Media Ethics 2016 Abstracts
Carol Burnett Award
Framing Ferguson: Duty-Based Ethical Discourse in the Editorial Pages of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch • Christina DeWalt, The University of Oklahoma • This paper utilizes in-depth textual analysis to examine the editorial content published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch after the shooting of Michael Brown and throughout the subsequent civil unrest in Ferguson, Missouri. The moral philosophy of W.D. Ross’ and his conceptualization of prima facie duties is employed as an ethical framework in this study.
Information policy as a force at the gate • Matt Bird-Meyer, University of Missouri • This case study serves as an exploratory piece utilizing an interdisciplinary perspective in applying theories from journalism and library and information science to understand the nature of information policies at online-only, nonprofit newsrooms. By using information policy as a guide to evaluating the newsgathering process, the goal of this paper is to build insight into the gatekeeping forces these reporters encounter.
Open Competition
Bias against bias: How Fox News covered Pope Francis’ climate change stance • Edson Tandoc, Nanyang Technological University; Bruno Takahashi; Ryan Thomas, University of Missouri-Columbia • When Pope Francis, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church, released his encyclical on climate change in June 2015, the Fox News Channel faced a dilemma. Fox News, the most watched cable news network in the United States, has a positive bias for the Pope. But the network is also known for its bias against man-made climate change. Guided by articulation and cognitive dissonance theories, this study analyzed how Fox News covered Pope Francis’ stance on climate change. The analysis found a clear ambivalence in Fox News’ coverage and identified four discursive strategies that the network news used to navigate discursive dissonance.
Moral Exemplars in Advertising: A Rhetorical Criticism of WPP Websites • Erin Schauster, University of Colorado Boulder; Tara Walker; Margaret Duffy, Missouri School of Journalism • To encourage a sustainable, ethical marketing communications (marcom) industry, ethical exemplars are needed. Wire and Plastic Products (WPP) is a British multinational advertising and public relations company, which holds approximately 350 marcom companies worldwide. WPP’s website states that all WPP companies behave under the “values of honesty, integrity and respect for people.” This rhetorical analysis examines the extent to which these codes and the rhetoric on subsidiaries’ websites call upon Kantian ethics and standards for moral reasoning and whether they should be seen as moral exemplars for the industry.
Analyzing the Intersection of Transparency, Issues Management and Ethics: The Case of Big Soda • Kati Berg; Sarah Feldner • As stakeholders demand more transparency from corporations, corporations must continually engage in practices of issues management and legitimacy building. In an increasingly saturated and technology-driven communication environment, issues management has never been as salient for public relations practitioners and communication managers. Coombs and Holladay highlight the reality that what might be considered good public relations practices relative to organizational aims, might not be considered to be good ethical practice. This tension is one that public relations scholars and practitioners must examine. This paper analyzes Coca-Cola’s reaction to public criticism of its products and their connection to obesity rates and type 2 diabetes. This case is illustrative because it brings to light a particular framework for understanding corporate issue management within an ethical frame. The public commentary and media critique made it clear that the tactics of Coca-Cola were not fitting with broader social expectations. We argue here that the problem with Coca-Cola’s public relations efforts were not simply because the public did not approve nor should the problem be understood as an inherent lack of ethicality in issues management and legitimacy building efforts. The root of the problem comes to light when this is considered in the way in the approach to issues management and legitimacy building.
Nazila Fathi’s 2009 Expulsion from Iran: The Ethical Implications of Partnering with “Local” Journalists in Foreign Correspondence • Lindsay Palmer • This article examines the ethical complexity of the partnership between mainstream, Anglophone news organizations and the “local” or “native’ journalists who help them cover politically precarious stories. I take Iranian-Canadian journalist Nazila Fathi’s 2009 persecution in Iran as a case study. Drawing upon an interview with Fathi, as well as 42 other qualitative, semi-structured interviews with locally-based journalists who work with Anglophone news outlets, I address two ethical issues: 1) the safety of the locally-based journalists, who are often targeted by their own governments for working with westerners, and 2) the ways in which western news outlets problematically represent or ignore the challenges faced by their locally-based employees.
Dueling Ethics Scandals: Rolling Stone, Brian Williams, and a Damaged Paradigm. • Raymond McCaffrey • This study examined how journalists defended their profession in the face of simultaneous ethics scandals involving Rolling Stone magazine and NBC news anchor Brian Williams. An analysis of more than 2000 stories for both cases revealed that in response to Rolling Stone’s disputed rape story, journalists responded in a manner consistent with traditional paradigm repair, but failed to develop a discursive strategy to contextualize Williams’ false statements about being on helicopter that crashed in Iraq.
The Royal Family, The British Press, and a Hoax: Evaluating Journalistic and Public Responses • Teri Finneman, South Dakota State University; Ryan Thomas, University of Missouri-Columbia • This study contributes to an ongoing discussion regarding the relationship between the British press and the royal family of that country, specifically pertaining to issues of privacy. We examine opinion columns and letters to the editor in response to a hoaxing incident perpetrated by Australian deejays that was attributed as a factor in the death of a nurse at the hospital where Kate Middleton was receiving care. We found that while some journalists condemned the hoax in strong terms, attacking the deejays and the station for their conduct, others used consequentialist reasoning to suggest the hoax was an innocent “prank” that went wrong. Some moved beyond the immediate case to consider broader cultural factors that led to the hoax, including the demand for stories about the royal family. We found that readers were deeply critical of the hoax, expressing sympathy for Middleton. Some letter writers broadened the scope of their commentary beyond the immediate hoax to scrutiny of “media” personnel writ large. It is noteworthy that members of the public were apt to blame the media, while members of the press were apt to blame the public, or the culture at large, for lapses in ethical behavior. Our findings indicate tentative evidence of ongoing consideration of ethical boundaries as they pertain to royal privacy issues.
On the Unfortunate Divide Between Media Ethics and Media Law • Theodore L. Glasser, Stanford University; Morgan Weiland, Stanford University • A conceptual merger between media ethics and media law creates opportunities for intellectually and pedagogically richer accounts of media norms than either area of study can achieve on its own. Bridging the divide between media ethics and media law— understanding ethics and law as functionally complementary domains of inquiry — improves the prospects for developing an overarching normative framework that cultivates the principles that clarify the rights and responsibilities of an independent and democratic press.
Mass Communication and Society 2016 Abstracts
Moeller Student Competition
Influencing the Twitterverse: Agenda setting capabilities of religious leaders • Jordan Morehouse, University of Houston/MA Graduate • This study examined the content published by two international religious leaders on the social networking site, Twitter. A content analysis was performed to describe the content published by the two international religious leaders. Agenda setting theory was used to guide this study. The findings suggest that the religious leaders publish content regarding “teachings or suggestions on how to live.” The findings contribute to literature regarding agenda setting, religion in the media, and social media.
Social Media for Socialization? The Mediation Role of Social Media on the Relationship between Sex and Traditional Gender Values • Keonyoung Park, University of Minnesota Twin Cities; Hyejin Kim, University of Minnesota – Twin Cities • By employing selective exposure theory, this study examined the mediation role of social media usage on the relationship between college students’ biological sex and willingness to accept traditional gender values. Findings showed the mediation effects by motivation to use and topic selection but not by time spent in social media. This study is expected to contribute to literature by providing comprehensive understanding of social media as a media reinforcer of socialization and traditional values.
Open Competition
Am I Depressed, or Is It the Showhole?: Mental Health, Affective Gratifications, and Binge-Watching • Alec Tefertiller, University of Oregon; Lindsey Conlin, The University of Southern Mississippi • Terms like “binge-watching” and the “showhole” suggest a relationship between binge-watching and emotional health. This study sought to understand the relationship between binge-watching and unhealthy emotional traits and regular emotional states such as sadness. The study did not find a conclusive connection between binge-watching and unhealthy emotional traits. However, the study did find emotional states experienced after binge-watching had implications for entertainment gratifications.
Propaganda Pros: The Islamic State in Iraq and Syria’s Crusade to a Caliphate • Alex Luchsinger, University of South Carolina; Robert Mckeever, University of South Carolina • ISIS has launched a robust media campaign to establish a caliphate throughout the world. They are recruiting around the world, largely because of the broad reach of the Internet. This research focused on ISIS propaganda used to persuade people to support the group. Survey data were collected (N=406) from the U.S. and the 13 other countries with large Muslim populations. Findings indicate that identification mediates the effect of exposure to propaganda on behavioral intention.
In Twitter We Trust? Testing the Credibility of News Content from Twitter Sources • Anne Oeldorf-Hirsch, University of Connecticut; Michael Schmierbach; Alyssa Appelman, Northern Kentucky University; Michael Boyle, West Chester University • Twitter has grown as a major news source, yet little is known about trust in the site for news content. This study employed an online experiment (N = 311) to test the effects of attributing the origin of a news story and quotations in news stories to Twitter on perceptions of credibility. Results suggest that strong visual cues of tweets used as quotations in stories have a negative effect, but otherwise effects are minimal.
Journalism and Democracy in Kyrgyzstan: Analysis of Victimizations in Kyrgyz Journalism • Bahtiyar Kurambayev • “In-depth qualitative semi-structured interviews with 27 journalists based in capital Bishkek city reveal that Kyrgyz journalists employ avoidance strategy because of potential victimization including lawsuits, physical attacks, arrests, etc. This study also explores what long term effect this victimization produces on journalists themselves and overall freedom of the press in Kyrgyzstan, the country which is viewed as the most democratic in former Soviet Union Central Asian region. The author employed a snowball sampling to locate initial several research participants and seek their suggestions of other journalists. The interviews were held during the period of January 4-January 23, 2016. They were held primarily in Russian language. The practical implications are also discussed.”
See, Click, Control: Predicting the Popularity of Civic Technology for Social Control • Brendan Watson • Many local news media no longer fulfill their surveillance and feedback control functions. Thus, cities rely on emerging media to maintain social order. This study found that large, pluralistic cities with higher levels of community stress had higher usage levels of the mobile app, SeeClickFix, which allows residents to snap and send photos of community problems to local governments. Implications for structural pluralism theory and research on social functions of emerging civic technologies are discussed.
“Liking” and being “liked”: How personality traits affect people’s giving and receiving “likes” on Facebook? • cheng hong, University of Miami; Zifei (Fay) Chen, University of Miami; Cong Li, University of Miami • Using the theoretical framework of gift giving and impression management, this study examined an important social media communication phenomenon—giving and receiving “likes.” Through a survey with 421 Facebook users, four groups of individuals were identified based on their reported frequencies of giving and receiving “likes” on Facebook: “like” enthusiasts, unrequited “likers,” “like”-throbs, and “like” abstainers. The study results revealed that these four groups of Facebook users significantly differed in their personality traits and age.
“Dog-Involved Bitings?” Construction of Culpability in News Stories About “Officer-Involved Shootings” • Chris Etheridge, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Rhonda Gibson • The #BlackLivesMatter social movement has drawn renewed attention to a discussion of police use of force throughout the United States. Historically police and media outlets that cover these incidents have tended to individualize situations where police use force on a citizen. This qualitative content analysis attempts to demonstrate that calling these incidents by the controversial term “officer-involved shooting” gives journalists a common reference point for broader discussions about police use of force, race, and accountability.
Media Framing of the Confederate Flag Debate in South Carolina • Christopher Frear, University of South Carolina; Jane O’Boyle, University of South Carolina; Sei-Hill Kim • A quantitative content analysis of news stories in three South Carolina newspapers (N=417) examines the framing of the Confederate flag debate in the wake of the 2015 Charleston massacre. Findings from Charleston, Columbia, and Greenville newspapers reveal distinct regional differences in framing and that stories focused on the legislative process in removing the flag more than the flag’s symbolic meaning or the shootings.
Co-viewing as social facilitation of children’s cognitive processing of educational television content • Collin Berke, Texas Tech University; Travis Loof, Texas Tech University; Rebecca Densley; Eric Rasmussen, Texas Tech University; Justin Keene, Texas Tech University • Previous research has revealed that the mere presence of a parent watching television with a child can influence the child’s cognitive processing of and emotional reactions to that content. This study sought to extend these previous findings by investigating the role of co-viewing on the child’s cognitive processing, as evidenced by psychophysiological orienting responses, of three specific types of information commonly found in educational content: explicit plot, explicit educational, and implicit inference. An experiment was conducted that measured the heart rate of children while watching messages either with or without a parent present in the room. Two main predictions were made in this study. First, parent child co-viewing would lead to greater resource allocation to encoding the message—as indicated by cardiac deceleration. Second, information that required internal processing, such as explicit educational or implicit inferential content would lead to greater resources allocated to internal processing—as indicated by cardiac acceleration. The results of a multi-level model indicate that co-viewing does have an effect on the short term, phasic processing of novel information, and that the three types of information have different and dynamic effects on the overtime processing exhibited by the child. Implications for parental mediation strategies and educational television programming are given.
Amplified Gatekeeping: A Theoretical Proposal • Edson Tandoc, Nanyang Technological University • This essay reviews gatekeeping theory and proposes a rethinking of gatekeeping in this age when audiences, not just journalists, take part in the production and distribution of news. This paper argues that rather than pit one channel against the other, a more empirically grounded representation of the news construction process is one where both journalist and audience gatekeeping channels are considered. When bits of information pass through the journalist channel and then through the audience channel, they are able to reach more people. When bits of information pass through the audience channel and then through the journalist channel, they are conferred with more legitimacy. When bits of information pass through both journalist and audience channels before reaching the public, gatekeeping becomes amplified.
A message testing approach to news media literacy PSAs • Emily Vraga, George Mason University; Melissa Tully, University of Iowa • In an evolving news environment, our understanding of “news media literacy” (NML) must also evolve to equip individuals with the skills to critically engage with news. Using an experimental design, this study tests different NML messages to determine if certain messages appeal to some groups over others and if the effectiveness of the messages depends on the media context in which they are consumed. Findings suggest that context and audience characteristics influence NML message effectiveness.
Domestic violence and sports news: How gender affects people’s understanding • Erin Willis; Patrick Ferrucci, U of Colorado; Edson Tandoc, Nanyang Technological University; Chad Painter, Eastern New Mexico University • Domestic abuse has frequented recent headlines among professional athletes and ignited much debate about personal conduct off the field. This study examined if and how participants differentiate between male and female victims and perpetrators of violence; specifically, whether participants placed blame differently when presented a health message in a sports context when it involves a male or female athlete as perpetrator. Results and practical implications are discussed.
Online Discourse: Exploring Differences in Responses to Civil and Uncivil Disagreement in News Story Comments • GIna Masullo Chen, The University of Texas at Austin; Pei Cindy Zheng, The University of Texas at Austin • This experiment (N = 499) examined how uncivil and civil disagreement differ in their influence on emotions and intentions to participate politically. Results showed that exposure to uncivil disagreement lead to an increase in negative emotion and a decrease in positive emotions to a greater extent than exposure to civil disagreement or the control. In addition uncivil disagreement – but not civil disagreement – led to an indirect effect on intention to participate politically, operating through emotions.
Nasty Comments Anger You More Than Me, But Nice Ones Make Me As Happy As You • GIna Masullo Chen, The University of Texas at Austin; Yee Man Margaret Ng • Two experiments (N = 301; N = 567) showed people perceived online comments posted on news stories had a greater effect on the negative emotions of others, compared to the self, suggesting support for an emotional third-person perception (TPP). In addition, results showed agreement comments had an equal effect on the positive emotions of the self and others, suggesting an emotional first-person effect (FPE).
Extrovert and engaged? Exploring the connection between personality and involvement of stakeholders and the perceived relationship investment of nonprofit organizations • Giselle A. Auger, Rhode Island College; MoonHee Cho, University of Tennessee • This study explored the relationship between the big five personality traits – agreeableness, intellect, conscientiousness, emotion, and extroversion – and the involvement, engagement, and perceived relationship investment (PRI) of participants with nonprofit organizations. The role of personality is important because it reflects fundamental qualities that may influence an individual’s behavior. Results demonstrated significant correlation between each trait and involvement, passive engagement, and PRI. Four were also positively correlated to active engagement of participants.
The Effect of Pro- and Counter-Attitudinal Exposure on Cognitive Elaboration and Political Participation: Examining The Moderating Role of Emotions in Exposure to Political Satire • Hsuan-Ting Chen, Chinese University of Hong Kong • Results from an online experiment suggest that exposure to political satire can spur or thwart cognitive elaboration and political participation depending on whether the satirical content posits attitude-consistent or counter-attitudinal political views and how viewers respond emotionally to the message itself and the context of the message. Attitude-consistent exposure is more likely than counter-attitudinal exposure to prompt cognitive elaboration, which in turn encourages political participation. Anxiety about the issue can further enhance this relationship. Exposure to counter-attitudinal political satire, however, is a double-edged sword. It can either enhance or impede cognitive elaboration and participation depending on to what extent viewers feel amused by the political satire or are enthusiastic about the issue after exposure to the satire.
Verbal Aggression, Race and Sex on Reality TV: Is This Really the Way It Is? • Jack Glascock; Catherine Preston-Schreck • This study presents the results of a content analysis of verbal aggression in a composite week of popular reality TV programming on cable and broadcast television. Also examined were contextual variables including race and sex. Results show that reality programming contains a significant amount of verbal aggression that is often depicted as justified and without consequences. African Americans were found to be overrepresented and depicted as more verbally aggressive and more likely to be victims than other races/ethnicities. Other minorities, Asian Americans and Hispanics, were practically nonexistent. The results are discussed in terms of the potential effects of exposure to verbal aggression and the accompanying contextual factors found in reality TV programming.
Sharing or Showing Off? Reactions to Mapped Fitness Routines Posted on Social Media • Jared Brickman; Yujung Nam; Shuang Liu; QIAN YU, Washington State University; Zhaomeng Niu • Sharing fitness achievements on social media has become increasingly popular, including maps that show running routes. The purpose of this study was to investigate mass audience reactions to these types of posts. An online experiment with a 2 (map presence) x 2 (running speed) design was completed by 285 undergraduates. Posts with maps were evaluated using ANCOVA, finding people reacted more positively to maps with fast speeds or text-only posts with slow speeds.
How Young Uninsured Americans Respond to News Coverage of Obamacare: An Experimental Test of Emotional and Cognitive Predictors • Jason Martin, DePaul University; Jessica Myrick, Indiana University; Kimberly Walker, University of South Florida • This experiment integrated theory from multiple domains to examine how aspects of news coverage of Obamacare and audience members themselves interact to shape attitudes and intentions. Using a sample of uninsured young adults (N=1,056), we tested a model of the effects of frames, exemplars, political identity, and need for orientation on emotions, attitudes, and intentions. The findings point to the importance of individual differences and message factors in predicting emotions that mediate effects.
Examining the social media mourning model: How celebrities are mourned on Twitter • Jensen Moore, University of Oklahoma; Sara Magee, Loyola University Maryland; Jennifer Kowalewski, Georgia Southern University; Ellada Gamreklidze, Louisiana State University • We utilize the Social Media Mourning (SMM) model to content analyze celebrity death Twitter posts from 2011-2014. We examine which of the three communication types, variables within those types, and issues fans use the most when mourning deceased celebrities via social networking sites (SNS). Results indicate mourners engage primarily in One-Way and Two-Way Communication about celebrity deaths via Twitter. Immortality Communication and consequences of communicating about death via SNS were not abundant on this platform.
