demanding justice and an end to violence.

A Political Boss and the Press: The Impact on Democracy of Two Brazilian Newspapers • Summer Harlow, University of Texas-Austin • When Brazil’s president was implicated in a bribery scandal in 2005, Antônio Carlos Magalhães, a long-time senator in Brazil’s Northeast state of Bahia, emerged as one of the president’s most vocal critics. A content analysis of scandal coverage in two Bahia newspapers – one of which Magalhães owned – showed that Magalhães’ newspaper succumbed to owner influence, excluding citizens’ voices as it covered the senator more extensively and favorably than did the competing newspaper.

Thailand’s Internet Policies: The Search for a Balance between National Security and Rights to Information • Chalisa Magpanthong, Ohio University • This research reviews communication policy and its application to Thailand’s management of Internet resources—a contentious battle between national security ideology and a rationale for communication freedoms in the public interest. It investigates the movement of government policy toward increasing control over the public’s use of Internet resources by means of the Computer Crime Act and lese majeste laws, and this research examines public reaction to the government’s unbalanced policies.

Intellectual Games: International Intellectual Property Rights and the Middle Eastern Video Game Industry • Adrienne Shaw, University of Pennsylvania • This paper analyzes the rhetoric rather than the policy of international Intellectual Property Rights (IPRs) as they relate to the Middle Eastern video game industry. It draws on textual analysis, economics literature, and a small number of interviews with gamers and game designers from the region. Monroe Price’s Market for Loyalties framework is used to analyze how a dominant discourse in which IPR protections are viewed as a universal good has limited discussions of this nascent industry.

Framing Barack Obama’s first visit to Africa as president: A comparative analysis of African and non-African news coverage • Etse Sikanku, University of Iowa • This study examined how African (The Daily Graphic, The Daily Nation, AllAfrica.com) and non-African news media (The Times, The New York Times, Associated Press) covered Barack Obama’s first visit to sub-Saharan Africa (Ghana). A content analysis of 163 stories found five major themes embedded in media reportage of America’s first black president’s visit to the continent of his father. This includes: globalization, democracy, responsibility, historical and soft news narratives. Even though coverage was neutral across board, the African newspapers concentrated more on the historical and soft news frames while non-African newspapers reported heavily on the democracy and responsibility frame.

The Daily Dance: Agenda-setting, framing, and communication for development at daily State Department briefings • Ed Simpson, Ohio University • In February 2009, the Pew Center’s Project on Journalism Excellence released a special report on U.S. foreign press coverage, noting that while the foreign press corps increased dramatically in the last forty years (from 160 to more than 1,490), the coverage merely has been broadened rather than offering increased diversity or depth. In other words, more outlets are carrying essentially the same stories. This study, guided by framing and agenda-setting theory within a context of communication for development, sought to help explain this phenomenon by examining 242 exchanges during a constructed week sampling of daily U.S. State Department briefings. As suggested by framing and agenda-setting theory, this study found that the State Department tended to reinforce U.S. policies regardless of questions asked; that questions tended to come from a U.S. perspective, and that the U.S. development agenda was a minor part of the discourse. The results of this study suggest that the agendas of neither the State Department nor the mainstream press corps have changed significantly from previous research, despite a shift in stated policy and rhetoric. In addition, the results suggest a need for a deeper examination of how the foreign press is incorporated into the flow of information from the State Department.

More Troops, More War: A Framing Analysis of International News Coverage of the Troop Surge in Afghanistan • James Ian Tennant, University of Texas at Austin • This content analysis examines coverage of the process leading up to President Barack Obama’s decision to send 30,000 U.S. troops to Afghanistan. The focus is on sources used by The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, The Guardian and the Al-Jazeera English website, and the presence of two kinds of frames. The analysis showed that the four media outlets relied heavily on official sources while coverage reflected a similar use of frames.