Acknowledging the silly alongside the severe: Mediated portrayals of mental illness as trivializing versus stigmatizing • Jessica Myrick, Indiana University; Rachelle Pavelko • Researchers have documented the ways in which media stigmatize mental illness. However, media also portray mental illness trivially, like when a well-organized closet is akin to obsessive-compulsive disorder. An experiment (N=175) asked participants to recall either a media portrayal where mental illness was stigmatized or a portrayal where it was trivialized. Results suggest that audiences can recall certain components of stigmatization and trivialization, but these mediated portrayals are associated with different psychological perspectives.
The effects of media exposure and media attention on sustainability communication • Jinhee Lee; MoonHee Cho, University of Tennessee • The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of consumers’ media exposure and attention on pro-environmental behaviors and the moderating effects of environmental concern and media credibility. Based on an online survey of 503 consumers, the study found positive effects of media exposure and media attention on pro-environmental behaviors. Significant interaction effects between media credibility and environmental concern were displayed. Theoretical and practical implications are addressed.
Adolescents’ Third-Person Perception Regarding Media Depictions of Bullying • John Chapin, Penn State • Adolescents consume more than 100 hours of TV per month. Teen shows often address bullying, but the depictions can be simplified and unrealistic. Findings from a survey of 1,593 adolescents indicate 52% of the students believe depictions of bullying on TV are usually realistic, and 35% say victims bring the abuse on themselves. The study uses third-person perception as a theoretical framework, documenting that adolescents believe depictions of bullying on TV affect others more than themselves. Third-person perception was predicted by optimistic bias and Just World Beliefs. Adolescents who exhibit third-person perception are more likely to believe media depictions are realistic and more likely to blame victims of bullying in real life.
The Influence of Demographics and News Media Exposure on Philadelphians’ Beliefs About Poverty • Joseph Moore, University of Missouri; Esther Thorson, University of Missouri School of Journalism • This study examined the effect of gender, race, socioeconomic status, political ideology, and media exposure on Philadelphians’ beliefs about the causes of, and most effective solutions to poverty. Analysis of survey data revealed significant effects for all categories. Women, racial minorities, and those with lower incomes were more likely to regard poverty as a structural phenomenon. Greater exposure to television news was found to contribute significantly to individualistic thinking about poverty causes and solutions.
Fifteen Years of Framing Research: Is Framing Research Maturing? • Joseph Provencher, Texs Tech University; Benjamin Smith, University of California, Santa Barbara; Cynthia-Lou Coleman, Portland State University • Framing research has grown in recent decades, and critics ask whether research is guided by core elements underpinned by common theories and methodologies: is framing a fractured paradigm? While a handful of scholars argue over paradigms, researchers continue to conduct studies under the heading of framing. We examine features about current research, including theoretical drivers, methodologies employed, whether framing is situated within message or cognitive domains, and whether researchers study framing within a process model.
Traumatic Experiences: Measuring Journalists’ Trauma Exposure and Emotional Responses • Kenna Griffin, Oklahoma City University • This study measures work-related trauma exposure and emotional trauma symptoms experienced by journalists. It also considers traits of the individual journalists and their exposure that make them more prone to emotional trauma. The 829 respondents reported trauma exposure and symptoms greater than those experienced in the general population and comparable to emergency workers. Age, job experience, and trauma exposure severity, duration and frequency were found to affect the likelihood that journalists would experience symptoms.
How can I watch what I eat when I eat while I watch? Examining the role of media in children’s eating behaviors and food consumption • Kim Bissell, University of Alabama; Sarah Pember, The University of Alabama; Kim Baker, University of Alabama; Xueying (Maria) Zhang, University of Alabama • This study examined the use of an iPad app that measured children’s eating behavior and the healthfulness of the foods they consumed throughout the day using the new media device as their source of tracking food consumption. Factors that might predict greater consumption of healthy or unhealthy foods were examined, along with the use of media while eating. Findings suggest the environment in which children are eating food is a strong predictor of the type and amount of food they are eating. Children in the present study who participated in their school’s free or reduced breakfast and lunch program had very little control over the foods they had access to for those meals, and therefore, had a greater likelihood of consuming more unhealthy foods. Children across the sample reported using media while eating at home and further reported family members using devices during mealtimes at home. The use of media while eating food was a significant predictor of more unhealthy food consumption. These and other findings are discussed.
Gain-Loss Framing and Emotional Imagery: Testing Valence and Motivational Rules for Matching • Kiwon Seo, Sam Houston State University • An experiment (N = 424) examined how message styles of framing and imagery are matched to affect persuasion. Specifically, they are matched by valence (gain framing + positive images vs. loss framing + negative images) and by motivational direction (framing + approach motivation image vs. framing + avoidance motivation image). The results indicate that (a) visual images attenuated framing effects and (b) valence matching was superior to motivation matching.
Political inequalities start at home: Parents, children and the socialization of civic infrastructure online • Kjerstin Thorson; Yu Xu, University of Southern California; Stephanie Edgerly • We use a two-wave panel survey of parent-child dyads to show that the roots of online democratic divides are found in the unequal socialization of political interest. We test a model connecting parent socioeconomic status to family communication in the home and development of youth political interest. We develop a theoretical concept of online civic infrastructure to foreground how social media use in childhood and adolescence may shape future opportunities for civic and political engagement.
Suicide reporting: Taiwan public’s opinions about the copycat effects and WHO’s media guidelines • Kuang-Kuo Chang, Shih Hsin University; Eric Freedman • This study examined the opinions of Taiwan’s general public about suicide and its news reporting in application of the World Health Organization media guidelines. Key findings suggest (1) that the copycat effect is strongly perceived by the respondents (2) who, however, assigned causal and treatment responsibilities to suicidal individuals and to the governments, respectively, instead of to the media. More important, respondents surprisingly rated avoiding sensational reporting as least significant among the 10 guidelines. The study discusses implications of the findings in policymaking, public health advocacy, and journalistic practices in preventing the copycat effect of suicide as a serious social problem.
“The news you choose”: examining if racial identity trumps other factors when news is negative • Lanier Holt, The Ohio State University; Dustin Carnahan, Michigan State University • An abundance of studies show that people prefer to read stories about people who are like themselves. However, what happens when these stories are negative? This analysis tests racial identity and the black sheep effect to see if in these circumstances will people still prefer stories about their own, or will they select stories that denigrate racial out-groups? We find that even given other factors, racial identity still trumps other factors in people’s news choices.
Media Literacy Education and Children’s Unfavorable Attitudes towards Gender Stereotypes and Violence in Advertising in the United States • Laras Sekarasih, UMass Amherst; Christine Olson; Gamze Onut, University of Massachusetts Amherst; Kylie Lanthorn, University of Massachusetts Amherst; Erica Scharrer, University of Massachusetts Amherst • This study examines the effectiveness of media literacy education (MLE) in cultivating critical attitudes towards gender stereotypes and violence in advertising among 4th and 6th graders. Pretest and posttest comparisons suggest stronger unfavorable attitudes towards the presence of violence in advertising upon the completion of MLE. However, stronger unfavorable attitudes towards the stereotypical portrayals of boys and girls in advertising was only found among girls; no significant change was found among boys.
Grass Mud Horse: Luhmannian Systems Theory and Internet Censorship in China • Lei Zhang, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse; Carlton Clark, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse • This paper argues that the efforts of the Chinese Communist Party to censor the Internet are likely to undermine the CCP’s credibility in the eyes of the Chinese people. Systems theory as Niklas Luhmann offers powerful theoretical lens through which to observe contemporary events in China. Luhmann argues that global society is a communication system rather than the aggregate of human beings. The Chinese Communist Party can censor or silence particular people, but it cannot shut down the global information network that is transforming China.
Blurring the Boundaries between Journalism and Activism: A Transparency Agenda-building Case Study from Bulgaria • Lindita Camaj • This paper explores the relationship between journalists and civil society actors in promoting the Freedom of Information (FOI) right in Bulgaria. It emphasizes the importance of civil society as influential actors in the media agenda-building process and presents a new approach to conceptualize the journalist-nongovernmental organization (NGO) relationship from a cooperative, rather than power-distance, perspective. The alliance between NGO and journalists in Bulgaria resulted in (1) increased public awareness of the FOI right, (2) increased FOI law uses by citizens and journalists, (3) improved the governmental transparency, and (4) enhanced quality of journalistic output. Theoretical and practical relevance of these findings is discussed.
Psychological Traits, Addiction Symptoms, and Smartphone Feature Usage as Predictors of Problematic Smartphone Use among University Students in China • Louis Leung, The Chinese University of Hong Kong; Jingwen Liang, The Chinese University of Hong Kong • This study investigates the effects of psychological traits (i.e., procrastination, leisure boredom, and impulsivity) and addiction symptoms on problematic smartphone use. Data were collected from a random sample of 649 university students. The results showed that procrastination, impulsivity, including sensation seeking and (lack of) perseverance, symptoms of addiction (e.g., inability to control craving, withdrawal, and complaints), and frequent usage of smartphone features for instrumental, relational, expressive, and informational purposes were significant predictors of problematic smartphone use.
Be a “Defensive User”: A Study of Opinion Leaders on Chinese Weibo • LUWEI ROSE LUQIU, Penn State University; Michael Schmierbach • This study focuses on the effect of several tactics that the Chinese government implemented to crack down on opinion leaders in social media. Through a 2 x 2 experimental study with Weibo users, it tests the effects of both attacks using negative comments as well as differences in the amount of original content posted. Contrary to expectations, negative comments actually spur greater interest, suggesting that users may have formed a unique culture to protect themselves from government manipulation.
Young Latinos’ Satisfaction with the Affordable Care Act and Insurance Preferences: The Role of Acculturation, Media Use, Trust in Health Sources, and Ideology • Maria Len-Rios, The University of Georgia; Yen-I Lee, University of Georgia • The purpose of this study is to assess how individual characteristics of Latinos, including acculturation levels, media use, trust in health resources and ideology, predict Latinos’ satisfaction with the Affordable Care Act. This study is important because Latinos are among those in the U.S. most likely to lack health insurance coverage, and rate access to health insurance as important. We offer an analysis of a national nonprobability online survey (N=434) of Hispanic Americans representing 35 states. Our findings showed that acculturation and political ideology predict satisfaction with the ACA, as well as trust in service providers and information sources.
Content-Expressive Behavior: Discussion Network Heterogeneity, Content Expression, and Political Polarization • Matthew Barnidge, University of Vienna; Alberto Ardèvol-Abreu, University of Vienna; Homero Gil de Zúñiga, University of Vienna • One thriving area of research on participatory media revolves around political expression and the creation of political content. This study analyzes the connections between these behaviors, heterogeneous information networks, and ideological polarization while accounting for the role of emotional intelligence. Results from a two-wave-panel survey of U.S. adults show that people who engage in content-expressive behavior are embedded in heterogeneous information networks, and that emotional intelligence moderates the relationships between content-expressive behavior and political polarization.
Like Me: How Facebook Users Engage in Self-Presentation • Megan Mallicoat • This study draws on self-presentation theory to examine how participants strategically present themselves through Facebook. Participants (N=168) were asked to rate their day-to-day Facebook interactions according to a 25-point scale measuring behavior motivated by a taxonomy (Jones & Pittman, 1982) of five self-presentation strategies. Results show self-reported self-presentation efforts on Facebook are similar — but not identical — to prior research regarding self-presentation. Results also suggest Facebook use might be a useful predictor of self-presentation strategies.
The Influence of Narrative Messages on Third-Person Perception • Michael Dahlstrom, Iowa State University; Sonny Rosenthal • Narratives can shape perceptions about the world through unique processing pathways, but are audiences aware of this influence? This study explores these questions by bridging the theoretical frameworks of third person perception and narrative persuasion and testing them in an environmental context. Findings suggest that individuals do recognize narratives as having special influence, but only when they perceive the potential effects of a message to be harmful.
Anti-intellectualism among Students in Journalism and Communication: A Developmental Perspective • Michael McDevitt; Jesse Benn; Perry Parks, Michigan State University; Jordan Stalker, University of Wisconsin; Taisik Hwang; Kevin Lerner, Marist College • This study measures anti-intellectualism in journalistic attitudes for the first time, and documents developmental influences on anti-intellectualism among undergraduates at five colleges with comprehensive programs in journalism and mass communication. Journalism major and role conceptions generally fail to inoculate students against professional anti-rationalism and anti-elitism. While reflexivity is typically viewed as an expression of critical thinking, support for transparency in news work appears to condone a populist suspicion of intellectuals and their ideas.
Drinking at Work: The Portrayal of Alcohol in Workplace-related TV Dramas • Mira Mayrhofer, University of Vienna; Jörg Matthes, U of Vienna • We analyzed the most popular work-related TV-dramas regarding the portrayal of alcohol in a televised workplace environment. Of interest were character-beverage interaction, setting, motivations, topic, valence, and portrayed consequences. Half of all beverage scenes were alcohol-related and a character–beverage interaction was more likely for alcoholic than non-alcoholic beverages. Furthermore, over 30% of all consumed beverages at work were alcoholic and only a few consequences of alcohol were presented.
Picturing horror: Visual framing in newspaper coverage of three mass school shootings • Nicole Dahmen, University of Oregon; David Morris II, University of Oregon • Images can and do influence the manner in which audiences understand and remember news. As such, it is critical that scholarship consider visual framing. This study examines visual framing of a timely and disturbing topic: mass shootings. Through content analysis of 4,934 photographs from nine days of newspaper coverage from three mass school shootings, the study found empirical evidence of routinization of coverage and coverage that emphasized the perpetrators at the expense of the victims.
The (in)disputable “power” of images of outrage: Public acknowledgement, emotional reaction, and image recognition • Nicole Dahmen, University of Oregon; Natalia Mielczarek; Daniel Morrison, University of Oregon • A recent news image–that of a drowned 3-year-old Syrian boy washed ashore as a result of refugees fleeing Syria–resonated with audiences and leaders, becoming a seeming catalyst for action. But the effect was short lived. Through survey data, this research explores iconic images and visual collective memory, considering connections between public acknowledgement, emotional reaction, and image recognition. Studying such relationships will help us to further understand the (in)disputable “power” of harrowing images.
The Religious Facebook Experience • Pamela Brubaker, Brigham Young University; Michel Haigh, Penn State • “This study explores why people (N = 428) use Facebook for religious purposes and the needs engaging with religious content on Facebook gratifies. Along with identifying the uses and gratifications received from engaging with faith-based Facebook content, this research explores whether or not religiosity, the frequency of Facebook use, and the intensity of Facebook use for religious purposes predicts motivations for accessing this social networking site for faith-based purposes. An exploratory factor analysis revealed four primary motivations for accessing religious Facebook content: ministering, religious information and entertainment, spiritual and emotional support, and proselytizing. A multiple regression analysis showed religiosity, the frequency of Facebook use, and the intensity of Facebook use for religious purposes predicted motivations for ministering and seeking religious information and entertainment. Intensity of Facebook use was the only predictor of spiritual and emotional support whereas frequency of engagement with religious content was the only predictor proselytizing.”
Constructed: Digital journalists, role conception and enactment • Patrick Ferrucci, U of Colorado • This study utilizes social construction theory to examine how digital journalists conceive and enact their roles. Through 37 in-depth interviews with digital-only journalists working across the country for a variety of non-legacy market models, this study found that digital journalists embrace the interpreter role, the advocate role and one new role germane to digital journalism: the mobilizing marketer. The study then examines the routines and norms that have become institutionalized to enact these roles.
“Not Strawberry Shortcake Again!”: Exploring Parental Mediation of Pre-School Children’s Book Selection and Book Reading in a Library Setting • Regina Ahn, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Michelle Nelson, UIUC – Advertising Department • Our research investigates parental mediation practices for children’s book selection and reading with an ethnographic approach in a library setting. Findings show the prevalence of licensed media character books and commercial influences on children’s and parents’ book choices (e.g., Strawberry Shortcake). Based on our observations, a typology of parental mediation and social interactions emerged; yet, limits of parental strategies were also explored in the library. Implications and future research directions of the research are discussed.
Celebrity Candidate Voters in Campaign 2016: Media Use, Motivations and Political Learning • Stacey Kanihan, University of Minnesota; Hyejoon Rim, University of Minnesota • Drawing from the “celebrity politics” literature, this national survey (n = 1608) examines the influence of a celebrity candidate on voters’ media behaviors during the 2016 U.S. presidential primary. Findings reveal celebrity supporters are mainly driven by entertainment motivations and follow news on television and YouTube, but their predictor of campaign knowledge is news websites. A comparison group of others also learns from Twitter and television. Findings contextualized by the ideal of an informed electorate.
The Ironic Effect of Covering Health: Conflicting News Stories Contribute to Fatalistic Views Toward Nutrition • Temple Northup, University of Houston • In the United States, the number of overweight or obese people has increased considerably. This is a serious issue and it is important to investigate what role the media may play in this problem. This research examines some of the psychological mechanisms that could explain the previously identified link between media and an unhealthy diet by specifically testing the effects of reading news stories that contain contradictory (or consistent) health information. Results suggest conflicting health information caused increased negative affect as well as feelings of fatalism related to eating well, an important and known predictor of unhealthy food consumption.
Use of Violent War-Themed First Person Shooters and Support for Policies of Military Intervention • Toby Hopp; Scott Parrott; Yuan Wang, The University of Alabama • A survey (n=246) explored the relationship between exposure to violent, war-themed First Person Shooter (FPS) video games and citizen attitudes toward interventionist military policy. Results suggested that frequent exposure/use of war-themed FPS games was positively associated with both moral disengagement and attitudes governing the acceptability of military violence. The data further indicated that moral disengagement was a positive predictor of citizen preference for interventionist military policy.
The Changing Media Perceptions and Consumption Habits of College Students: A Media System Dependency Perspective • Todd Holmes, State University of New York at New Paltz; Sylvia Chan-Olmsted, University of Florida • Using media system dependency (MSD) as a theoretical framework and a series of 12 focus groups over four years, this exploratory study examined how college students’ perceptions and use of traditional and new media platforms and devices changed throughout their years as college students. The findings suggest that college students’ dependency on new media platforms is a function of the ability of these media to facilitate the attainment of understanding, play, orientation, and expression goals.
Exploring Flaming, Message Valence, and Strength of Organizational Identity • Troy Elias, University of Oregon; Andrew Reid, University of Southern California; Mian Asim, Zayed University • Mobile applications or “apps,” represent increasingly ubiquitous small digital programs that facilitate a wide array of tasks, including banking, social networking, or monitoring one’s health. This study examines factors that affect consumers’ adoption of apps. Specifically, this experimental study explores the impact of negative and positive reviews from ingroup members, in conjunction with flaming comments from outgroup members, on the attitudes and behavioral orientations of those that strongly and weakly identify with an organization. Results of the study reveal that when users are presented with an identity-relevant informational app, those individuals who possess weak levels of organizational identification will have a more favorable attitude toward an organization’s app, attitude toward the app’s brand, and a greater likelihood of purchasing the app after viewing positive reviews versus negative reviews, as opposed to individuals with strong levels of organizational identification, who appear to be less susceptible to negative WOM.
Too Hard to Shout Over the Loudest Frame: Effects of Competing Frames in the Context of the Crystallized Media Coverage on Offshore Outsourcing • Volha Kananovich; Rachel Young • This study investigates the effects of competing frames in newspaper coverage of offshoring, an issue that is characterized by explicitly negative media coverage and a single dominant frame. The findings of a randomized, controlled experiment (N=152) demonstrate conventional framing effects on attitudinal change, but show that the attitudes of people with greater interest in economic and political news move away from supporting offshoring if they are exposed to a positively valenced frame.
Promoting HPV Vaccination for Male Young Adults: Effects of Descriptive and Injunctive Norms • Wan Chi Leung • This study explores promotions of the HPV vaccination for men, focusing on how social influence plays a role in influencing young male adults’ attitudes toward the HPV vaccine. An online survey was conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk, and responses from 656 males aged 18-26 in the United States were analyzed. Results indicated that exposure to messages were associated with perceived effects of the messages on others, which related to the perceived descriptive norm of vaccine uptake among other males. However, the perceived injunctive norm was more powerful in predicting support for the HPV vaccination for males than the perceived descriptive norm. Findings point to suggestions for future promotions of the HPV vaccination for males.
From immediate community to imagined community: Social identity and the co-viewing of media event • Xi Cui; Jian Rui, Lamar University; Fanbo Su, Guangzhou University • This paper examines how various forms of co-viewing media events, i.e. physical discussion, social media engagement and imagined togetherness, contribute to viewers’ emotional reactions to the live broadcast genre which, in turn, strengthen viewers’ social identity. It is found that, consistent with theorizations of rituals and media events, viewers experience stronger emotional reaction when they actively engage in social interactions of various forms during watching a media event. Among the various co-viewing situations, social media engagement is found to be the strongest predictor of emotional reaction. The emotional reactions further translate into viewers’ social identity that is relevant to the messages conveyed in the media events. The findings provide some answers to the debate regarding the validity of large-scale mediated integrative rituals in contemporary societies. Meanwhile they deepen our understandings of co-viewing behaviors, especially social media engagement, in the consumption of traditional mass-media events.
Examining the Interaction Effects between Media Favorability and Recency of Business News on Corporate Reputation • XIAOQUN ZHANG, University of North Texas • This study showed the significant interaction effect between media favorability and recency of business news on corporate reputation, indicating that the second-level agenda setting effect and recency effect take place simultaneously when people use media messages to form corporate reputation. The composite measure of media favorability and recency was superior to the measure of favorability. This study was based on the content analysis of 2,817 news articles from both elite and local newspapers.
Becoming Collective Action Experts: Parsing Activists’ Media and Discourse Strategies in China • Yuqiong Zhou, School of Communication, Shenzhen University; Yunkang Yang • Action strategy, media strategy, and discourse strategy are three key strategies of social contention. Compared to action strategy, our understanding of the other two is very limited. This study attempts to analyze the working mechanisms of media and discourse strategies and the co-working mechanisms between the two by employing new theoretical framework and research methods. Based on literature review, we examine the media strategy from the perspectives of mediated content, connective action and media co-empowerment and circulation; we analyze the discourse strategy from the approaches of framing and gaming; and finally we illustrate the coordinating relationship between media and discourse strategies. The meta-analysis of 40 massive incidents during 2009-2014 demonstrates that “time vs. space” and “us vs. them” are the two coordinates of China’s contentious discourse system. The comparative case study of Wukan and Panyu incidents shows that despite the great differences between Wukan villagers and Panyu citizens in demographics, social capital and media literacy, they both demonstrated remarkable wisdom and managed to adjust their media and discourse strategies to fulfilling consensus mobilization, action mobilization, and social mobilization. In particular, Wukan villagers’ creative utilizing of new media deserves further discussion.
Student Competition
Who has (not) Set Whose Agenda on Social Media? A Big-Data Analysis of Tweets on Paris Attack • Fan Yang, Pennsylvania State University; Tongxin Sun • Utilizing social network, semantic and sentiment analysis, this study investigates agenda setting of 13,784 Tweets on Paris attack. Findings indicate individual Twitter opinion leaders are as influential as media organizations for agenda setting. The significant negative correlations of issue/attribute salience between the agendas of media and individual opinion leaders suggests that rather than setting agendas for each other, the two complement each other in determining “what” and “how” to think about Paris attack on Twitter.
The New Gatekeepers: Discursive Construction of Risks and Benefits for Journalism, Silicon Valley, and Citizens • Frank Michael Russell, University of Missouri School of Journalism • This study explores interactions between journalism, Silicon Valley, and citizens based on a qualitative textual analysis of interviews between journalists and technologists in the Riptide oral history of the digital disruption of journalism. Guided by the concept of reciprocity, the study examines how interviewers and interviewees discursively constructed risks and potential benefits in this relationship for journalism, Silicon Valley, and citizens. Interactions were discursively constructed most prominently in terms of risks for journalism.
Location-based social networking: Location sharing of the users, by the users, for the users • Kyung-Gook Park, Concentrix; Jihye Kim, University of Florida • The goal of this study is to examine location-based social networking (LBSN) services users’ uses and gratifications and the relationship between the intensity of LBSN services use and trust in location content. The findings demonstrate that the intensity of LBSN services is positively associated with each gratification. In addition, discovery is positively related to trust in user-generated content (UGC), whereas communication is negatively related to trust in ready-made content (RMC).
Political self-categorization, geography, and the media: How does news consumption play a role in perceptions of universal human rights? • Lindsey Blumell, Copenhagen Business School/Texas Tech University • Since the end of WWII, the international community via the United Nations has developed a framework of human rights that is meant to be universal to all persons, but political and cultural factors have limited that adoption. This study looks at how overall, transnational, and humanitarian news consumption influences a global audience’s perceptions of human rights. Results of a transnational survey indicate news consumption and political self-categorization are the strongest predictors of human rights attitudes.
Media and Anti-Muslim Sentiment in China: A Study of Chinese News Media and Social Media • LUWEI ROSE LUQIU, Penn State University; Fan Yang, Pennsylvania State University • The goal of this study is to determine the relationship between the portrayal of Muslims in Chinese news and social media and anti-Muslim sentiment in China. Analysis of 10 years of news reports about Muslims and Islam on state news media and over 10,000 posts on Weibo, a Chinese microblog equivalent to Twitter, shows an overall negative tone against Muslim, priming a significant stereotype effect. IAT was conducted among non-Muslim Chinese and negative stereotypes about Muslims as a result of media cultivation were detected. A survey of Chinese Muslims showed real-life discrimination to be a consequence of this negative attitude. This study shows that media stereotypes of Muslims are the key factor for anti-Muslim sentiment, because they play an important role in forming public opinion in China. However, although there is a negative attitude toward Muslims on social media, such media have provided an alternative platform for Chinese Muslims to communicate with out-group members and have allowed discussions between Chinese Muslims and non-Chinese Muslims.
Complicity, trust or getting through the day? News media institutional norms at the state house • Meredith Metzler • The relationship between elected representatives and reporters is mutually dependent yet antagonist, stemming from the press’ role as a political institution. This qualitative analysis finds that legislative offices understand their institutional role as representation of constituents and the news media’s as a neutral information provider. The results suggest professionalism manifested legislator’s trust in media. Recurring concern over “information correction” suggests legislators find themselves increasingly as fact arbiters in the changing media landscape.
Negotiation of Sexual Identity in Gay On-Air Talent on West Texas Mainstream Media • Nathian Rodriguez, Texas Tech University • This analytic autoethnography explores identity negotiation in on-air media personalities in West Texas by augmenting the author’s personal experience with the lived experiences of five other LGBTQ radio/television on-air personalities. Employing the communication of identity theory, results indicate conflicts between the personal and communal frames, the relational and communal frames, and the enactment frame with all other frames. Strategies used to help navigate these conflicts include employment of hegemonic masculinity norms, self-monitoring and assimilation.
Effects of Mass Surveillance on Journalists and Confidential Sources: A Constant Comparative Study • Stephenson Waters, University of Florida • This qualitative study explores how national security journalists communicate online using digital security technologies to evade potential surveillance by government authorities. This study follows a panopticism framework, which states that those under real or perceived observation will alter their behavior to be more subservient to authority. Through a series of seven in-depth interviews with journalists, using a constant comparative method, journalists who participated in this study reported that the way they work has changed under a real or perceived threat of mass government surveillance, making their work more difficult and potentially damaging their communications with sources. Many potential interview subjects refused to participate on the record because of the sensitivity and potential risks involved in the discussion of the subject matter.
“We can’t stop, and we won’t stop”: Motivated Processing of Sex and Violence in Music Media • Tianjiao (Grace) Wang, Washington State University • This study examines the processing of two types of content commonly found in popular music videos- sex and violence. High sex high violence music videos were the most engaging and memorable messages, potentially creating a flow experience. The motivated cognition perspective proved to be robust in predicting the processing of messages containing motivationally relevant content.
Magazine 2016 Abstracts
Digital Excellence in U.S. Magazines: An Analysis of National Magazine Award Categories and Calls • Aileen Gallagher, Syracuse University • This study examines the categories and calls for entry for the digital National Magazine Awards from 1998 to 2016. Researchers tracked the addition and subtraction of digital categories, and analyzed calls for entries to determine how definitions of excellence in magazine journalism have changed. Researchers found new technology and media platforms create different standards of excellence than traditional print editorial content. The Magazine of the Year award further alters the way prizes assess a publication’s caliber.
Towards a Typology of Magazine Digital Longform: How Is Online Literary Journalism Different from Print? • Aleksandr Gorbachev, University of Missouri, Missouri School of Journalism; Berkley Hudson, University of Missouri • To better understand how magazine journalism works in the digital environment of the twenty-first century, it seems valuable to look at the Internet profile of one of the most praised and established genres: longform, narrative or literary journalism. To explore this, a qualitative typology was devised to determine the specific characteristics of digital longform content as a way to compare with print magazine stories. Four different digital longform outlets—The Atavist Magazine, Narratively, The Big Roundtable and Matter—were compared to those produced by two legacy magazines, The Atlantic and GQ. A total of 295 stories were analyzed: 199 published by digital longform publications and 96 in print. The analysis yielded a number of insights, including that narrative still stands on its own, whether in print or online, and that many opportunities remain for enhancing digital longform journalism with multimedia elements.
The New Yorker’s Lillian Ross: The Literary Journalism Canon’s Neglected Eavesdropper • Annie Rees, University of Missouri-Columbia • When Tom Wolfe codified the term “New Journalism,” he left out many established writers including The New Yorker’s Lillian Ross. Critics were frustrated by Wolfe’s insistence on a burgeoning field of “new” journalism when many felt that the four tenets of New Journalism—scenes, dialogue, the third person, and status details—were variations on themes that had been in practice by skilled writers for decades. This paper argues that Lillian Ross has been left out of the nonfiction canon too often, and in her absence from anthologies of “new” journalism, not enough study has been made in way she innovated literary journalism. Although within her body of work there has been some focus on “Portrait of Hemingway” (1950) and Picture (1952), less attention has been paid to other features, particularly the continuing “Talk of the Town” pieces she wrote through the 2000s.
Millennials and the Future of Magazines: How the Generation of Digital Natives Will Determine Whether Print Magazines Survive • Elizabeth Bonner; Chris Roberts, University of Alabama • Through a mixed-methods study utilizing a preliminary survey and focus groups, this qualitative work seeks to reveal how Millennials feel about print magazines in the Internet age. Participants reported reading magazines for reasons pertaining to content, aesthetics, entertainment, escape, habit, and ease of use. Findings revealed instrumental themes, reported as recommendations to the magazine industry, as these digital natives will inevitably dictate the fate of print media in the coming years.
Repairing the Gamer Community: Paradigm Repair in Early Gaming Magazines Nintendo Power and Sega Visions • Gregory Perreault, Appalachian State University; Malik Rahili • Video game journalism began amidst widespread negativity surrounding gaming (Williams, 2003). Gaming journalism began its existence under attack because of the audience to whom they appealed. Paradigm maintenance is process by which journalists reaffirm why they do what they do. In this case, gaming journalists had to repair the paradigm of the gamer identity, in order to defend the motivation behind their work. This study argues that early gaming magazines Nintendo Power and Sega Visions repaired the gaming paradigm during the development of gaming’s mainstream acceptance from 1991-1995 by challenging stereotypes of gamers as anti-social, anti-intellectual and generally childish.
Uprising to Proxy War: How Time Inc. and Newsweek framed the Syrian conflict (2011-2016) from War versus Peace Journalism Perspective • Nisha Garud • Based on the theoretical framework of Johan Galtung’s war and peace journalism perspective, this study examines framing of the Syrian conflict in Time Inc. and Newsweek. A total of 255 stories published during the five years of the conflict were analyzed for the dominant conflict frame (war versus peace frame), salient indicators of war and peace journalism and variations in framing during three significant stages of the conflict. A quantitative content analysis revealed war journalism dominated the U.S news magazine coverage of the Syrian conflict. Analysis also showed significant differences in Time Inc. and Newsweek’s coverage; Time Inc. employed more war journalism indicators whereas Newsweek employed more peace journalism indicators. The study suggests that scholars should consider the type of news media and its associated characteristics such as style of writing, space for coverage, and production time as factors that are likely to influence the preference of journalists to frame stories from a war over peace journalism perspective.
Magazines and Social Media Platforms: Strategies for Enhancing User Engagement and Implications for Publishers • Parul Jain, Ohio University; Zulfia Zaher; Enakshi Roy • Using theoretical perspective of Uses and Gratification and Big Five personality traits, the current research examines magazine readers’ social media behavior by exploring users’ preferred social media platforms for connecting with magazines, genre of magazines most likely to be accessed via social media sites, and motivations behind doing so. In addition, we also examine engagement strategies that are most likely to attract more readers and retain the interest of current users. Finally, we explore the relationship between accessing magazines via social media platforms and personality types. To answer the above questions, we employ two studies utilizing focus group discussions and survey methods. The findings indicate that most people expect a magazine to have a presence on major social media platforms and indicate varying motivations for accessing magazine’s social sites such as opportunity to get targeted and relevant messaging. In addition, users suggest various engagement and content strategies that may be relevant to publishers such as inclusion of visual and video content. Theoretical and practical implications of the study are discussed.
Home computing’s halcyon days: Discourse frames in computer magazines in the mid-1980s • Terry Britt, University of Missouri • This study examines the computer magazine market in the mid-1980s with regard to prevalent topics in articles in presenting discursive frames about home computing to readers, and how the content provided insight to actual and potential uses of computers. Looking at articles published from 1984-1985 in three large-circulation general computer magazines, the study finds three discursive frameworks – advisory, instructive, and social/cultural – routinely present within both the topics and the content of the magazines.
Law and Policy 2016 Abstracts
Debut Faculty Paper Competition
Not the Publisher, Still the Proprietor: Bypassing a Website’s Immunity Under Section 230 in Sex Trafficking Cases • Andrew Pritchard; Elaina Conrad • Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act shields websites from liability for user-submitted content, including content that perpetrates sex trafficking. However, this immunity is avoided when a website’s liability does not stem from its role as publisher. Courts’ treatment of websites as real property, combined with well-established principles of landowner liability, should allow websites to be held liable for their role in sex trafficking: not for third-party content, but for crimes resulting from it.
Unmasking The Anonymous Cyberbully: A New Approach • Ben Holden, University’ of Illinois • Americans have the right under the U.S. Constitution to speak anonymously. However, this right is not absolute and is subject to laws of general applicability, including the civil law of defamation. Courts frequently find that the First Amendment’s implied anonymity right yields to the procedural rights of civil defamation plaintiffs when the plaintiff is not a public figure and the speech is not a matter of public concern. But it is generally very difficult, if not impossible, to prove each element of civil defamation and related torts – plus the absence of privilege – without the identity of the speaker. The growing and potentially deadly problem of teen bullying by electronic communication lies at the intersection of these lofty constitutional principles and the practical imperative of parents to keep their kids safe. This Conference Paper suggests a standard for unmasking the Anonymous Teen Cyberbully.
EU v. U.S. Data Protection: An Unsafe Harbor? • Holly Hall, Arkansas State University • A recent ruling by the Court of Justice of the European Union declared the mechanism for data transfer known as Safe Harbor invalid. Many were critical of Safe Harbor for poor enforcement and confusing terminology. The revelations of former CIA employee, Edward Snowden, of United States government agencies’ mass surveillance programs added to the doubts of the functionality of Safe Harbor. The case leading to Safe Harbor’s downfall, Schrems v. Data Protection Commission, led to a new data transfer agreement called Privacy Shield. This paper will examine the evolution of data privacy protection law in the United States and European Union, the Safe Harbor provisions, the decision of the Schrems case, and the implications of Schrems on the newly announced Privacy Shield, shaping the data protection frameworks of the future.
Fight Terror, Not Twitter: Why Section 230 Should Insulate Social Media from Material Support Claims • Nina Brown • Twitter promotes itself as a global communications platform of free expression. ISIS and other terrorist organizations promote themselves via Twitter. A recent lawsuit by a widow of a government contractor killed in a terrorist attack argues that the proliferation of terrorists on Twitter, and Twitter’s reluctance to stop it, violates the Antiterrorism Act. This article explores the dangers associated with holding social media companies responsible for such attacks, and offers a solution to avoid liability.
Open Competition
Cyber Breach: Where privacy ends and data security begins • Angela Rulffes, Syracuse University • This article proposes that data security and privacy are distinguishable concepts that have different harms. Privacy violations, with some exceptions, involve the publication of personal information without permission. A data breach, however, is the loss of data. Data breaches should be treated as a breach of a duty of care, and states should implement laws that create a fiduciary relationship between companies and consumers and provide for civil liability if personal data is not protected.
Crash and Learn: The Inability of Transparency Laws to Penetrate American Monetary Policy • Benjamin W. Cramer, Pennsylvania State University; Martin E. Halstuk, Pennsylvania State University • The article will argue that the Federal Reserve System, thanks to its legislative structure, place within the American government, and court precedents regarding transparency statutes, is insulated from public oversight of almost all of its operations. The second section introduces the Fed’s history and structure. The following section will discuss the role of transparency and secrecy in the 2007-2008 financial crisis. The fourth section will consider whether two potentially powerful transparency statutes, the Freedom of Information Act and the Federal Advisory Committee Act, can be used to reveal documents from the banking sector and its regulators, along with the relevant statutory and case histories of those acts. The article will conclude with a discussion of the factors that have made the Federal Reserve System, and its internal decision-making processes, particularly impenetrable to citizens, journalists, and politicians who seek information on crucial matters of monetary policy.