Beyond soap opera for social change: An analysis of Kenya’s The Team Melissa Tully, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Brian Ekdale, University of Wisconsin-Madison • We explore how the TV series The Team, Kenya, adapts the entertainment-education model to include morally ambiguous characters and more participation through social networking and mobile screenings. We analyze how The Team uses the metaphor of sport, while online discussions take the metaphor to its more literal meaning about national unity. This research is based on qualitative methods including interviews, textual analysis of the series, and review of internal documents and the show’s Facebook accounts.

Modernity and Tradition:Technology in Chinese Television Commercials • Ying Xi, School of Journalism and Communication, Tsinghua University, China • This article explored China’s mediation between tradition and modernity in the television commercials about technology. A double-level framework was developed on the basis of literature review and was empirically tested by analyzing Chinese television commercials about technology-intensity products on two levels: cultural value themes and the way in which cultural themes are presented. The results indicated coexistence of two levels in a single commercial, and found that general cultural patterns (i.e., cultural value themes expressed in commercials) can be changed and adapted into modernization process while specific cultural patterns (i.e., the way of themes presentation) can remain constant. The study also explained the relations between two levels that specific cultural patterns serve as an ideological goal or as a legitimating principle for people’s present actions while general cultural patterns serve as criteria or as guidance to direct people’s specific actions in their daily life. In addition, the level of modernity was identified as an important factor to influence cultural expression across different product origins.

Sensationalism in News: NBC’s Coverage of The U.S. Presidents’ Visits to China, 1989-2009 • Boya Xu, West Virginia University • This study analyzes NBC’s coverage of the U.S. President’s visits to China from 1989 through 2009, and investigates the evolving characteristics of media framing over time while exploring the impact of sensationalism on the actual content of media reporting. By examining the reporting techniques, types of layperson speaking, and tone in news reporting in different time periods, using quantitative content analysis, it is concluded that the amount of sensationalist features applied in news making continues to rise over the years, while the media interpretation of international communication is applied within the context of foreign policies and bilateral relations.

<< 2010 Abstracts

Press Freedoms in the American Colonies, 1755-1765: The Public and the Printers Gigi Alford, University of Alabama • During the decade leading up to the Stamp Act of 1765, printers in the American Colonies faced a growing demand for press freedoms. The right to a free press, colonists believed, belonged to the people rather than the printers. In fact, the people often pushed the printers toward greater liberties, creating a dynamic negotiation of the limitations of press freedoms. This discourse, however, was cut short by the revolt against England.

Negotiating the Transition from True Woman to New Woman in the Lydia Pinkham Animated Ads of 1890 • Elizabeth Burt, University of Hartford • Negotiating the Transition from ‘True Woman’ to ‘New Woman’ in the Lydia Pinkham Animated Ads of 1890 This paper analyzes five illustrated advertisements designed by the Lydia E. Pinkham Medicine Company in 1890. These animated ads all make statements about woman’s place in late Victorian society, a time when the traditional True Woman was being challenged by the emerging paradigm of the New Woman. These advertisements reveal aspects of both models and suggest to the modern reader how women in 1890 reading these ads could negotiate the transition between the two.

Considering Contempt by Publication, 1800-1830 • Butler Cain, West Texas A&M University • Contempt by publication was one of the earliest methods the American judicial branch used to control media coverage of state and federal court systems. Editors, publishers, and reporters could be fined and jailed if their publications raised the ire of a judge. During this period, American courts began considering under what circumstances this authority should be used to protect the integrity of the judicial process. Meanwhile, free press advocates began arguing against the power.

‘Severe in invective’: Franc Wilkie, Wilbur Storey, and the improbable ‘send rumors’ quotation W. Joseph Campbell, American University • This paper scrutinizes the evidentiary record behind the famous anecdote about Wilbur F. Storey’s instructing a Civil War correspondent to send rumors if no news was to be found. The paper offers a compelling case that the anecdote about Storey, the editor of the Chicago Times, is quite likely apocryphal. Reasons for doubting whether Storey ever sent such instructions are many, and are discussed in detail. Among the reasons is that the anecdote is thinly documented and uncorroborated, except for a passage in a memoir by Franc B. Wilkie that was published in 1891, twenty-seven years after the instructions would have been sent. The paper draws on a variety of primary and secondary sources, including the literature of false memories and the work of psychologists who have described the difficulties in recovering long-ago memories with any precision.