Student Data in Danger: What Happens When School Districts Rely on the Cloud • Chanda Marlowe, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill • According to Fordham Law School’s Center on Law and Information Policy’s report “Privacy and Cloud Computing in Public Schools,” 95% of public school districts rely on cloud services for a diverse range of functions. The use of cloud services raises serious privacy concerns. For example, in March of 2014, Google admitted to scanning students’ emails and gathering data that were used to target ads to those students. Under the threat of lawsuits, Google promised to stop; however, in December 2015, Google was accused of collecting and using student data for non-education purposes again, this time in violation of the Student Privacy Pledge that it signed January 2015. Yet, schools continue to contract with private sector corporations to obtain cloud services, leaving parents to wonder what information is collected on their children, how that information is being used, and how, if at all, that information is being protected. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the major privacy problems that school districts face when they rely on cloud services offered by private corporations, to analyze how FERPA and state privacy laws are addressing these problems, and to offer possible solutions that go beyond FERPA and state privacy laws. This topic is important because legislation must strike the right balance between protecting students’ personal information and meeting the technological needs of schools.
Underinclusivity and the First Amendment: The Legislative Right to Nibble at Problems After Williams-Yulee • Clay Calvert, University of Florida • Using the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2015 opinions in Williams-Yulee v. Florida Bar and Reed v. Town of Gilbert as analytical springboards, this paper examines the slipperiness – and sometimes fatalness – of the underinclusiveness doctrine in First Amendment free-speech jurisprudence. The doctrine allows lawmakers, at least in some instances, to take incremental, step-by-step measures to address harms caused by speech, rather than requiring an all-out, blanket-coverage approach. Yet, if the legislative tack taken is too small to ameliorate the harm that animates a state’s alleged regulatory interest, it could doom the statute for failing to directly advance it. In brief, the doctrine of underinclusivity requires lawmakers to thread a very fine needle’s eye between too little and too much regulation when drafting statutes. To wit, underinclusivity was tolerated and permitted by the majority in Williams-Yulee, but it proved fatal in Reed. This paper suggests that while Williams-Yulee attempts to better define underinclusivity, its subjectivity remains problematic.
Counterspeech, Cosby and Libel Law: Some Lessons About “Pure Opinion” & Resuscitating the Self-Defense Privilege • Clay Calvert, University of Florida • Using the recent federal district court opinions in Hill v. Cosby and Green v. Cosby as analytical springboards, this paper explores problems with the concept of pure opinion in libel law. Specifically, Hill and Green pivoted on the same allegedly defamatory statement made by attorney Martin Singer on behalf of comedian Bill Cosby, yet the judges involved reached opposite conclusions regarding whether it was protected as pure opinion. Furthermore, the paper analyzes notions of counterspeech and the conditional self-defense privilege in libel law in arguing for shielding Singer’s statement from liability. Although the self-defense privilege was flatly rejected in Green because it was not recognized under the relevant state law, it merits renewed consideration in similar cases where attorneys verbally punch back against their clients’ accusers in the court of public opinion.
The Right to Record Images of Police in Public Places: Should Intent, Viewpoint or Journalistic Status Determine First Amendment Protection? • Clay Calvert, University of Florida • Using the February 2016 federal district court ruling in Fields v. City of Philadelphia as an analytical springboard, this paper examines growing judicial recognition of a qualified First Amendment right to record images of police working in public places. The paper argues that Judge Mark Kearney erred in Fields by requiring that citizens must intend to challenge or criticize police, via either spoken words or expressive conduct, in order for the act of recording to constitute “speech” under the First Amendment. The paper asserts that a mere intent to observe police – not to challenge or criticize them – suffices. The paper also explores how recording falls within the scope of what some scholars call “speech-facilitating conduct.” Additionally, the paper criticizes Kearney’s view, as well as that of a federal judge in the Southern District of New York in 2015, suggesting that the right to record is possessed only by journalists, not by all citizens.
Holding Higher Education Accountable: Three Decades of Public Records Litigation Involving the University of Wisconsin • David Pritchard, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; Jonathan Anderson, USA TODAY NETWORK – Wisconsin • Analysis of a comprehensive set of trial-court public records cases involving the University of Wisconsin over a 30-year period showed that news organizations constitute a strong majority of plaintiffs, that issues involving administrative searches and academic freedom are relatively rare, that news organizations and activist groups seeking records always prevail, and that the university has begun to ask the legislature to provide via statute the confidentiality that the university has not been able to get from the courts. The research is distinctive in that it focuses on trial court cases over an extended period of time. The generalizability of research from a single state is discussed.
Libel by the Numbers: The Use of Public Opinion Polls in Defamation Lawsuits • Eric Robinson, Louisiana State University • Libel plaintiffs must show that the defendant made a defamatory statement which lowered esteem of the plaintiff in the community. Polls can show this, but courts were initially reluctant to allow polling evidence. While courts have become increasingly receptive, use of polls in defamation cases remains rare. This article reviews libel cases in which polls have been used, and recommends that more defamation plaintiffs consider using polls and that courts be receptive to such evidence.
Mobile Broadband: A Cross Country Comparison • Hsin-yi Sandy Tsai • There are significant differences among countries with regard to their mobile broadband penetration rates. This study aims to understand whether public policies influence these differences and what kind of policies/regulations, if any, are necessary and/or sufficient conditions for higher mobile broadband (high speed mobile Internet) penetration rates. Although many studies have probed the factors influencing fixed broadband penetration, few studies have focused on mobile broadband. In order to capture the complicated interactions among factors related to mobile broadband penetration, in this study, in addition to using econometric approaches, a different approach—Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA)—was utilized to analyze the policy and economic factors that affect mobile broadband penetration in 34 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development ) countries. By using both econometric approaches and QCA, this study found six necessary conditions for higher mobile broadband penetration: 1) technology neutrality, 2) higher quality of regulation, 3) higher fixed broadband penetration rates, 4) higher mobile competitive intensity, 5) higher urban population, and 6) higher education. The results of econometric analyses were largely consistent with these findings and also found income, education, and competition to be important determinants of mobile broadband penetration.
The Holmes Truth: Toward a Pragmatic, Holmes-influenced Conceptualization of the Nature of Truth • Jared Schroeder, Southern Methodist University • This paper examines how the Supreme Court has conceptualized truth in freedom-of-expression cases and draws from pragmatic approaches to philosophy, the so called “pragmatic method” put forth by American philosopher William James and the judicial philosophy of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, to propose a unifying conceptualization of truth that could be employed to help the Court provide consistency within its precedents regarding the meaning of a concept that has been central to the Court’s interpretation of the First Amendment but has never been explicitly defined by the Court.
Congress Shall Make No Law…Unless? The Expansion of Government Speech and the Narrowing of Viewpoint Neutrality • Jason Zenor, SUNY-Oswego • In Walker v. Sons of Confederate Veterans, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the State of Texas’ denial of a private organization’s request to place a confederate flag on specialty license plates. The Court upheld that denial as a form of government speech, a doctrine that has only recently developed but gives the government absolute immunity to make decision based upon viewpoints. This paper argues that the government speech doctrine has granted the government the right to coerce the free marketplace of ideas. Thus, the paper proposes a new legal test that would limit when speech is considered governmental and place further checks on the government’s ability to endorse political ideas when communicating administrative policy.
Proxies and Proximate Cause: The Future of Immersive Entertainment and Tort Liability • Jason Zenor, SUNY-Oswego • In June of 2014, two teenage girls lured their friend into the woods and stabbed her 19 times. The heinousness of the crime itself was enough to make it a national news story. But what really caught the attention of the nation was the motive for the crime. The girls wanted to appease the Slender Man, a murderous apparition who had visited them in their sleep and compelled them to be his proxies. Many people had never heard of the Slender Man, a fictional internet meme with a sizeable following of adolescents fascinated with the macabre. Soon the debate raged as to the power and responsibility of such memes. As for legal remedies, media defendant are rarely held liable for third parties crimes. Thus, the producers of violent memes are free from liability. But this law developed in an era of passive media where there was disconnect between media and audience. The paper examines how media liability may change as entertainment becomes more immersive. First, this paper examines the Slender Man phenomenon and other online memes. Then it outlines negligence and incitement law as it has been applied to traditional entertainment products. Finally, the paper posits how negligence and incitement law may be applied differently in future cases against immersive media products which inspire real-life crimes.
Escaping the “Bondage of Irrational Fears”: Brandeis, Free Speech and the Politics of Fear • Joseph Russomanno, Arizona State University • The war of words typically inherent in presidential campaigns seemed to reach unprecedented levels in late 2015. Calls to silence some of the rhetoric brings to mind the free speech doctrine of Louis Brandeis, including his belief that the proper remedy to “bad” speech is not enforced silence, but instead more speech. This paper examines political developments of this period through the lens of Justice Brandeis’ doctrine and its major elements: fear, courage, education and democracy.
Dismissed: Removal of College Media Advisers & Student Journalists’ First Amendment Rights • Lindsie Trego, UNC-Chapel Hill • Cases of indirect censorship of collegiate media have recently made news headlines. In many of these cases, advisers have been administratively removed in response to disputes between student editors and administrators. These cases call into question whether student journalists can successfully seek legal redress for indirect acts against their First Amendment rights. This paper examines whether removal of college media advisers constitutes an injury to student journalists in the context of First Amendment litigation.
A Doctrine at Risk: Content-Neutrality in a Post-Reed Landscape • Minch Minchin • This paper analyzes the lack of cohesion within the U.S. Supreme Court regarding the distinction between content-neutral and content-based regulations of expression. Highlighting two recent cases that illustrate a high degree of fracturing among the justices—McCullen v. Coakley and Reed v. Town of Gilbert—this paper suggests that without further clarification about the doctrine’s nature, purpose and application, the venerable First Amendment canon may soon disintegrate into constitutional oblivion.
Indecency Four Years After Fox Television Stations: From Big Papi to a Porn Star, an Egregious Mess at the FCC Continues • Minch Minchin; Keran Billaud; Kevin Bruckenstein; Tershone Phillips • In 2012, the U.S. Supreme Court in Federal Communications Commission v. Fox Television Stations, Inc. failed to address critical First Amendment questions concerning the FCC’s broadcast indecency policy. More than three years later, this paper examines how the Commission has filled the void left by the Supreme Court with a series of erratic and disjointed moves. These include its March 2015 proposal to fine a television station the maximum $325,000 for airing a tiny, fleeting sexual image during a newscast. That action, somewhat stunningly, came just two-and-half years after the FCC claimed it would target only the most “egregious” instances of indecency. This paper analyzes, among other issues, the troubling implications of the record-setting fine, including arguments against it made by the National Association of Broadcasters. The paper also reviews the FCC’s call for public comment on its fleeting expletive policy, as well as it decision to jettison hundreds of thousands of indecency complaints following Fox Television Stations.
Influencing copyright policymaking: An examination of information subsidy in Congressional copyright hearings from 1997 through 2014 • Minjeong Kim, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies • Assuming that the scope and extent of protection embedded in copyright law is a policy choice resulting from a contestable policymaking process, this study traces the copyright policy debate from 1997 through 2014 by focusing on information subsidy to lawmakers at the Capitol. This study reports the findings from a content analysis of 341 testimonies at 60 Congressional hearings that dealt with the issue of copyright.
An Examination of Ag-Gag and Data Trespass Statutes • Ray Whitehouse, UNC Chapel Hill • Since 1990, nine states have passed legislation that aims to limit undercover investigations of agricultural operations. These “ag-gag” laws attempt to limit investigations in three ways: by criminalizing recording and reporting on operations, criminalizing deceptive entry into operations, and by mandating that anyone recording abuse report it within a short time period. In 2015, two major events related to ag-gag laws took place. First, a federal judge ruled that Idaho’s ag-gag law was unconstitutional. This case decision, the first examining ag-gag laws, cast doubt on the constitutionality of other state ag-gag laws. Second, Wyoming passed a “data trespass” law that criminalized collecting information on “open land” with the intent to give that information to government agencies. Agricultural activists filed suit, claiming that it was an unconstitutional ag-gag law aimed at stopping citizen activists from reporting Clean Water Act violations by ranchers who lease public land from the state. Lawmakers disagreed, arguing that the bill simply strengthened existing trespass laws. This paper compares Wyoming’s data trespass law with all existing ag-gag laws and Idaho’s recently overturned law to examine its constitutionality. This examination is important because it incorporates recent legal outcomes that before now have not been incorporated into analysis of ag-gag laws. It suggests that because both the Idaho and Wyoming laws are similar in their construction and the legal questions in their respective cases are similar, the Idaho decision is very applicable to Wyoming’s data trespass law and casts serious doubts upon the constitutionality of Wyoming’s data trespass statute.
Speech v. Conduct, Surcharges v. Discounts: Testing the Limits of the First Amendment and Statutory Construction in the Growing Credit Card Quagmire • Rich Shumate, University of Florida; Stephanie McNeff, University of Florida; Stephenson Waters, University of Florida • This paper examines First Amendment speech concerns and related issues of statutory construction raised by so-called dual-pricing or anti-surcharge statutes that prohibit merchants from imposing “surcharges” on credit card purchases, but allow them to offer “discounts” to cash-paying customers. The paper uses the recent split of authority created by the November 2015 opinion of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit in Dana’s Railroad Supply v. Florida and the September 2015 decision by the Second Circuit in Expressions Hair Design v. Schneiderman as a timely analytical springboard for analyzing these issues. These cases not only test the fundamental dichotomy in First Amendment jurisprudence between speech and conduct, but also the length to which courts should go to provide narrowing constructions to rescue otherwise unconstitutional statutes. Furthermore, the paper argues that dual-pricing laws detrimentally affect not only the right of merchants to speak, but also the unenumerated First Amendment right of consumers to receive speech directly affecting their pocketbooks. Finally, the paper concludes that dual-pricing laws smack of the worst kind of governmental paternalism – a form protecting corporate interests of credit card companies at the expense of consumers.
A ‘Net’ Gain for Society?: Examining the Legal Challenge to the FCC’s Net Neutrality Order • Sarah Papadelias, University of Florida • This paper analyzes the FCC’s 2015 net neutrality order and the pending legal challenges against the order. Net neutrality has risen as a prominent social and political issue with many different interests at stake. Initially, this paper discusses the history of net neutrality as a complex regulatory topic. The paper then examines the structure and substance of the 2015 order and explains the three major rules proffered by the order. Next, the paper outlines the legal arguments on each side of the lawsuit, tracking the many briefs submitted in the case. Ultimately, the paper concludes with a proposed judicial opinion predicting the D.C. Circuit’s ruling on the pending proceeding. It appears the FCC has bolstered its new net neutrality rules with the appropriate legal authority and the court likely will uphold the rules.
Free Speech v. Fair Disclosure: Does Citizens United Create a Constitutional Challenge for the SEC? • Sonia Bovio, Arizona State University • The U.S. Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission ruling may have unexpected bearing on aspects of corporate speech currently regulated by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). This paper outlines the First Amendment issues related to one SEC disclosure regulation in particular: Regulation Fair Disclosure (Reg FD), as they relate to Citizens United. It demonstrates how Reg FD could withstand constitutional challenges by reviewing elements of Citizens United that may favor the regulation, and by examining the intentions of the Framers of the First Amendment with regard to corporate speech, in particular James Madison’s perspective.
International Communication 2016 Abstracts
Markham Student Paper Competition
Framing the 2014 Indonesian Presidential Candidates in Newspapers and on Twitter • Ary Hermawan, University of Arizona School of Journalism • The 2014 Indonesian presidential election was the first election in the world’s largest Muslim democracy where social media played a significant role. Social media became a public forum where Indonesians framed the presidential candidates in the most polarizing election in the nation’s history. A content analysis of four national newspapers and tweets showed that both legacy media and social media framed the candidates in terms of personality but differed in how they did it.
Surveying television drama in China Central Television’s foreign language channels • Dani Madrid-Morales • This paper surveys over one hundred and seventy drama series (dianshiju) broadcast in four of China Central Television’s (CCTV) foreign language channels between 2004 and 2015. By analyzing the genre, theme, time of action and location it seeks to understand how, through the narrative of fiction, China’s public broadcaster contributes to constructing a global narrative on contemporary Chinese society. It also highlights the seemingly uncoordinated logic behind China’s efforts to internationalize its television drama.
Dolphins and Deviants: News Framing and the Birth of a Global Prohibition Regime • Jay Alabaster • This exploratory study bridges this gap by examining the birth and widespread adoption of a global prohibition regime. The Cove, a U.S. documentary highly critical of annual dolphin hunts in the small Japanese town of Taiji, was released to high acclaim in 2009. It won an Academy Award the following year and was screened around the world. This triggered a surge of global activism aimed at pressuring local Taiji fishermen and the Japanese government to stop the town’s hunts. The resulting moral standoff between Western activists campaigning to save Taiji’s dolphins and various actors within Japan steadily backing the long-running hunts in Taiji was closely covered by international media. This study uses a content analysis to examine framing and sources in articles from the three main Western news agencies, the Associated Press (AP), Agence France Press (AFP), and Reuters, as well as the main Japanese news agency, Kyodo News (Kyodo). The study reveals significant evidence for the emergence of a global prohibition regime.
The journalistic construction of English as a global lingua franca of news • John Carpenter • This study examined the journalistic coverage surrounding the launch of Al Jazeera’s English language news service in 2006 to uncover the dominant, socially-constructed meanings for the English language as it relates to news in a global context. Using theories of language ideology, media counter-flow, and journalistic interpretive communities, analysis showed that that the journalistic interpretive community created ideologies of English as a global lingua franca that would allow news providers to reach a global audience. Furthermore, journalists created ideological meanings for English as the language of news counter-flow, capable of balancing the influence of CNN and BBC by introducing a developing world perspective into global news flows. The study concluded that journalists should reflexively consider the universality of English as a language of the developing world.
Professionalizing the Indigenous: Kabaddi as an Indian Object of Global Media Diaspora • Jordan Stalker, University of Wisconsin • This paper contributes to the field of global media by introducing the concept of “diasporic media objects.” Using Arjun Appadurai’s hard and soft cultural form framework, I show how the once-indigenous Indian sport of kabaddi has been received by the Western press throughout the past and how it has used digital media platforms to professionalize itself and bolster India’s global media presence. The modern Indian diaspora involves objects rather than individuals.
Understanding Entman’s Frame Functions in American International News • Josephine Lukito • The purpose of this article is to examine which countries are covered most in American international news and to apply Entman’s (1993) frame functions to an international news frame analysis. Important here is the understanding of generic framing analyses, such as coding for generic frames or for parts of a frame. Results of a content analysis suggest that Entman’s interpretation of frame functions is too narrow to capture all possible frames in American international news.
War Advertising: Themes in Argentine Print Advertising During the Malvinas / Falklands War • Juan Mundel, Michigan State University; Yadira Nieves-Pizarro, Michigan State University • This study explores the extension of discursive war strategies to print advertisements in 1981 and 1982. A content analysis on newspaper advertising before and after the war supports the notion that advertisements reflect changes in market conditions. With the advancement of the war efforts, there was a change in (1) the tactical intent of the ads, (2) the nature of advertiser, and (3) products advertised. Additionally, our study show that the discursive strategies employed by advertisers were consistent with those emphasized by other media, such as television and print journalism.
Securitization: An approach to the framing of the “Western hostile force” in Chinese media • Kai Xu • This study content analyzes a well-known frame “Western hostile force” in Chinese media from the perspective of securitization. Results suggest that “Western hostile force” is a securitizing move that encompasses an array of different threats. The results also suggest evidence of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) maintaining that China is constantly under these threats, even if in some cases, it never identifies the identities of those threats.
Cross National Newspaper Coverage of Transit Migration: A Community Structure Approach • Kevin O’Brien; Madison Ouellette; Maria Gottfried; Petra Kovacs; John Pollock, The College of New Jersey • A cross-national community structure analysis compared national characteristics/demographic differences with variations in coverage of transit migration in sixteen leading papers worldwide, yielding combined article “prominence” and “direction” “Media Vector” newspaper scores emphasizing “government” or “society” responsibility for transit migration. The findings illuminate two distinct types of “vulnerability”: “economic” vulnerability (crop production index, 27.4% variance) linked to coverage emphasizing government responsibility; and “political” vulnerability (global instability index, 11.9% variance) connected to coverage emphasizing society responsibility.
Do large countries hunger for information less? Country’s size and strengths as determinants of foreign news volume • Miki Tanikawa, University of Texas • This study hypothesized that the size of the GDP, population, geography and the military strengths of the country are inversely related to the volume of international news reporting in the news media of the countries in question, reflecting different perceptions of the needs to monitor the international environment. Data analyses in this study found that these variables broadly predicted the size (smallness) of foreign news volume of the countries under study.
Effectiveness of Global and Local Brands’ Facebook Strategies in Engaging the Saudi Consumer • Mohammad Abuljadail • This paper seeks to investigate the “posting” behavior of global and local brands ’Facebook pages and the effectiveness of these strategies in engaging the Saudi consumer. Specifically, the author examines whether the “posting” behaviors differ between local and global brands in Saudi Arabia and whether the different posting strategies used by local and global brands are more effective than others in generating engagement (likes, comments and shares). Findings and implications are discussed.
Does Paris matter more than Beirut and Ankara? A Content Analysis of Frames Employed in Terrorism Coverage. • Mustafa oz, The University of Texas at Austin • The main purpose of this study is to examine the coverage of Beirut, Ankara and Paris terrorist attacks to see whether there was a western bias in terms of the coverage of these three terrorist attacks. While these three terrorist attacks were similar, they did not have the same amount of attention from the western media outlets. The results suggested that while the attacks were equally shocking, the US media failed to cover the Beirut and Ankara attacks as much as they covered the Paris attacks.Keywords: Framing, Terrorism, Media, Coverage, Content Analysis
A Network Agenda-Setting Study: Opinion Leaders in Crisis and Non-Crisis News on Weibo • Qian Wang • Within the theoretical frame of agenda setting, this study utilized network analysis to compare the interrelationships of the networked agendas in crisis and non-crisis news. It also explores patterns of the relationships between the media outlets and opinion leaders during these crisis and non-crisis news. The results show that business elites rather than Chinese media outlets set the agendas of both crisis and non-crisis news on Weibo. Furthermore, the agenda-setting process among these opinion leaders changed in these two cases.The agendas of these opinion leaders were highly correlated with each other in the Tianjin explosion, while they were much less correlated in Tu Youyou’case. The findings prove that the agenda-setting effect on social media platforms is not a linear process directly from one direction to another. It is a diversified and dynamic process where different parties interact and influence each other, and each party has the potential to set other agendas in certain issue topics.
Framing and Agenda Interaction of Epidemics under the Globalization Era: A cross-national study of news coverage on Ebola virus disease in China, U.S, Japan, and UK • QIAN YU, Washington State University • This study analyzes news coverage of the Ebola Virus Disease (EVD) in China, U.S, Japan, and UK to examine variations in framing and agenda interactions. A content analysis was conducted on 730 news articles from highly circulated and prestigious newspapers in these four countries during the period of March, 24 to December 31, 2014. The findings revealed that common characteristics shown in news frames, sources, and predominant tones used by the four countries’ coverage on portraying the EVD; agenda interactions with different extents were identified among the four newspapers. This study enriches understanding of how journalists with variations in media systems, cultural values, political systems, and social ideologies construct a global health risk. Limitations and future directions are also discussed in the ending part.
One newspaper, double faces? A cross-platform content analysis of People’s Daily on Twitter and Weibo • Shuning Lu, The University of Texas at Austin • News organizations have increasingly adopted social network sites in news production, however, not many studies have probed into the content produced by media organizations across different social media platforms. By situating itself in the intersection of media globalization and technological innovation in journalism, the study systematically examined the characteristics of content posted by People’s Daily, the official press in China, on two social media platforms, Weibo and Twitter. It revealed that there was a Weibo-versus-Twitter difference in the volume, topic and style of online news in People’s Daily. The study also discussed the implications of the findings how different ecologies of Weibo and Twitter help to shape the variation in both content and news style of People’s Daily on the two social media platforms.
Mediated public diplomacy: Foreign media coverage of Sochi Olympics • Yanqin Lu, Indiana University • This study employs content analysis to examine the differences between American and Chinese media coverage on the opening ceremony of the Sochi Winter Olympics. The findings indicated that media coverage in both countries did not present substantial differences in the salience of each event theme. However, American media covered these themes in a more negative tone than Chinese media did. Implications are discussed in terms of the effectiveness of mediated public diplomacy.
National Outlook on Transnational News Event: Comparative Audience Framing on Malaysian’s MH370 Plane Incident • Yearry Setianto, Ohio University; Qianni Luo • This study compares how Malaysian and Chinese audiences framed the news report of their respective national media on the Malaysian’s MH370 plane incident. Using audience framing, we explored similarities and differences of the frames. While Chinese audiences framed that the Malaysian government should take the responsibility, Malaysian audiences defended their government’s effort in dealing with the incident. Researchers found audiences’ nationalism, preexisting knowledge and cultural values to be important factors in understanding the audience frames.
Cultural Influences on Product Placement in American and Chinese TV Situation Comedies • Yiran Zhang, University of Minnesota Twin Cities • Through a textual analysis, this study explored how individualism, power distance and long-term orientation were presented in American and Chinese product placements in situation comedies. The results demonstrated that individualism was mostly presented as positive self-images in Chinese product placements, but as self-independence in American ones. The presentation of short-term orientation in Chinese product placements focused on completing a task under time pressure, while that of American ones concentrated on temporary entertainment.
Journalism and the Fight for Democracy: Framing the 2015 Myanmar Election • Zin Mar Myint, Kedzie Hall – Kansas State University; Bondy Kaye, Kansas State University • The 2015 elections in Myanmar represented a turning point in the country and a major leap toward establishing a democracy. Informed by framing theory, this study analyzed coverage of the Myanmar election by state-owned and privately-owned media firms in Myanmar and major media firms in the U.S. through a content analysis of 732 news articles. Results indicate that U.S. media and privately-owned media in Myanmar converged in coverage of democracy and the opposition NLD party. Their frames lean towards the push for change.
Robert L. Stevenson Open Paper Competition
U.S. Foreign Policy Interests and Press Coverage of the Kashmir Dispute between India and Pakistan • Abhijit Mazumdar, University of Tennessee, Knoxville; Catherine Luther, University of Tennessee • This paper researches U.S. press portrayals of the Kashmir dispute between India and Pakistan before and after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and explores if the portrayals were in line with shifting U.S. foreign policy interests. Findings indicated no significant differences between the two timeframes in the portrayal of the cause of the dispute and its solutions. The stories gave a balanced account of the dispute. Significant differences, however, were found in source usage.
Impact of Economic Hardships on Kyrgyzstan Journalism: Results from In-Depth Interview with Journalists • Bahtiyar Kurambayev • In-depth qualitative semi-structured interviews with 27 journalists based in capital Bishkek city reveal that revenue starving Kyrgyz news outlets employ a variety of unusual tactics to generate some income including financially punishing journalists for failing to meet the set normative, imposes obligations to locate cash-paying news story clients. This study also reveals that news outlets have introduced barter as a system of payment. The author employed a snowball sampling to locate initial several research participants and seek their suggestions of other journalists. The interviews were held during the period of January 4-January 23, 2016. They were held primarily in Russian language. The practical implications are also discussed.
Characteristics of Exemplary Conflict Coverage: War and peace frames in Pulitzer Prize-winning international reporting • Beverly Horvit, University of Missouri School of Journalism; Kimberly Foster • Amid the current state of global conflicts, scholars urge journalists to provide rich detail and depth in conflict coverage that enhance foreign reporting, and other scholars focus on the theoretical and practical challenges of such detailed reporting. One such way for journalists to report on detail is Galtung’s (2000) method of peace journalism. This qualitative study explores the prevalence of peace journalism frames in Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting and finds evidence crucial to peace journalism advocates.
Beyond Hybridity: Intralocal Frictions in Music Video Production, Distribution, and Reception in Kenya • Brian Ekdale, University of Iowa • While the hybridity framework has inspired many valuable studies, global media research has hit a period of theoretical stasis. Drawing on the concepts of critical transculturalism (Kraidy, 2005) and global friction (Tsing, 2005), this paper introduces intralocalism as a way to study the entanglement of global cultural flows in grounded social practices. This paper demonstrates the analytic utility of intralocalism through an examination of music video production, distribution, and reception in Kenya.
News Media Uses During War and Conflict: The Case of the Syrian Civil War • Claudia Kozman, Lebanese American University; Jad Melki, Lebanese American University • Using the Syrian conflict as a case study, this survey of displaced Syrian nationals in four countries revealed that the major uses and gratifications of traditional and new media is receiving and understanding information, ahead of entertainment and overcoming loneliness. Among all media, TV consumption showed the highest correlation with people’s perception of TV as useful for providing information about Syria. Among digital media, social media were the most important in receiving information about Syria.
A New Sensation? Exploring Sensationalism, Online Journalism and Social Media Audiences across the Americas • Danielle Kilgo, University of Texas at Austin; Summer Harlow, Florida State University; Victor Garcia-Perdomo, University of Texas at Austin/Universidad de La Sabana, Colombia; Ramón Salaverría, University of Navarra • Sensationalism is a term without complete consensus among scholars, and its meaning and implications have not been reconsidered for a digital environment. This study analyzes 500 articles from digitally native news organizations across the Americas, evaluating the sensational treatment of news categories and values, and their associated social media interactions on Facebook and Twitter. Findings suggest that characteristics of sensationalism have shifted, and audiences are not necessarily more likely to respond to sensational treatments.
Collectivism Appeal and Message Frames in Environmental Advertising – A Comparison between China and the U.S. • Fei Xue • The current study examined the effects of appeal types (self vs. group) and message framing (positive vs. negative) on American and Chinese consumers’ responses to environmental advertising. It was found that group appeal generated higher level of green trust and purchase intention in both countries. However, positive message frames seemed to work better for American consumers while negative message frames were more effective among Chinese consumers.
Sourcing International News: A comparative Study of Five Western Newspapers’ Reporting on the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands Dispute • Guofeng Wang, School of Foreign Language Studies, Ningbo Institute of Technology, Zhejiang University • This study examines the sources of information used by five Western newspapers from 2011 through 2013 to report on the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands territorial dispute between China and Japan. A quantitative analysis of sources and a qualitative approach to news frame analysis in the selected U.S., U.K., Australian, French and German newspapers reveals many similarities in their reporting on this ongoing conflict. This study also shows that while the selection of one source or another does not ultimately determine how a news article is framed, identifiable sourcing patterns do exert a significant influence on the overall balance or bias of the reporting.
Discursive Construction of Territorial Disputes: Foreign Newspaper Reporting • Guofeng Wang, School of Foreign Language Studies, Ningbo Institute of Technology, Zhejiang University • This study examines how five foreign newspapers in the U.S., U.K., Germany, France and Australia discursively construct the Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands dispute through a quantitative analysis. The findings reveal that they share a similar intergroup conflict schema based on competition and the pursuit of respective national interests, and that noticeable differences between the editorial position of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung and that of the others may be due to current public opinion of Germany’s socio-historical context.
What Moves Young People to Journalism in a Transitional Country?: Intrinsic and Extrinsic Motivations for Working in Journalism in Serbia • Ivanka Pjesivac, University of Georgia • This study examined the motivations among journalism students in Serbia, through a national survey at four major journalism programs in the country. Both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations had a significant impact on willingness to work in journalism, with the moderating effect of experience. The study is the first one conducted in a transitional country of Eastern Europe. The results are discussed in the context of the Self-Determination Theory of motivations applied to international journalism.
Perspectives of journalists, educators, trainers and experts on news media reporting of Islam and Muslims • Jacqui Ewart, Griffith University; Mark Pearson, Griffith University; Guy Healy, Griffith University • This paper uses data from an Australian study to ascertain issues associated with news media coverage of Islam and Muslims from the perspectives of journalists, journalism educators and media trainers. We draw on data from interviews with 37 journalists, editors, educators, media trainers, Muslim community leaders and other experts located in Australia and New Zealand to explore their understandings of the ways stories about Islam and Muslims are reported and why.
Attitude change among U.S. adults after the Castro-Obama announcement: The role of agenda-setting • Jami Fullerton; alice kendrick, smu; Sheri Broyles, 1155University of North Texas • The United States and Cuba made history in late 2014 by announcing the resumption of diplomatic relations. Using the media coverage and social media content related to the announcements as a quasi-experimental stimulus, this pre-post-study noted increases in U.S. adults’ levels of perceived knowledge, salience of attributes as well as attitudes toward Cuba after the joint proclamations. Results suggest that media coverage and social media content played major roles in influencing both public knowledge and attitudes toward Cuba as a country. These first- and second-level agenda-setting effects are positioned within the Model of Country Concept as an example of how a powerful byproduct of international media can factor in both cognitive and affective evaluations among the citizens of one country about the government and citizenry of another.
New Digital Dialogue? A Content Analysis of Chinese Political Elites’ Use of Sina Weibo • Jiawei Liu, Washington State University; Wenjie Yan • This study aims to add current understanding of what Chinese politicians use Sina Weibo for, as well as whether and to what extent they use Sina Weibo to communicate with the public. We content analyzed 69 Chinese politicians’ Sina Weibo posts between January 1 and March 31, 2015. Our results showed that Chinese political elites actively read and repost Weibo. However, they still communicate with the public in a predominantly top-down manner on Sina Weibo.
The Networks of Global Journalism: Global news construction through the collaboration of global news startups with freelancers • lea hellmueller; Sadia Cheema; Xu Zhang • This study explored the way global news startups connect freelancers with traditional news organizations. Through ten interviews with founders and editors the results reveal a networked marketplace of global journalism: The startups build on new technologies as well as on-the-ground evidence as their business model and de-localize the distribution of news within a digital marketplace. Through a content analysis of their edited stories (N=226), global journalism as an outcome of this marketplace is discussed.
Disentangling and priming the perceived media credibility in Singapore: Declared/theoretical versus tacit/applied definitions • Lelia Samson, Nanyang Technological University • The purpose of this paper is twofold: First, it explores what audiences associate with the notion of media credibility in Singapore. It thus investigates to what extent do Singaporean audiences associate the notion of media credibility with standard journalistic practices, with issues of press independence, and with dimensions of social consensus and popularity. These associations are examined within the context of the Singaporean audiences’ responses to declared/theoretical versus the tacit/applied definitions of credibility. Second, the current study examines whether dominant and alternative news sources can prime different meanings in audiences. 112 volunteers participated in a mixed factorial experiment and their open ended responses were content analyzed. Results indicate that media credibility was least associated with notions of press independence. Interesting findings were found between the declared/theoretical versus the tacit/applied definitions. Singaporean audiences associated the journalistic practices for the declared/theoretical definition of media credibility up to 78% of the cases – but their tacit/applied definition of credibility are associated with journalistic practices for only 36% of the cases; and they only associated the dimensions of readership and popularity for the declared/theoretical definition for 5% of the cases. But their associations with the dimensions of readership and popularity for the tacit/applied definition of credibility reach over 52% of the cases. Priming of dominant versus alternative news sources indeed influenced the perceived credibility and the meaning activation as expected.
At A Crossroads or Caught in the Crossfire? Crime Coverage Concerns for Democracy in Portugal, Spain, and Italy • Maggie Patterson, Duquesne University; Romayne Smith Fullerton, Western University of Ontario; Jorge Tunon, Carlos III University of Madrid • This study of crime reporting shows that keeping crime records secret hurts democratic consolidation. While many reporters and journalism experts interviewed claimed to value the presumption of innocence, many skirted restrictions by getting leaks from police and prosecutors. This porous secrecy leads to publication of rumors and unreliable eye-witness accounts. Four exacerbating factors affect this reporting method: widespread “clientelism;” a partisan news media; an alternative definition of “public interest”; and weak professionalism.
Localness and Orientalism in The New York Times • Marcus Funk, Sam Houston State University • Computerized content analysis of New York Times coverage demonstrates that orientalist language is used significantly more frequently when covering Middle Eastern nations and the American South than the Tri-State Area. This analysis of 15 years of Times coverage also finds that unifying language is more common concerning the Middle East and American South than Tri-State Area, but argues such positive language is othering and orientalizing. It further postulates that orientalism is rooted in cultural distance.
Covering Argentine Media Reform: Framing the Conversation to Keep Control • Mariana De Maio, San Diego State University • Using second-level agenda-setting and framing theories and content analysis, this paper examines the coverage of the Argentina’s 2009 media reform. To investigate the attributes media used in framing the law, data were collected from three national newspapers’ online publications (Clarín, La Nación, and Página/12). Results from the analysis suggest that the three newspapers framed the media reform debate using different attributes and tone.
Explaining the formation of online news startup in France and the US: A field analysis • Matthew Powers, University of Washington, Seattle • This paper explores the differential formation of online news startups in France and the US. Drawing on interviews with journalists and Bourdieu’s field theory, we argue that while journalists in both countries created startups as a way to enter into the journalistic field, the volume of capital they held varied as a result of journalism’s structural position vis-à-vis the field of power. These differences shaped the extent and style of online startups in both places.
The International News Hole: Still Shrinking and Linking? 25 Years of New York Times Foreign News Coverage • Meghan Sobel, Regis University; Seoyeon Kim; Daniel Riffe • This study uses quantitative content analysis of 25 years of New York Times international news coverage to extend the exploration of how nations’ economic status impacts the amount and topic of coverage received and how coverage is linked to American interests. Data suggest an increase in the percentage of foreign news items, with growing attention given to low- and middle-income countries. However, U.S. links are prevalent and developing country coverage remains largely negative.
Everything’s Negative About Nigeria: A Study of U.S. Media Reporting on Nigeria • Oluseyi Adegbola; Sherice Gearhart, Texas Tech University; Jacqueline Mitchell, University of Nebraska at Omaha • U.S. television coverage of other countries can be misrepresented or go under-reported. Utilizing media framing theory, the current study content analyzes 10 years of U.S. television media coverage of Nigeria, Africa’s most populous nation. Reports broadcast by the big three networks were coded for issues, sources, valence, and frames (N = 643). Results corroborate existing research regarding the predominance of episodic frames and negative coverage and present new findings pertinent to coverage of foreign nations.