Late to the Game: William Randolph Hearst, the New York Journal, and the Modern Sports Section John Carvalho, Auburn University • William Randolph Hearst has been credited with creating the modern sports section in the New York Journal soon after he purchased it in 1895. Several of Hearst’s biographers, however, do not mention this strategy. Is it reflected in the earliest editions of the New York Journal? This article looks at the sports page for the first two months of the Journal to find evidence of the assumed emphasis on developments to the sports section: an increase in pages devoted to sports, bylined articles by popular athletes and writers, banner section flags, extended coverage of high-profile sports events, and use of illustrations. Most developments credited to Hearst were not, in fact, frequently used.

Friends of the Bureau: Personal correspondence, and the cultivation of journalist-adjuncts by Hoover’s FBI • Matthew Cecil, South Dakota State University • Beginning in the mid-1930s with Director J. Edgar Hoover’s initial steps into the public consciousness, the FBI developed an expansive public relations division that maintained advantageous relationships with dozens of reporters, broadcasters and editors. Through mountains of personal letters produced by his staff, Hoover fostered the illusion of interpersonal relationships with journalists like The American Magazine’s Courtney Ryley Cooper, Fulton Oursler of Reader’s Digest, and Jack Carley of the Memphis Commercial Appeal. In return for Hoover’s favor, these friends of the Bureau became reliable supporters, passionate defenders, and even quasi-agents of the FBI.

All Things Are As They Were Then: Radio’s You Are There • Matthew Ehrlich, University of Illinois • This paper analyzes the 1940s radio series You Are There, originally titled CBS Is There. The series expressed the optimistic liberalism of its producer-director at the same time it reproduced consensual, patriotic interpretations of America’s past. Its creative blend of fact and fiction challenged conventional definitions of journalism and documentary while momentous changes were sweeping American broadcasting, underscoring the power and authority of radio news even as television was eclipsing radio as a national medium.

Cold War Culture, Broadcast News Documentaries and the Approach of War in Vietnam • James Ettema, Northwestern University • Broadcast documentaries are the medium’s most coherent attempt to make sense of the run-up to war in Vietnam. Sounding such themes as France’s fiasco and America’s exceptionalism they capture both hopes and fears of the cultural moment. As journalism they are not naïve but they are more fretful than probing, more anxious than prescient thus highlighting the role of history and culture in imposing limits on journalism in the performance of its duty to democracy.

A Light out of This World: Awe, Anxiety, and Routinization in Early Nuclear Test Coverage, 1951-1953 • Glen Feighery, University of Utah • Above-ground nuclear testing in the early 1950s commanded attention in the news. This study contributes to understanding atomic test coverage as an environmental issue. It examines how national, state, and local newspapers described the blasts, addressed the issue of fallout, and reacted on their editorial pages. Although some scholars have portrayed certain news organizations as propagandistically uncritical of nuclear testing, this study suggests another explanation: that news routines influenced coverage more than disregard for public safety.

The president’s private life: A new explanation for ‘the right to privacy’ • PATRICIA FERRIER, AUSTIN PEAY STATE UNIVERSITY • On December 15, 1890, in the Harvard Law Review, Samuel D. Warren and Louis D. Brandeis criticized the press for overstepping in every direction the obvious bounds of propriety and of decency. Many scholars who have written about the first, major step in recognizing personal privacy say the article was a reaction to press reports of Warren’s social life. Perhaps scholars have not looked in the correct places for the explanation of why Warren and Brandeis called for common-law protection of personal privacy. The weekly press in Boston and the daily press in New York provide evidence that a seemingly tenuous link with a former president of the United States may be the key to explaining the genesis of the Warren/Brandeis article.