Social Media As A Marketing Tool: Why Kuwaiti Women Entrepreneurs Prefer Instagram To Sell Their Fashions, Food, And Other Products • Shaikhah Alghaith, Colorado State University — Department of Journalism & Media Communication; Kris Kodrich, Colorado State University — Department of Journalism & Media Communication • The purpose of this study is to identify the preferred types of social media adopted by Kuwaiti women entrepreneurs. Instagram was found to be the most adopted among women entrepreneurs to utilize as a marketing tool. Rogers’ (2003) Diffusion of Innovations theory was applied to explore the attributes of Instagram. The attributes of Instagram that influenced Kuwaiti women entrepreneurs’ decision to adopt it include photo-sharing nature (relative advantage), ease of use (complexity), and popularity (observability).
Visual Dissent: Examining Framing, Multimedia, and Social Media Recommendations in Protest Coverage of Ayotzinapa, Mexico • Summer Harlow, Florida State University; Ramón Salaverría, University of Navarra; Danielle Kilgo, University of Texas at Austin; Victor Garcia-Perdomo, University of Texas at Austin/Universidad de La Sabana, Colombia • The 2014 forced disappearance of 43 college students from Ayotzinapa, Mexico prompted protests throughout Mexico and the world. This bilingual, cross-national study of multimedia features in stories related to the Ayotzinapa protests examines how social media users responded to news coverage of the protests. This study sheds light on differences in mainstream, alternative, and online media outlets’ coverage of protesters, indicating whether the protest paradigm remains a problem in this digital era of information choice.
Factoring media use into media system theory — An examination of 14 European nations (2002-2010) • Xabier Meilan, University of Girona; Denis Wu • This study incorporates media use pattern into examining three distinct media systems proposed by Hallin and Mancini (2004). The uses of newspapers, radio, television, and Internet in European Social Surveys were included. North-Central European nations, particularly the Nordic countries, demonstrate more widespread media use than other European nations. Media-use Gini indexes support Hallin and Mancini’s original demarcation. Cluster analysis, however, indicates that the European nations of the three groups slightly differ from the original typology.
The Third-Person Effect of Offensive Advertisements: An Examination in the Chinese Cultural Context • Xiuqin Zeng, Xia’men University; Shanshan Lou; Hong Cheng • This study examined the third-person effect hypothesis (Davison, 1983) in offensive advertising in the Chinese cultural context. Based on a survey of 1,539 Chinese Internet users about the third- and first-person effects among offensive ads, neutral ads, and public service ads, the study inquires into the relationship between the TPE and respondents’ levels of acceptance toward advertising. Besides confirming the TPE existence in an Eastern cultural context, the results suggest that the TPE predict WOM spreading for both offensive and neutral product ads, but not for PSAs. Theoretical contributions and managerial implications of these findings were discussed.
Social Media, Public Discourse and Civic Engagement in Modern China • Yinjiao Ye; Ping Xu; Mingxin Zhang • The current study investigates the relationship between social media use and public discourse and civic engagement in mainland China. A survey of 1, 202 Chinese show that social media use significantly relates to both public discourse and civic engagement. Moreover, political interest modifies the role of social media use in public discourse and civic engagement. Both general trust in people and life satisfaction moderate some of the relationships examined but not all of them.
A cross-cultural comparison of an extended Planned Risk Information Seeking Model • Zhaomeng Niu; Jessica Willoughby • This study tests the Planned Risk Information Seeking Model (PRISM) in China and the United States with a personal risk, and two additional factors: media use and cultural identity. Both additional variables predicted health information seeking intentions and were valuable additions to PRISM. Based on our findings, cultural identity and media use should be considered when designing interventions to address mental health information seeking or evaluating the process of mental health information seeking.
History 2016 Abstracts
Labor’s Rejection: How the National Basketball Players Association blocked management before Congress • Bill Anderson • “Labor’s Slam Dunk” Highlights • Examines how basketball players’ union stopped two leagues from merging. • Explores public relations history from a non-corporate perspective. • Success depended on union efforts and outside factors. • Situates public relations as one of many constructors of meaning.
Two Seminal Events in Motion Picture Public Relations History: How U.S. Court Decisions Twice Changed the Way Movies Are Publicized • Carol Ames, California State University, Fullerton • This qualitative historical study finds that two seminal U.S. court decisions changed entertainment public relations by changing the motion picture industry’s business model. U.S. v. Motion Picture Patents Company (225 F. 800 D.C. Pa. 1915) ended monopoly control of the film business and transformed film public relations from a retail model to the big-business, centralized model of the studio era. U.S. v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. (334 U.S. 131 1948) forced the Hollywood studios to divest their theater chains and ushered in the modern era of specialized PR agencies and independent consultants.
Write on: An analysis of the role of the underground press in three cities • Chad Painter, Eastern New Mexico University • This analysis traced the radical, monitorial, facilitative, and collaborative roles of the underground press in three U.S. cities. Articles were analyzed in 81 underground newspapers published between 1956 and 1983. Publications were analyzed for content and story selection, objectivity, tone, efforts at community building, and relationships to mainstream media. The findings suggest both politics and culture are components of community and democracy. Further, the findings suggest that normative theory previously has been too narrowly conceived.
The Struggle to Describe South Carolina’s Leading Civil Rights Lawyer • Christopher Frear, University of South Carolina • Three events help show how newspaper coverage of the career of South Carolina’s leading civil rights lawyer, Matthew J. Perry, helped create and shape narratives about South Carolina’s African American freedom struggle. The three events significant legally and socially for South Carolina and personally for Perry: the 1963 desegregation of Clemson, Perry’s 1974 campaign for Congress, and his 1979 appointment to the federal bench in Columbia.
Tel Ra Productions & TeleSports Digest: The Unknown Story of American Television’s Early Chronicler and Archivist of US Sports • Daniel Haygood, Elon University • During commercial televisions’ early era, the four television networks featured an extensive offering of sports programming on their prime time schedules. Once the networks began to replace sports programs with entertainment shows, other entities attempted to fill this sports gap. Tel Ra Productions emerged as the leading syndicated producer of television sports programming, beginning in the late 1940s. Its primary program was TeleSports Digest, a thirty-minute show, featuring a wide range of sporting events. Tel Ra also had the rights to some of the most valuable US sports properties, including NFL football, college basketball, Notre Dame football, and others. This research tells the story of Tel Ra Productions, TeleSports Digest, and the portfolio of sports shows created by this Pennsylvania production company. Further, Tel Ra’s role and its significance to sports broadcasting history is explored.
George G. Foster’s Urban Journalism as an Antecedent to Muckraking • Denitsa Yotova, University of Maryland, College Park • This paper examines the writings of George G. Foster in antebellum New York. It analyzes his particular style of social commentary and press criticism as early forms of alternative journalism and muckraking. A review of primary and secondary sources determines that although presented in a more literary, non-fiction style, Foster’s writings demonstrate an analytical and expository approach to journalism that existed long before the most famous muckrakers changed American print culture. By focusing on the work of the largely understudied journalist and litterateur George G. Foster in the context of society, culture, and the press during the mid-nineteenth century, this study demonstrates that such early alternative forms of reporting should be viewed as a compelling journalistic endeavor that engaged both society and the press. Ultimately, Foster’s exposés, as printed in the New York Tribune and later in his books, were aimed at raising the public’s consciousness about the need for moral and social change, and served as a precursor to muckraking.
Full-Court Press: How Segregationist Newspapers Covered an Integrated Virginia High School Basketball Team • Elizabeth Atwood, Hood College; Sara Pietrzak, Hood College • This study explores how newspapers that had opposed school desegregation and supported Virginia’s massive resistance policies covered a local high school basketball team that won the state championship three years after the school was desegregated. Uniquely situated at a nexus of research into community newspapers and studies of sports coverage of racial minorities, this study finds that hometown boosterism trumps racial politics with the newspapers praising the integrated team as a model of cooperation.
Missing the story • James Mueller, University of North Texas • This paper examines coverage of a cavalry fight that blunted a Confederate attack aimed at the Union rear during the decisive third day of the battle of Gettysburg. It studies a sample of major newspapers from both the North and South and suggests that reporters ignored that part of the battle, contributing to a possible misunderstanding of the battle today.
Witness to War: Newsreel Photographer Arthur Menken • Joe Hayden, University of Memphis • In the heyday of American newsreels, Arthur Menken stood at the top of his field. He made a name for himself covering some of the most important events of the 1930s and 1940s. Yet that reputation seems to have slipped into the past. Using contemporary news accounts and many previously unpublished photographs, this study reconstructs the career of an intrepid war correspondent who for a time was the most distinguished documentarian capturing history on film.
The Espionage Conviction of Kansas City Editor Jacob Frohwerk: “A Clear and Present Danger” to the United States • Ken Ward, Ohio University; Aimee Edmondson • In 1918, German-language newspaper editor Jacob Frohwerk was convicted under the Espionage Act for editorials critical of World War I. He appealed to the Supreme Court, where his case was considered alongside landmark First Amendment cases like Schenk. Despite the impact of the case, Frohwerk has been overlooked by historians. This historical analysis utilizes archival documents, newspaper articles, and court and prison records, providing the first thorough consideration of Frohwerk’s career, trial, and lasting impact.
Cowboy Songs from the Cold War Adversary: Listening to RIAS as portrayed in the East German Press • Kevin Grieves, Whitworth University • For much of the Cold War, East Germany attempted to block Western media. This study analyzed East German press’ treatment of East Germans listening to the U.S. Government-run station RIAS Berlin during the period 1946-1953. The analysis points to ambiguity and the conflicted nature of East German attitudes towards outside propaganda messages. These attitudes – competing with enemy media, engaging in counterpropaganda, educating citizens about propaganda, or blocking messages seen as threatening – remain relevant today.
A Genuine Sense of Helplessness: Newsroom Ethnography and Resistance to Management Change at The New York Times in 1974 • Kevin Lerner, Marist College • “In 1974, the management scholar Chris Argyris published an ethnography of the New York Times, though the paper was ineffectively disguised as “”The Daily Planet”” and its editors and business executives each identified only by a single letter. Argyris had unprecedented access to the 40 top editors and executives at the paper, and his book, once decoded by a journalism review called (MORE), provides insight into the un-self critical nature of newsrooms and a reluctance to respond to outside press criticism.
This paper draws on Argyris’s book, cross-referenced with the article from (MORE) that identified major publishing and editorial staff at The Times, as well as the institutional archives of The New York Times, particularly those of its top editor at the time, Abe Rosenthal. Argyris secured access to the Times via its publisher, Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger, but Rosenthal’s papers provide the most thorough portrait of the editorial staff’s oppositional stance toward Argyris. It places Argyris’s failure to effect change at the Times in the context of Wendy Wyatt’s discursive theory of press criticism as well as theories of anti-intellectualism developed by sociologist Daniel Rigney out of the work of historian Richard Hofstadter.”
War of Words: A Comparative Contextual Analysis of newspaper coverage of the Battle of Kontum • Kris Boyle, Brigham Young University • This study compares newspaper coverage of the Battle of Kontum in the Stars and Stripes and The New York Times. The textual analysis revealed the Times appeared more skeptical of the U.S and South Vietnamese success in the battle. The Stars and Stripes was more optimistic and favorable in its coverage. Additionally, the approach used by the Stars and Stripes in reporting the conflict – usually based on first-person accounts – differed from the Times’ big-picture approach.
The Aesthetics of Historiophoty: Ken Burns and the Origins of Visual Effects in the Historical Documentary • Kyle McDaniel, University of Oregon • This study examines the origins of visual effects in the historical documentary film, and investigates how such aesthetic practices and tools engage with historiophoty. Here, historiophoty was explored through visual analyses for archival photographs in the early films of historical documentarian Ken Burns. As such, the significance of this research is to understand how visual effects have the ability to subvert or reinforce aspects of historiophoty and therefore, affect photography’s indexical ties to the past.
Saving Face: How The University of Georgia Survived the Integration Crisis and Maintained Its Image through Stakeholder Management • LaShonda Eaddy, The University of Georgia • Few studies have explored higher education desegregation in the nation’s first state to charter a state-supported university, Georgia. The present study documents the University of Georgia’s integration communication with various groups based on Freeman’s stakeholder theory as well as the University’s public relations response and strategy. The study examines the University’s public relations function and the analysis shows how the public relations strategy was to save face when addressing issues raised by its stakeholder groups.
News Ecosystem During the Birth of the Confederacy: South Carolina Secession in Southern Newspapers • Michael Fuhlhage, Wayne State University; Sarah Walker; Nicholas Prephan; Jade Metzger • This study uses content assessment to examine 822 newspaper articles covering secession in the weeks before, during, and after South Carolina’s secession convention in four Southern newspapers: the Charleston Mercury, New Orleans Picayune, Alexandria Gazette, and Macon Telegraph. The study examines the role of four media of dissemination — telegraphic reports, exchange newspapers, letters, and staff correspondence — in the creation of emergent Confederate nationalism, coverage of disunion, and the spread of secessionist ideas and symbols.
“Russian Journalists and the Great Patriotic War” • Owen V Johnson; Rashad Mammadov • The paper focuses on the role of Russian journalists and their reporting during World War II. We argue that, generally, the historical trajectory of journalism and the press in Russia significantly diverges from the often cited “norm” of the West. We look at the press in Great Patriotic War, and judge them on the basis of institutional culture and on how journalists themselves understand the role of journalists in a particular time and place.
Silent Spring, Loud Legacy: How Elite Media Helped Establish an Environmentalist Icon • Perry Parks, Michigan State University • Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring is widely credited with altering Americans’ environmental consciousness and changing people’s relationship with nature, science, and government. One means by which the book, which chronicled the dangers of pesticides, attained and reinforced its symbolic status in collective memory is through newspaper coverage, which remained persistent through five decades. This study of fifty years of Silent Spring in two elite newspapers traces how news media can help elevate a situated artifact into an enduring icon with contemporary power.
Framing Barry Goldwater: The Extreme Reaction to His 1964 “Extremism” Speech • Rich Shumate, University of Florida • This study examines the extreme reaction by political and media elites to one of the most noteworthy political speeches of the 20th century—Barry Goldwater’s acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican National Convention, in which he said, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” Using a textual analysis of coverage of the convention, this paper posits that frames employed by elite media triggered a negative response to Goldwater’s speech, irrespective of its actual content.
The Social Awakening and The Soul of News • Ronald Rodgers, University of Florida • The long conversation about the role and responsibility of the newspaper a century ago was often hinged to a commonplace conceit of the age – the “social awakening.” A derivative of that conceit was the notion of the “soul of news,” which was at the center of an argument about the newspaper as a public utility whose role as society’s servant trumped the demands of the market and its constraints on journalistic conduct and content.
Ada Patterson: “The Nellie Bly of the West” • Samantha Peko, Ohio University • In 1896, Ada Patterson was making headlines as the St. Louis Republic’s “Nellie Bly.” From climbing the St. Louis City Tower to riding with the St. Louis Fire Chief for a story, Patterson took on any challenge. She was one of many “stunt girls” who used the Bly formula as an opportunity to transition from the society pages to the front pages. This paper explores Patterson’s life, and how her “stunts” helped progress her career.
Is This the Best Philosophy Can Do? Henry R. Luce and the Commission on Freedom of the Press • Stephen Bates, University of Nevada, Las Vegas • After spending $200,000 on it, Time Inc. editor in chief Henry R. Luce renounced the Commission on Freedom of the Press. Many accounts ascribe his stance to financial self-interest: the Commission’s report, A Free and Responsible Press (1947), castigated American journalism. Based on previously unavailable documents, including Luce’s handwritten notes, this paper argues that much of his disenchantment stemmed from Christian metaphysics blended with personal pique.
The Sponsor’s Fight for Audience: A 1930s Radio Case Study • Stephen Perry, Regent University • This study examines the practices of General Foods in areas of stunting, gimmickry, and the use of celebrities to attract, keep, and rebuild an audience for the Byrd Expedition broadcasts, aired on CBS, between 1933 and 1935. The exploration finds evidence that the sponsor was very aware of the need to attract the largest audience possible in order to maximize the positive image of the sponsor’s product through its association with a program. Understanding the purposes and manner in which a sponsor undertook promotion of its program suggests a re-consideration of where rivalry existed in the sponsorship era of broadcasting. Understanding how the mediated representation of exploration was promoted for the benefit of Byrd’s expedition and the program sponsor also sheds light on how future areas of exploration might benefit from well-planned media promotion and programming. The study finds that, when nothing exciting was happening in the process of exploration, hype was used through stunts and gimmicks to attract and maintain the audience. Celebrities were also used, but seem to have been included in the program when other events made it convenient rather than specifically during times of low levels of adventure.
Decade of Deceit: English-Language Press Coverage of the Katyn Massacre in the 1940s • Timothy Roy Gleason, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh • The Katyn Massacre of Polish officers and intelligentsia by the Soviet Union was one of the worst military atrocities of modern European warfare. Often overlooked because of the vicious Nazi genocide of Jews during World War II, Katyn deserves more attention from scholars. This paper uses original sources—English-language press reports and intelligence documents—to better understand what the public was told and what the Allied governments knew about Katyn.
‘They Couldn’t Bring Me Down’: Gender and Agency in the Careers of Midwestern Women Broadcasters • Tracy Lucht, Iowa State University; Kelsey Batschelet, Iowa State University • This study uses in-depth interviews and historical analysis to uncover common threads of experience in the careers of Midwestern women who worked in broadcasting before and after feminist activism of the 1970s. The findings illustrate how gender influenced women’s careers at a regional level and show how these women exercised agency to make their way in an industry that did not always welcome their full participation.
Who Has Authority? The Construction of Collective Memory in Hong Kong Protest • Yin Wu, University of Wisconsin-Madison • Over 1,000 people gathered recently in memory of Occupy Central movement in Hong Kong a year ago. The one-year anniversary of Occupy Central movement is of particular interest for this study.Using theoretical framework of collective memory, this study compared three types of local press in Hong Kong: the pro-government press, the pro-democracy press, and the local-based press. The results reflect a competing sets of cultural values on pro-government and pro-democracy press, and a local-interest-focused coverage on the local newspapers in the construction of collective memory.
Electronic News 2016 Abstracts
Anchor Appearance: Matters of Gender • April Newton, University of Maryland, College Park; Linda Steiner, U of Maryland • This research investigated the experiences of on-air news anchors regarding their physical appearance. Specifically, the goal was to study what kinds of comments broadcast anchors have received from audience members, colleagues, or bosses, and whether or how the experiences of men and women differ. Through in-depth interviews with anchors and meteorologists, this research shows that women receive significantly more critical comments than do men and that most of those comments are about appearance.
Parasocial Interaction and Newscast Viewing: Extending the Effect from English Language to Spanish Language TV News • Ashley Gimbal, Arizona State University; Kirstin Pellizzaro • Parasocial interaction has been widely studied in the English language news market, but has never been used to understand the phenomenon within the ever growing Spanish language broadcast news market.. This study sought to fill a gap in the literature while adding to parasocial interaction research. Through the use of an online survey, this study found a significant difference in parasocial interaction levels between English language and Spanish language broadcast news audiences.
T.V. Talking Heads and the Nielsen Sweeps: An analysis of Rhetorical Complexity, Charisma and Ideology in Opinionated Cable News. • Ben Wasike, University Of Texas Rio Grande Valley • This study examined the rhetorical complexity and charisma of opinionated cable news show hosts in respect to sweeps months using integrative complexity as the theoretical guide and computerized content analysis. Liberal hosts were more complex rhetorically and were also more charismatic. Both complexity and charisma correlated with ideology and the hosts displayed more complexity during non-sweep months. Overall, opinionated hosts react to the sweeps by damping down their rhetorical complexity and charisma during sweeps months.
Even a Celebrity Journalist Can’t Have an Opinion: Post-Millenials’ Recognition and Evaluation of Journalists and News Brands on Twitter • D. Jasun Carr, Idaho State University; Mitchell Bard, Iona College • Post-Millenials have exhibited decreasing levels of news usage but increased consumption of news via social media, more pronounced than the changes in older cohorts. These changes raise questions about the role of media skepticism and the recognition and evaluation of journalists and non-journalist information sources. This study employs an experimental design to examine how media branding influences Post-Milleinals’ assessments of credibility, objectivity, and evaluations of the individual and information presented on a Twitter feed.
Tweetkeeping NBC’s Olympics: A Qualitative Content Analysis of the @NBCOlympics Twitter Account Gatekeeping Practices • Daniel Sipocz, Berry College • This qualitative content analysis examined the gatekeeping practices of the @NBC Twitter account as well as the network’s relationship with its Twitter audience during the 2012 and 2014 Olympics. Findings illustrate NBC’s social media gatekeeping is similar to its television gatekeeping practices. Further, its Twitter presence acted as a promotional vehicle to drive online audiences back to the traditional television broadcast where the network generates most if its revenue from Olympic coverage.
Sunday Morning Talk Shows and Portrayals of Public Opinion during the 2012 Presidential Campaign • Dylan McLemore, Auburn University at Montgomery • Public opinion polls can influence public opinion. This study considers how Sunday morning political talk shows used public opinion polls during the 2012 presidential campaign. Poll-based differentiation strategies are hypothesized and tested. Some programs relied heavily on their own networks’ polls, establishing legitimacy. All programs presented a tighter horserace than polls suggested. However, partisan bias did not appear to be a motivation. Results are discussed and methodological considerations for future research are presented.
Out of Bounds? How Gawker’s Outing a Married Man Fits into the Boundaries of Journalism • Edson Tandoc, Nanyang Technological University; Joy Jenkins, University of Missouri • Gawker ignited a controversy when it published an article in July 2015 about a married Conde Nast executive who allegedly sought the services of a gay escort. The popular blog eventually removed the article following an almost universal condemnation from readers and other journalists. This study considers this case as a critical incident in journalism that provoked reflections among journalists and audiences about the boundaries of acceptable journalistic practice. Four themes emerged from the analysis of 65 news articles and 2,203 online comments: First, discussions focused on whether Gawker is a news organization. Second, journalists and audiences questioned whether the article meets the definition of news. Third, discussions touched on questions of journalism ethics. Finally, online commenters engaged in a meta-discourse, examining their own community, while journalists also paid attention to such discourse, recognizing audiences as part of the interpretive community engaged in reflecting about the boundaries of journalism.
Video Goes Vertical: Local News Videographers Discuss the Problems and the Potential of Vertical Video • Gino Canella, University of Colorado Boulder • By utilizing 15 in-depth interviews with current and former local television news videographers and editors, this paper examines vertical video and what impact it is having on the production of local TV news. I analyze (1) the discourse video professionals use to distinguish their work as professional while labeling 9×16 video “amateur,” (2) what role vertical video has on influencing video professionals’ daily newsroom responsibilities, and (3) where it fits within the business of local TV news.
WDBJ: When TV News Becomes the News, A Social Network Analysis • Jeremy Harris Lipschultz, UNO Social Media Lab, School of Communication • The purpose of this paper is to explore Twitter conversation related to the August 25, 2015 shooting deaths of Parker and Ward, as well as the injury of Gardner,during their WDBJ in Roanoke, Virginia live report. The initial breaking news top Twitter accounts and hashtags were replaced with emerging topics and influencers, as the conversation shifted over time. The gun control debate activated a political conversation with polarized clusters, conspiracy theory videos, and overall shift from shooting event to gun control issues.
Are traditional journalism principles still alive and well in today’s local TV newsrooms? • Keren Henderson, Syracuse University; Michael Cremedas • This study surveyed 348 local TV journalists to learn whether—given the demands of the contemporary, conglomerated television news industry—they still adhere to traditional journalistic principles. The findings suggest that, by and large, reporters make a determined effort to uphold good journalism practices despite management pressures to produce increasingly higher volumes of news content more quickly and with fewer resources.
Audience Research and Web Features of Radio Stations in A Time of Uncertainty • Lu Wu, UNC-Chapel Hill; Daniel Riffe • This study examined news radio managers’ self-reported beliefs about their organizations’ marketing orientation and their Website features. Combining a national survey of news radio managers with data from a content analysis of radio station Websites and secondary data from industry resources, this study found that external factors had limited influence on marketing orientations in news radio stations and what determined radio stations’ Website features largely resided in the organizational goals and resources allocation.
When “News Experts” Became “Showmen”: The 1948 National Conventions and the Roots of Live Coverage • Marilyn Greenwald, Ohio University • “This paper reviews the 1948 political conventions – the nation’s first televised conventions– and discusses how the introduction of television into the political process parallels in some ways the role the Internet played in coverage of the 2004 conventions. Using both primary and secondary sources, the author will show that the introduction of television into the convention process was chaotic, turbulent, and often comical, but also tremendously eye opening for those in front of and behind the camera. The injection of the camera into the political process introduced the concept of “infotainment” by forcing correspondents to realize that the visual aspect of television made entertainers of all of them. This paper will have three specific purposes: first, it will review some of the details of coverage and discuss how those involved handled what today seem like mundane challenges: for instance, applying flattering makeup for the camera, coping with temperamental equipment, and filling hours of open airtime; second, the paper will point out similarities to today’s media environment — like today, journalism was undergoing a sea change brought on by a variety of factors triggered primarily by advances in technology; and third, it will offer examples that point to a departure by news managers in the definition of news – one that tilted in the direction of entertainment.”
Age nothing but a number? Experience’s impact on perceptions of journalistic norms • Patrick Ferrucci, U of Colorado • This study examines how experience within the field of journalism affects perceptions of journalistic norms and success. Utilizing in-depth interviews with 53 digital journalists working in both legacy and digitally native newsrooms, the results show that veteran journalists (10+ years) and less-experienced (5 years or less) have differing views on both traditional norms and definitions of success. The results are interpreted through the lens of Robert Merton’s theory of cumulative advantage.
A History of Fallen Broadcast Journalists: Dying in the Line of Duty, at Home and Abroad and on Live TV • Raymond McCaffrey • This historical study examined how broadcast journalists have died on assignment, including the assassination of George Polk nearly 70 years ago and the recent fatal shootings of two Virginia journalists on live TV. The best known of the 110 U.S. fallen broadcast journalists on the Newseum’s Journalists Memorial died on foreign assignment. The New York Times covered about 73 percent of them compared to about 49 percent who perished while facing unimagined dangers at home.
Melodramatic animation in crime news and news information learning • Wai Han Lo; Benjamin Ka Lun Cheng • This study is conducted within the framework of dual-coding hypothesis, and it examines the effects that using melodramatic animation in crime news reports has on the learning of news information among older children in Hong Kong. For this study, 74 older children (mean age = 15.3) participated in an experiment that involved being exposed to news videos that either did or did not include melodramatic animation. The results showed that the participants learned news information better if it was presented with melodramatic animation. The social implications of the results are discussed.
Cultural and Critical Studies 2016 Abstracts
Destabilizing the Nation-State: News Coverage of Citizenship in the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 • Alejandro Morales; Cristina Mislan, University of Missouri, Columbia • This study explores the discourse of citizenship in newspaper coverage of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986. A historical analysis of a twenty-year period reveals how news media have constructed citizenship as a problematic concept threatening to destabilize the nation-state. Such discourse reinforces exclusionary politics, where employers, immigrants, and bureaucratic institutions are positioned against one another. Furthermore, the study provides insight into the ways media help reinforce the boundaries of national sovereignty.
Cognitive Film Theory and the Representation of Corporate Bureaucracy as the Apotheosis of the Banality of Evil • Angela Rulffes, Syracuse University • This study advanced a unique perspective on the banality of evil by examining how it is depicted in film and television through portrayals of corporate wickedness. Specifically, this study used a cognitive film theory lens to analyze three works by Joss Whedon. The results suggest that Whedon portrays banality of evil in the corporate world and indicates, through his works, that breaking away from corporate dominance, particularly through individual liberation, is of critical importance.
A Cowgirl and a Descendant of Slaves: Comparing Newspaper and News Magazine Coverage of Sandra Day O’Connor in 1981 and Thurgood Marshall in 1967 • Boya Xu, University of Maryland • As the first female justice and the first African American justice, Sandra Day O’Connor and Thurgood Marshall have both set irreplaceable marks in the U.S. Supreme Court’s history as inspirational embodiments. This study employs a qualitative textual analysis and examines the two justices’ nomination and confirmation process under mainstream media’s spotlight. It also investigates whether gender and ethnic stereotypes were present in news coverage of the two history-making figures. Five major influential news publications were selected to serve as the source of the study. Research results show that gender and race played some roles in determining each nominee’s qualifications and overall impression in front of the Judiciary Committee, yet the roles were not major compared to the political game analysis that all five publications engaged in larger amount of texts. The liberal or conservative viewpoints each publication shares also contributed to the diverse finding results. It is concluded from this research that news analysis was largely influenced by reporting and organizational bias. And contemporary social movements often served as a direct, larger background for the news making process.
The Corporation as Fellow Advocate: Norfolk and Western Magazine’s Reification of the Corporate Persona in the Cause of Free Enterprise – 1949-1952 • Burton St. John III, Old Dominion University • An underexplored area of organizational rhetoric concerns how the corporation attempts to position itself as a humanlike persona that speaks out on issues that concern the average man. This study of the Norfolk and Western Magazine’s rhetoric in defense of free enterprise in the early 1950’s establishes one example of the rise of the corporate persona in the U.S. and the lingering implication that such a construct presents for the understanding and discussion of pressing issues in the United States.
Doing Journalism and Sex Research: A Sociology of Knowledge Approach • Chelsea Reynolds, University of Minnesota School of Journalism and Mass Communication • This essay introduces a theory of sex reportage as normalizing discourse. It synthesizes the relationship between the normalizing gaze of sexuality studies and the normalizing gaze of news ideology. It extends the utility of representational perspectives when analyzing ideology in news content, including the importance of examining dominant-hegemonic media alongside potentially counter-hegemonic vernacular media. The essay provides methodological recommendations for analyzing sex reportage using a hybrid critical discourse analysis-grounded theory approach.
“You Have No Idea the Feeling of Insult”: Comparative Newspaper Discourses about Civil Rights • Christopher Frear, University of South Carolina • This study looks at four different types of newspapers — an African American weekly in South Carolina, a national African American weekly, a South Carolina white-run daily newspaper, and a national daily — and examines the discourses that each constructed over time and during four specific events in South Carolina civil rights lawyer and federal judge Matthew J. Perry’s career in the American South of the Jim Crow and civil rights era.
NPR, Marketplace, and the Sound of Finance • Diane Cormany, University of Minnesota • Abstract: Marketplace has self-consciously created a program that is different in tone, music, pacing, and even story selection from its financial news competitors. Yet it also claims the largest audience of any broadcast radio or television finance and business program. My paper uniquely combines political economy and generic analysis with theories of affect and financialization (the pervasiveness of finance capital) to demonstrate how Marketplace’s form interprets financial markets for its millions of listeners.
Alan M. Thomas’ Concept of the Active Audience in People Talking Back • Errol Salamon • In 1959, adult educator Alan M. Thomas outlined one of the first concepts of the active broadcast audience in Canada as a force for two-way communication and direct democracy. In 1979, Thomas created People Talking Back, a six-episode participatory television series, in order to facilitate democratic decision making outside of formal educational institutions. This paper brings together Thomas’ concept of the audience, his adult educational broadcasting scholarship, and archival research on People Talking Back.
Fan Representations and Corporate Media Hegemony in The Big Bang Theory • Heather McIntosh • The CBS series The Big Bang Theory (2007-) follows four nerdy friends who regularly engage a range of fandoms, offering an opportunity to engage fan representations through the ideological hegemony of a situation comedy. An examination of the show through themes of the fans’ participatory activities, media and merchandise consumption, and their social connections reveals that while the representations appear more positive, they offer limited range of fan behaviors that aligns with corporate media interests.
Aluta 2.0: A Qualitative Exploration of the emergence of social media as space for social movement contention in Ghana • Henry Boachi, Rutgers University • This interview-based study explores reasons why the #OccupyFlagStaffHouse movement in Ghana used social media – the least accessible form of media – as a mobilization tool, amidst a ubiquitous traditional mass media landscape. The study found that the usage of social media – Facebook and Twitter – was motivated by the skills of the movement members, the comparative anonymity it provides, desire to reach their primary social media-savvy audience, and to escalate the movement’s concerns beyond Ghana.
Necessary Complexity of Transnational Media Culture: K-pop in the West • Hyeri Jung, The University of Texas at Austin • By conducting close readings of Western fans’ reaction videos to K-pop and online users’ interactive enunciative productivity, this study aims to explore the theoretical validity of imperialism traditions, the nature of transnational media culture of K-pop, Western fans’ encoding/decoding of K-pop, and how and why their reception of the so-called hybridized K-pop creates ideological twists in global/international contexts. The ‘necessary complexity’ of interconnected audiences in ‘deterritorialized mediascapes’ is exemplified in K-pop.
Everything’s a Product: Reconciling the Commodification of Critique • Jared LaGroue, The Pennsylvania State University • Critical scholars face a frustrating ethical dilemma when critique is commodified: how do we reconcile the pleasure/truth of a text when its material production serves contrary capitalist ends? Is it possible to simultaneously celebrate a narrative while condemning its medium? The Lego Movie serves as a relevant pedagogical device for exploring the tension between culture industry and cultural studies arguments that elucidate this dilemma. I first conduct comparative textual and material analyses of The Lego Movie and Screen Junkies’ Honest Trailers parody of the film. I then develop a theoretical-categorical schema in attempt to map the potential normative-axiological positions available for reconciling the ethical dilemma of commodified critique. I conclude by applying this schema to the pedagogical example of The Lego Movie, and by offering potential applications of the reflexive practices associated with utilization of this model, and how this exploration aids efforts to achieve axiological congruence.
News media development in the Afghan case: The enigma of news media “capture” • Jeannine Relly, The University of Arizona; Margaret Zanger, The University of Arizona • This qualitative study of news media development utilizing the Afghan case examines the challenges facing Afghan journalists (N = 30) nearly 15 years after the fall of the Taliban, more than a decade of news media training, and the year that the U.S. military mission ended in the country. We found that although the majority of journalists were optimistic about the level of professionalism reached in the country, there were constraints at the organization level and from pressures outside of news outlets that made conducting journalistic work remarkable in the current environment. We suggest that future research could look more closely at both media development and the paradox of news media “capture.” We suggest a typology could further refine this work with six distinct forms of capture (economic, political, cultural, legal, bureaucratic, societal) that could be further developed by country.
“Guns don’t kill people…selfies do”: The narcissism fallacy in media coverage of selfie-related deaths • Jessica Hennenfent, University of Georgia • Through a textual analysis of six major news outlets, this research argues that a misinterpretation of the original Narcissus myth leads to a fallacious critique of selfies. Instead, the language used to describe selfie-related deaths indicates exhibitionism is a more accurate description of the selfie-taking phenomenon. This discursive shift parallels the analog to digital shift, in which it is not enough to capture one’s self image, but the image also needs to be shared.
“Multicultural-phobia” in Rumors: Why Rumors about Jasmine Lee Matter • Jinsook Kim, The University of Texas at Austin • This study explores rumors about Jasmine Lee, the first non-ethnic naturalized Korean lawmaker. Although rumors are often dismissed as the distribution of false information, this paper foregrounds rumors as political discourse that reflects certain social conditions and political anxieties. Since Lee is a symbolic figure of Korean multiculturalism, I argue that the consistent production and circulation of rumors about her is crystallized from the tension between state-led multiculturalism, and Koreans’ anxieties around changing nationhood
From overt to covert: An analysis of HIV/AIDS PSAs from 1989-1994 and 2009-2014 • Kellie Stanfield, University of Missouri • Since 1981, the CDC has released PSAs about HIV/AIDS. Despite this effort, more than 1.1 million people in the United States have the infection. Using media tropes as a theoretical concept and analytical method, this study engages in textual analysis of the CDC’s first televised PSA campaign and its most recent campaign. The analysis reveals the PSAs are socially and historically bound, and shows health campaigns can provide insights into complex cultural and social values.
Knowledge ghettos: The end of the public sphere? • Kevin Curran, Univ of Oklahoma • Habermas wrote of the need for informed debate in the public sphere. Donohue, Tichenor and Olien’s knowledge gap theory said those with more knowledge have more power. Applying knowledge gap theory to media, Bard suggests people who receive information from partisan sources are living in a knowledge ghetto. This paper will examine Bard’s propositions through audience measurements, electoral results or public actions. The result is a detriment to the public sphere.
Who Uses Dewey and Why? Remembering and Forgetting John Dewey in Communication Studies • Lana Rakow, University of North Dakota • Despite the prominence of communication in John Dewey’s philosophy, the field has a history both of trying to remember and of remembering in order to dismiss his ideas. By mapping his place in speech, rhetoric, journalism, and mass communication, this critical review demonstrates there has been too little attention to Dewey’s work; a conflation with pragmatism, progressivism, and the Chicago School; and received histories that obscure his approach to power and knowledge.
Simulacra-A Concept Explication • Leah Stone, Colorado State University • American media use simulacra across various media platforms to foster a synergistic consumer “hyperreality” of an image or object. The creation of media simulacra, a generation of models of a real object without origin or reality, defines American consumption culture. This explication will examine the concept simulacra and its key dimensions and epistemology, uses in both media and other research fields, and how simulacra may be refined and used as a lens for future research.
Habermas’s Account of Public Judgment: Future Directions for the Age of Networked Communication • Lewis Friedland; Thomas Hove • This paper analyzes the degree to which Habermas’s theories remain useful for evaluating the quality of public opinion in an age of networked communication. First, we review his account of how the media system enables societies to generate considered public opinion. Second, we explain why his description of the media system is outdated. Third, we identify a series of problems that need to be addressed by any theory of rational democracy.
How to understand a woman director? : A perspective of Chinese women audience members on Ann Hui’s The Golden Era (2014) v Li Chen, Syracuse University v The issue that this study addresses is the unprivileged status of women directors and women audiences in the male-dominated film industry in China. The purpose of this study is to use the concept of gender practice to explore how Chinese women audience members make sense of Ann Hui and her films. 18 in-depth interviews were conducted. The results indicated that ordinary Chinese women audience members are still unfamiliar with the concept of gender.