United States v. Shriver and the Rise of the Public Policy Rationale for the Journalist’s Privilege: 1894-1897 • Patrick File, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities • This paper explores the historical context surrounding U.S. v. Shriver, a journalist’s privilege case in the 1890s. Employing an examination of the case record as well as the professional discourse surrounding it, I argue that U.S. v. Shriver arose at an historical moment that, for the first time, allowed the newspaper industry to employ discursive themes that highlighted the modern newspaper’s value as a public service and justified adoption of a journalist’s privilege as good public policy.

The Communications Circuit of John Hersey’s Hiroshima • Kathy Forde, University of South Carolina • In August of 1946, one year after the U.S. bombing of Hiroshima and the end of World War II, the New Yorker published John Hersey’s Hiroshima, an account of what happened in the Japanese city from the moment the atomic bomb dropped through the following year, told through the perspectives of six civilians who survived. In this publication and reading history of John Hersey’s Hiroshima, I adopt book historian Robert Darnton’s well-known conceptual model of the communications circuit—the life cycle of a printed book that includes the roles of author, publisher, bookseller, reader, and, in the case of John Hersey’s Hiroshima, other media institutions, such as book clubs, newspapers, magazines, and radio. I attend not only to the institutions and production processes of journalism, which are the usual preoccupations of journalism history, but also to book history’s emphasis on the content of journalism and the uses readers made of this content in a given historical moment.

An Incitement to Riot: Television’s role in the civil disorders in the summer of ’67 • Thomas Hrach, University of Memphis • In the summer of 1967 America’s cities exploded in violence with riots in poor, black neighborhoods. Many people, including members of Congress, blamed televised news coverage of rioting for spreading violence around the nation. It was that issue that sent the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, better known as the Kerner Commission, to investigate whether the mass media played a role in causing the riots. When the Kerner Commission issued its report on March 1, 1968, television was exonerated. The report said there was no direct connection between television and the rioting. Television’s critics had been defused, and Congress took no action against television executives. Yet there was data that was never revealed as part of the report that could have been used to come to a different conclusion. The commission hired a research firm named Simulmatics to produce a content analysis of news media coverage of the riots. Data from the analysis, which is now available in the National Archives, was mentioned only briefly in the report. A full examination of that data lends credence to the criticism that there was a connection between television and the riots. This paper examines how the data fits into criticism of television violence in the 1960s and concludes that there was a more direct connection than the commission reported.

Building an American story: How early American historians used press sources to remember the Revolution • Janice Hume, University of Georgia • This study examines histories of the American Revolution published before 1899 to see how they used newspapers and magazines as sources. It seeks to determine how the press helped build America’s first real story as an independent nation, distinct from native and colonial origins. These histories did use press sources in myriad ways, and their permanence helped assure that these iconic narratives endured. Findings add to our understanding of the press and American collective memory.

Alchemy and Finesse: Transforming Corporate Political Media Spending into Freedom of Speech, 1977-78 • Robert Kerr, University of Oklahoma • This paper documents the late seventies behind-the-scenes battle that forged a five-justice majority for a narrow Supreme Court holding that first brought corporate political media spending within the protections of the First Amendment. It shows that justices on the Court then recognized the holding as a greater alteration of established law than another five-justice majority would maintain in 2010 when it expanded the influence of corporate money on democratic processes far beyond that seventies precedent.

Often Caregivers?  Sometimes Wild Women? An Archetypal Study of Sea Captains’ Wives in the New York Times, 1851-1900 • Paulette D. Kilmer, University of Toledo • Although conventional wisdom tells us that women were considered bad luck if they appeared anywhere onboard ships other than in the wooden figure carved out of the bow, examination of 500 articles in the New York Times and 100 in the New York Tribune indicates women went to sea with their husbands, brothers, fathers, uncles, and cousins. Moreover, at least from the early 1850s, captains hired stewardesses whose duties might include housekeeping, bookkeeping, medical care, and kitchen supervision to reduce scurvy. The news items reflect Carol S. Pearson’s Caregiver archetype, C.G. Jung’s Mother archetype, and Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ Wild Woman archetype.

Science in Advertising: The Role of Research for Richardson-Vicks during the Scientific Advertising Movement • Yeuseung Kim, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill • This study examines how advertisers and advertising agencies conducted and incorporated research in their work during the time when scientific advertising started to receive attention. Drawing largely on the Richardson-Vicks, Inc. archival materials, this study aims to add to the history of advertising by exploring how over-the-counter (OTC) medication was marketed and specifically, how research was used to support, create, and evaluate Vicks’ marketing and advertising efforts.

Jessica Mitford’s Experiments Behind Bars and the Moral Craft of Investigative Journalism • Amy Snow Landa, University of Minnesota • This paper examines the moral craft and public impact of Jessica Mitford’s 1973 exposé titled Experiments Behind Bars: Doctors, Drug Companies, and Prisoners, which was first published as an article in Atlantic Monthly and later as a chapter in Mitford’s book Kind and Usual Punishment: The Prison Business.

Frontier Fears: The Clash of Indians and Whites in the Newspapers of Mankato, Minnesota, 1863-1865 • Charles Lewis, Minnesota State University,Mankato • This research explores how two Minnesota frontier newspapers contributed to a climate of fear and hatred through their coverage of Indian-related events in the state during the three years following the horrific 1862 Dakota War. Such news did not create the conditions of brutality that persisted in Minnesota after the conflict, but the reporting helped perpetuate a white perspective of cruelty and callousness as well as promote notions of manifest destiny.

Piloting Entertainment News: Entertainment Tonight and its Lasting Impact on Television News Programs • Sara Magee, West Virginia University • For more than 25 years Entertainment Tonight has reflected the debate over news and entertainment. Decisions made early on by its creators are forerunners to how television news and entertainment programs are produced today. This paper takes a historical look at the little known period during 1981 when ET was created. Through personal interviews it showcases the struggles faced in bringing this program to life and its impact on media for generations to come.

Legacy of the Covenant: Media, Riots, and Racialized Space in Chicago, April 1968 Meagan Manning, University of Minnesota-Twin Cities • By fusing the notion of racialized space, Chicago’s storied spatial history, and the content of the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Defender through the month following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., I argue that the content of each paper assumes new meaning for the study of race in American history and illustrates a historical moment when the struggles of America’s marginalized populations were thrust to the forefront of American society writ large.

Creating a Photographic Record of the First World War: Real History and Recuperative Memory in Stereography • Andrew Mendelson, Temple University; Carolyn Kitch, Temple University • While largely forgotten today, stereograph photography was a 19th-century mass medium that survived well into the 20th century. These photographs produced three-dimensional images for viewers. The purpose of this paper is to examine the visual and verbal discourses of one set of stereographs – the Keystone View Company’s 1923 300-card history of the World War I. Since Americans saw few battle images during WWI, this set had a special opportunity to tell a definitive historical story of the war after its close. The Keystone stereograph set, a work of popular history for a lay audience, provided reassuring memory in keepsake form. As such, it is a predecessor to better-known (and more often studied) commemorative media of the later 20th century.

A Half Crazy Fellow: Newspapers and the Insanity Plea of the Assassin Charles Guiteau • Justin Murphy, Syracuse University • Charles Guiteau assassinated President James Garfield on July 3, 1881. At his murder trial, he unsuccessfully pleaded insanity. This paper examines media coverage of Guiteau’s case, and his insanity defense in particular. It is illustrated that the media coverage of this trial reflected popular frustration with the insanity defense in the late 19th century. Even before Guiteau’s trial, Americans had been angered by acquittals based on the insanity dodge. This paper further shows that newspapers took advantage of a major schism in the medical community, seizing upon the uncertainty generated by conflicting ‘expert’ testimonies to advocate for a politically popular outcome.

The Shibboleth of ‘Freedom of the Press’: The 1940s Newspaper Crisis, Media Criticism, and the Move Toward Regulating the Press • Victor Pickard, New york University • Given the current problems facing journalism, there is reason to pay close attention to previous eras when news industries faced structural crises. These crises often precipitated normative discussions about the role of the press in a democratic society, and the function of government to regulate that role. The following discussion draws on archival materials and press accounts to recover a moment in the 1940s marked by pronounced dissatisfaction towards the press—a moment when structural reform of major media institutions was seriously considered, but ultimately defeated.

Narratives of progress in times of faith and optimism in industrial development: Press coverage of Operation Bootstrap in Puerto Rico (1947-1963) • Ilia Rodriguez, University of New Mexico • This research builds upon the definition of development as an ideological field to examine the historical role of the Puerto Rican elite press during the period of industrial development known as Operation Bootstrap (1947-1963). It centers on the how the press became a site where universalist notions of progress and modernity met locally grounded interpretations to produce particular understandings at a time of profound historical change. The investigation is based on the assumption that while actively promoted by the discursive practices of U.S. government agencies and other international policy-making institutions, the central premises of a global ideology of development disseminated during the Cold War were reinterpreted or resignified in the local press to legitimize particular visions of progress as well as particular political agendas and class interests.

Herodotus As An Ancient Journalist: Reimagining Antiquity’s Historians as Journalists Joe Saltzman, USC Annenberg • The ancient historian is accused of not worrying much about what was true or false, making up quotes, frequently relying on legend rather than fact, often accepting idle rumor, malicious gossip and hearsay as fact. That sounds more like a tabloid journalist than a historian. In this paper, we reimagine Herodotus as the father of journalism rather than Cicero’s appellation, the father of history, as we examine how he reported, researched, and wrote his Histories.

The Role of the Business Press in the Commercial Life of Cincinnati, 1831-1912 • Brad Scharlott, Northern Kentucky University • In the 1830s two different price currents, which reported market-related news, appeared in Cincinnati but soon failed. In 1844, after the city’s economy had matured, the Cincinnati Price Current began and thrived. In 1846, its publisher concurrently became superintendent of the new Cincinnati Merchants’ Exchange, and for decades the current and exchange reinforced each other – and as they prospered, the city benefited. However, technological and market changes ultimately led to the decline of both.

As if the Sixties never happened: A singing cop, Baltimore’s last minstrel show, and the white media narratives • Stacy Spaulding, Towson University • This paper explores a 1982 episode of blackface minstrelsy by a white performer—a Baltimore cop who fought and won a First Amendment battle with the police department over his right to perform in blackface—to decode the surrounding media narratives in a white working class neighborhood on Baltimore’s east side. This paper uses historical methodology, rhetorical analysis and a whiteness studies framework to understand minstrelsy and the media as a site of racial and cultural negotiation.

Freedom’s Vanguard:  Horace Greeley’s thoughts about press freedom and ethics in the Penny Press era • Daxton Stewart, Texas Christian University • Horace Greeley, founder of The New-Yorker and The New York Tribune, became one of the most important American journalists during the Penny Press revolution. This historical study examines Greeley’s writings about freedom of the press and journalism ethics in pre-Civil War era, focusing on four main themes: legal restrictions such as libel, threats of mob violence against the press, the role of neutrality, and moral duties of the press to the public.

Politics as Patriotism: Advertising, Activists and the Press during World War II • Inger Stole, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign • This paper traces the battle over advertising regulation in the early 1940s. It outlines the activist critique of WWII advertising and explores the advertising industry’s creation of the Advertising Council as public relations tool. It discusses the crucial role that commercial news media played in shaping journalism to promote their commercial interests at the expense of the public interest and explores how the outcome helped shape postwar discussions about the role of advertising.

A Celebrated Illustrator and the Man Behind the Man: J. C. Leyendecker and Charles Beach Rodger Streitmatter, American University This paper focuses on J. C. Leyendecker, the most successful American magazine illustrator during the early 1900s. Hundreds of his hand-painted images appeared on the covers of such leading magazines as the Saturday Evening Post and Vanity Fair. Adding to Leyendecker’s fame were the high-profile advertisements he created for a long list of companies. The manuscript breaks new ground by illuminating the role that Leyendecker’s same-sex partner Charles Beach played in the illustrator’s career.

Reporters and Willing Propagandists: AEF Correspondents Define Their Roles • Michael Sweeney, Ohio University The early twentieth century witnessed greater journalistic emphasis on professionalism and allegiance to audience. At the same time, war reporting was evolving from open-access, patriotic coverage to greater military control. This study draws on documents in the National Archives to examine how accredited American reporters on the Western Front in World War I defined their roles. It found reporters seeking partnerships with the AEF to shape what they acknowledged as propagandistic, pro-American news stories.

Courage and Composure: The framing of the 1916 Easter Rising rebels as heroes in The Irish Times Carrie Teresa, Temple University • This study examines The Irish Times newspaper’s coverage of the rebel leaders of the 1916 Easter Rising by utilizing 26 articles published in the newspaper from the beginning of the Rising to the establishment of the Dail Eireann. This study argues that coverage of the Rising framed the rebels as national heroes, despite the political agenda and ownership influence of the newspaper itself, which questions traditional beliefs about ownership influence during political and social unrest.

Managing China’s Image Abroad: Justification and Institutionalization of International Propaganda in Republican China • Yong Volz, University of Missouri School of Journalism • China’s international propaganda was born in the aftermath of the anti-imperialist May Fourth Movement of 1919, and fed by an acute awareness of China’s weak position in the world. This study focuses on how Western-trained Chinese intellectuals justified international propaganda within the grand narratives of national crisis, world peace and truth. Their discourses provided legitimacy and means for the Guomindang government to institute a propaganda system to garner international support during its anti-Japanese war.

Explaining the Origins of the Advertising Agency • Tim Vos, University of Missouri School of Journalism • This study reopens the investigation into the origins of the advertising agency. By approaching the inquiry from the perspective of sociological institutionalism, new sites of historical exploration are identified. Volney B. Palmer began the first agency in Philadelphia in 1842, but little is known about the events that precipitated the agency. The study concludes that Palmer’s work in the canal business played a direct role in launching his ad business.

In the Name of the South: Fear-Based Rhetoric, the Southern Media and Massive Resistance David Wallace, University of Colorado at Boulder • During the civil rights movement, Southern editors and journalists capitalized on the values, beliefs, and fears of the South, serving as a propagandistic asset in the successful call for massive resistance. This paper argues that fear-based rhetoric in the Southern press was used to foster and establish an insider-outsider mentality, encouraging both vigilant protection of the Southern way of life as well as suspicion and hostility toward all those who were believed to challenge it.

We have no newspapers -dull, dull!  American Civil War Media Dependency • Betty Winfield, University of Missouri; Chad Painter, University of MIssouri School of Journalism • This historical study of Civil War media dependency examines soldiers’ letter references to newspapers and magazines. Through a textual analysis, we sought repeated patterns of media dependency. While we found evidence of DeFleur and Rokeach’s three major dependency themes of understanding, orientation and entertainment, we also found new media dependencies: validation of experiences, proxy correspondence, personal journalistic acknowledgements, checking mechanisms for accuracy, newspapers as exchange barters, and emotional longings for home. These findings should be useful for future media dependency studies, especially during war when there is a need to reduce ambiguity and have some semblance of normalcy.

When the Computer Became Personal: Print Ads for Early Home Computers • Bartosz Wojdynski, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill • Contemporary research in the psychology of communication technology suggests that many users form parasocial relationships with computers and other devices. Might this phenomenon be rooted in how computers were marketed to a mass audience? This study analyzes magazine advertisements for IBM and Apple home computers from 1981-1984 and analyzes techniques used to make computers seem similar to humans, similar to existing technologies, and necessary for success in modern life.

The Failed Attempts to Merge the Scripps and Hearst Wire Services During World War I • Dale Zacher, University of Arkansas at Little Rock • This historical study uses original manuscript materials to trace discussions the Scripps-owned United Press had with William Randolph Hearst’s International News Service about a possible merger during World War I. This study breaks new ground in showing that the two for-profit wire services, had trouble competing during the war period. The study argues the merger ultimately did not take place, primarily because of Hearst’s concerns he was surrendering too much control to the United Press.

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