When Sexual Assault Becomes the Story: The Gendered War Reporter in the Media Text • Lindsay Palmer • This paper conducts an analysis of the CBS 60 Minutes interview that followed correspondent Lara Logan’s sexual assault during the 2011 Egyptian uprising. Drawing upon a mixed set of methods deployed in the humanist field of film and media studies, I first provide some important background information on the cultural context in which Logan’s assault unfolded, analyzing the journalistic discourse on the broader coverage of the 2011 uprisings in Egypt. In order to examine this discourse, I conduct a critical reading of the English-language journalism trade articles published during the winter of 2011. I also draw upon the professional insights and cultural performances of 20 journalists I have interviewed, each of whom covered the 2011 protests. After providing this context, I finally turn to a textual analysis of Logan’s interview, illuminating the contradictory ways in which she is represented in that media text. In doing this, I argue that while the CBS video claims to facilitate Logan’s belated transcendence of Tahrir Square—casting her as an agent who can “speak out” on behalf of female war reporters—the interview ultimately represents Logan as the white, feminine victim of a racialized other: the abstract “Egyptian male,” who cannot be trusted to pilot Egypt toward a new political future.
Always Already Hailed: Negotiating Memory and Identity at the Newseum • Lori Amber Roessner, University of Tennessee, Knoxville; Carrie Teresa, Niagara University • This autoethnography considers the experiences of two media scholars at the Newseum in Washington, D.C., on August 10, 2013, and their digital return in February 2016. It considers the Newseum’s role in how we remember and why we forget certain aspects of American journalism and the relationship between this institutional site of memory and our individual and collective identities (D’Amore & Meriwether, 2013; Kitch, 2002; Schudson, 1995). The self-reflexive, autobiographical methodological form allows the historians of media and culture to consider the calls of Zelizer (1995), Kitch (2006), and Hume (2010) for more conceptual clarity in our understandings of public, social, cultural, and collective memory; for new understandings of the reception and negotiation of media memory-texts and sites of memory; and for the operation of memory in physical and digital landscapes, respectively.
A Normative History of Identifying Native-Americans as Mascots: The Redskins Case Study • Meghan Delsite; Bob Trumpbour, Penn State Altoona • The use of Native-Americans for team names in American sports teams has elicited a broad range of reactions in media, ranging from anger to aggressive defense of such practices. This research focuses on the use of the Redskins name in professional sports and the use of Native-American mascots in general as a practice that has within it an implicit and explicit power-dynamic. Normative approaches are presented to suggest a resolution that transcends power-based ideologies.
Identity, Representation and Travel: Negotiated and Transactional Communication in Tourism • Meta G. Carstarphen, University of Oklahoma • Discourse about tourism is not just about a living, breathing space. It is a narrative about ourselves, if we are tourists, and how we see ourselves in relationship to others. Considering Stuart Hall’s key ideas about identity and representation, this paper argues for a new critique about how the experience of travel is constructed in journalism, marketing and public relations.
Please exit through the gift shop: On the ethics of the 9/11 Memorial Museum Store • Miles Sari, Washington State University • Is it ethical for the 9/11 Museum to have a gift shop? Adopting Bandura’s notion of moral disengagement, this paper addresses this question by arguing that the shop is unethical because it forges an inhumane commercial space where visitors’ anxiety and need for closure is negotiated through consuming souvenirs. By capitalizing on the deaths of dehumanized 9/11 victims, under the guise of sustaining the memorial, visitors are alienated from the devastation associated with Ground Zero.
Mobile Masculinities: An Investigation of Networked Masculinities in Gay Dating Apps • Nathian Rodriguez, Texas Tech University; Jennifer Huemmer, Texas Tech University; Lindsey Blumell, Copenhagen Business School/Texas Tech University • This study argues that hegemonic masculinity and inclusive masculinity are conciliatory when applied to networked masculinities in homosexual spaces. It contends hegemonic masculinity is a macro-level process that informs micro-level processes of inclusive masculinity. Employing a textual analysis of 500 individual profiles in gay dating apps (Scruff, GROWLr, GuySpy and Hornet), findings indicate networked masculinities informed by hegemonic masculinity. A process of “mascing” also resulted from the data.
What were newspapers for? Artistic and literary responses to the 2009 newspaper crisis • Nicholas Gilewicz, Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania • 2009 newspaper closures caused extensive reflection in journalism about newspapers’ future and generated responses from interrelated fields. Two case studies—the 2010 New Museum of Contemporary Art exhibition The Last Newspaper and the 2009 literary journal McSweeney’s publication of the San Francisco Panorama newspaper prototype, and news coverage of each—illustrate how representatives of the art and literary worlds mediatize the newspaper materially and conceptually as a mnemonic deposit of sociocultural ideas about newspaper journalism.
Constructing a “First” First Lady Through Memory: The Case of China’s Peng Liyuan • Qi Ling, The University of Iowa; Dan Berkowitz, University of Iowa • Our study analyzed how cultural memory of previous and contemporary first ladies was used as journalistic devices to make sense of the unusual case of Peng Liyuan, the current first lady of China. When faced with reporting international news in little-understood cultural dimensions, the media turn to memory of the familiar to make the news resonant, thus reaffirming the cultural and gender values that are associated with the a typical Western first lady.
Living with Images of Suffering: A Critical Examination of News Photographs Depicting the Dead • Richard Lewis, The University of Southern Mississippi • This paper examines the historic development and contemporary reactions to images of corpses published in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Framed by a discussion of Susan Sontag’s concern over the anesthetic effect of photographs of suffering and Stuart Hall concept of preferred, negotiated and oppositional readings, it argues that Hurricane Katrina represented a rare circumstance when shocking images of dead bodies were published by the commercial press without presenting obvious and overt challenge to hegemony.
Discourse and Localization of Children’s Rights in Youth-Produced Digital Media in the Global South • Sanjay Asthana, Middle Tennessee State University • Through the study of four UNICEF supported youth media initiatives from Palestine, Israel, Ghana, and South Africa, the paper will theorize and generate new empirical knowledge about the encounter between constructions of youth in rights based discourses of UNICEF and young people’s digital media narratives. The research on children and youth media practices, encountered instances where the universal discourse of children’s rights does not connect with the local realities of youth (constraints), but found that young people translate children’s rights to construct new meanings to suit their local contexts and experiences (possibilities). It is this double dialectic, of constraints and possibilities, revealed in youth digital media narratives that the article examines in greater detail, and offers reflections on the interconnectedness among the triptych children’s rights, digital media, and youth life-worlds.
Precarious copycats: The subaltern problem in Shanzhai culture • Sara Liao, Department of Radio-TV-Film, The University of Texas at Austin • This study evaluates the discourse of Shanzhai culture, that is, the copycat phenomenon, in its historical, social-political, and cultural context. A close reading of Shanzhai cellphones and fashion copycats complicates the subaltern problem which posits stable social relations between elites and subalterns or bourgeoisie and workers. In contemporary China, I see precarity embodies both a material condition of one’s socio-economic position, and an anthropological or existential condition of ontologically uncertainty, both of which intensify and approach closer to each other. Precarity in Shanzhai reflects and constitutes today’s sensibility of class, labor, and gender. Today’s sensation of Shanzhai culture in general and Shanzhai fashion in particular, where women make fashion copycats, challenges the way we perceive and experience the precariousness under neoliberalism.
Journalists’ Normative Discursive Constructions of Political Viewpoint Diversity • Tim Vos, University of Missouri; David Wolfgang, University of Missouri • This interview-based study with 18 U.S. political journalists explores how they conceptualize political viewpoint diversity as a journalistic norm in a time in which news and the news media ecology are changing. The political journalists still embrace the normative role of providing audiences with a range of political viewpoints, but have assumptions about democracy that seem to thwart their intentions. The implications for field theory are considered.
“LinkedIn is my office; Facebook my living room, Twitter the neighborhood bar”: Media scholars’ liminal use of social media for peer and public communication • Victoria LaPoe, WKU; Candi Carter Olson, Utah State University; Stine Eckert • This study grounds 45 interviews with media scholars in liminality theory and analyzes how they use social media as they transition to an offline and online communication paradigm. Scholars employ personal strategies to decide if and how to integrate social media into their professional lives for peer and public communication. Scholars struggle with a double bind of needing to be social media savvy while worrying about career consequences of posting publicly. Few best practices exist.
Reproducing the “Imprint of Power:” Framing the “Creative Class” in Putin’s Russia • Volha Kananovich; Frank Durham • This textual analysis traces the framing of the 2011-2011 anti-Kremlin protests in Russia by the nation’s most popular newspaper Komsomol’skaya Pravda. Findings show that the newspaper shifted its position from discounting the seriousness of the protests to adopting an increasingly negative frame of the protesters once the Putin government made its opposition clear. The pattern shown here describes the abandonment of the newspaper’s nominally middle-ground position in favor of adhering to the state’s political power.
The Spectacular Mo’Ne Davis: Race, Gender, and Sexuality in U.S. Belonging • Zachary Vaughn, Indiana University • Building on Sarah Projansky’s spectacular girlhood proposition, I investigate how Mo’ne Davis complicates our understanding of national belonging in the United States. Davis first became popular in the U.S. mediascape for her phenomenal success in boys Little League baseball, in which she pitched her team into the Little League World Series tournament. Primarily, I am fascinated with a short documentary produced by Spike Lee: “Throw Like a Girl.” I argue that Mo’ne Davis can be seen as a case study in how issues related to gender, race, and perceived sexuality can inform us of the deeply demarcated divisions always already infused in the United States as an imagined community. Davis, and girls like her, expose these ideological and cultural instantiations and can allow us to deconstruct and then reconstruct a new national consciousness that is held together by both our similarities and our differences to begin the process of imagining the U.S. as a melting pot in the truest sense.
Communicating Science, Health, Environment, and Risk 2016 Abstracts
Using Visual Metaphors in Health Messages: A Strategy to Increase Effectiveness for Mental Illness Communication • Allison Lazard, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Benita Bamgbade; Jennah Sontag, University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill; Carolyn Brown • Depression is highly prevalent among college students. Although treatment is often available on university campuses, many stigma-based barriers prevent students from seeking help. Communication strategies, such as the use of metaphors, are needed to reduce barriers. Using a two-phase approach, this study identified how college students conceptualize mental illness, designed messages with conceptual and visual metaphors commonly used, and tested these message to determine their potential as an effective communication strategy to reduce stigma.
How Journalists Characterize Health Inequalities and Redefine Solutions for Native American Audiences • Amanda Hinnant, University of Missouri, School of Journalism; Roma Subramanian; Rokeshia Ashley, University of Missouri-Columbia; Mildred Perreault, University of Missouri/ Appalachian State University; Rachel Young; Ryan Thomas, University of Missouri-Columbia • This research investigates how journalists for Native American communities characterize health inequalities and the issues with covering determinants of health. In-depth interviews (n = 24) revealed a tension between “medical” and “cultural” models of health, contributing to the oversaturation of certain issues. Interviews also amplified the contexts that shape health inequalities, illuminating the roles of historical trauma and the destruction of indigenous health beliefs and behaviors. Failure to recognize the issues can stymie communication efforts.
Poison or Prevention? Unraveling the Linkages between Vaccine-Negative Individuals’ Knowledge Deficiency, Motivations, and Communication Behaviors • Arunima Krishna • The last few decades have seen growing concerns among parents regarding the safety of childhood vaccines, arguably leading to the rise of the anti-vaccine movement. This study is an effort to understand situational and cross-situational factors that influence individuals’ negative attitudes toward vaccines, referred to as vaccine negativity. In doing so, this study identified two categories of reasons for which individuals display vaccine negativity – liberty-related, and safety-related concerns – and elucidated how situational and cross-situational factors influenced each type of vaccine negativity differently. Specifically, this study tested how knowledge deficiency, or acceptance of scientifically inaccurate data about vaccines, and institutional trust influenced negative attitudes toward vaccines. Using the situational theory of problem solving as the theoretical framework, this also identified and tested a knowledge-attitude-motivation-behavior framework of vaccine negative individuals’ cognitions and behaviors about the issue.
Chronic pain: Sources’ framing of post-traumatic stress disorder in The New York Times • Barbara Barnett, University of Kansas; Tien-Tsung Lee, University of Kansas • Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a common reaction after witnessing a violent event. While nearly eight million Americans, including combat veterans, have PTSD, few studies have explored how the condition is represented in mass media. This content analysis examined sources’ characterization of PTSD in New York Times articles. Results show that news stories framed PTSD as a long-term problem, with little chance for recovery, a frame that could negatively affect public policy decisions.
This Is Not A Test: Investigating The Effects Of Cueing And Cognitive Load On Severe Weather Alerts • Carie Cunningham • Climate change is increasing and causing more severe weather events around the globe. Severe weather events require effective communication of incoming dangers and threats to different populations. The current study focuses on investigating ways in which severe weather alerts are attended to and remembered better by audience members. To this end, this study used a 2 (primary task cognitive load: low vs. high) x 2 (weather alert cueing technique: cued vs. non-cued) within-subject experiment to understand how television weather alerts evoke attention and memory from viewers. Participants were exposed to TV films that varied in cognitive load, through which they were exposed to both cued and non-cued weather alerts. The findings show that cognitive load changes viewers’ recognition and memory of the weather alerts, but not of the main content. Furthermore, the interaction of cueing and cognitive load influenced fixation and gaze in attention measures, but not the recall measures for the weather alerts. Results are discussed in the context of dependent variables: visual recognition, information recognition, cued recall, free recall, fixation, and gaze. The findings support some nuances to television viewing under different conditions.
A State-Level Analysis of the Social Media Climate of GMOs in the U.S. • Christopher Wirz, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Xuan Liang, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Michael Xenos; Dominique Brossard, UW-Madison; Dietram Scheufele • This study is a state-level analysis of the relationship between the social media, news, and policy climates related to GMOs. We performed a systematic and exhaustive analysis of geographically-identified tweets related to GMOs from August 1, 2012 through November 30, 2014. We then created a model using a variety of state-level factors to predict pessimistic tweets about GMOs using states as the unit of analysis.
Psychological determinants of college students’ adoption of mobile health applications for personal health management • Chuqing Dong; Lauren Gray; Hao Xu, University of Minnesota – Twin Cities • “Mobile health has been studied for patient care and disease management in the clinical context, but less is known about factors contribute to consumers’ acceptance of mobile health apps for personal health and fitness management.
This study serves as one of the first attempts to understand the psychological determinants of mobile health acceptance among millenials – those most likely to use mobile apps. Built on an extended model combining the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) and the Reasoned Action approach, this multimethod study aimed to identify which proximal determinants and their underlying salient beliefs were most associated with intention to use mobile health apps in the next twelve months.
Results from the qualitative belief elicitation data analysis indicated 14 different positive and negative consequences (behavioral beliefs) of using mobile health apps, 11 social references (normative beliefs) important to the use of mobile health apps, and 9 behavioral circumstances (behavioral control beliefs) that would enable or make it more difficult to use mobile health apps. Results from the quantitative Reasoned action data indicated perceived ease of use and perceived usefulness of the app were positively correlated with attitude towards mobile health app use and perceived usefulness was also positively correlated with intention to use it in the next twelve months. Instrumental attitudes and perceived behavioral control (capacity), as well as several of their underlying beliefs, were the strongest predictors of intention to use mobile health apps in the next twelve months.”
Talkin’ smack: An analysis of news coverage of the heroin epidemic • Erin Willis; David Morris II, University of Oregon • The number of heroin users continues to rise in the United States, creating a public health epidemic that is cause for great concern. Recent heroin use has been linked to opiate abuse and national organizations have identified this issue as a serious public health challenge. The Obama administration recently directed more than $1 billion in funding to expand access to treatment and boost efforts to help those who seek treatment. Newspapers are seen as reliable and credible sources of information, and newspapers’ portrayals of public health problems influence readers’ perceptions about the severity of the problem and solutions to the problem. The current study examined national and city newspapers coverage of heroin. The results of this study inform health communication and public health education efforts and offer practical implications for combatting the heroin epidemic.
Exchanging social support online: A big-data analysis of IBS patients’ interactions on an online health forum from 2008 to 2012 • Fan Yang, Pennsylvania State University; Bu Zhong, Pennsylvania State University • This research conducts a big-data analysis to examine why IBS patients offered social support to peer patients on an online health forum. Social network analysis of 90,965 messages shared among 9,369 patients from 2008-2012 suggests that although having received support from others encourages individuals to offer support in the online community, being able to help others previously also emerges as a significant and long-lasting impetus for social support provision online. Reciprocating support with one another, however, prevents one from keeping offering support on the forum over time. Furthermore, based on sentiment analysis, it is indicated that the extent to which one could freely express emotions for support seeking also serves as a significant predictor for the amount of social support he/she could obtain from others. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
To entertain or to scare? A meta-analytic review on the persuasiveness of emotional appeals in health messages • Fan Yang, Pennsylvania State University; Jinyoung Kim, The Pennsylvania State University • This research conducts a meta-analytic review on the how appealing to positive vs. negative emotions in health messages could persuade. Emotional appeals significantly enhance the persuasiveness of health messages on cognition, attitude, and intention, but not on actual behavior. Appealing to negative rather than positive emotions appears to be more persuasive. Furthermore, richer formats of presentations of health messages are significantly more effective than plain texts. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
A Disagreement on Consensus: A Measured Critique of the Gateway Belief Model and Consensus Messaging Research • Graham Dixon, Washington State University • The newly developed Gateway Belief Model suggests the key to scientific beliefs is one’s perception of a scientific consensus. However, inconsistent findings question the explanatory power of the model and its application. This paper provides further depth to the explanatory power of the model, suggesting consensus messages affect audience segments in different ways. This nuanced perspective of the model can usher in future research seeking to close belief gaps between the lay public and experts.
Communicating inaction-framed risk: Reducing the omission bias via internal causal attribution • Graham Dixon, Washington State University • Despite identical outcomes derived from actions or inactions, people often experience more intense affective reactions toward action-framed outcomes. This “omission bias” presents challenges to communicating various risks. Reporting on two experiments, findings suggest that the omission bias occurs across various risk topics and message stimuli. Importantly, dimensions of causal attribution, such as locus of causality and stability, play a mediating role on the omission bias. Recommendations are made for more effective risk communication practices.
You Win or We Lose: A Conditional Indirect Effect Model of Message Framing in Communicating the Risks of Hydraulic Fracturing • Guanxiong Huang, Michigan State University; Kang Li; Hairong Li • This study explores the effects of message framing and reference frame on risk perception and associated behavior intent. Using an environmental hazard of hydraulic fracturing as an example, a 2 (message framing: gain vs. loss) × 2 (reference frame: self vs. group) between-subject experiment shows significant interaction effects between message framing and reference frame, in that gain-framed message paired with self-referencing frame is most effective in enhancing risk perception whereas the loss-framed message paired with group-referencing frame is most effective in increasing willingness to sign a petition to ban hydraulic fracturing. More theoretical and practical implications for environmental risk communication and persuasive message design are discussed.
Messages Promoting Genetically Modified Crops in the Context of Climate Change: Evidence for Psychological Reactance • Hang Lu, Cornell University; Katherine McComas; John Besley, Michigan State University • Genetic modification (GM) of crops and climate change are arguably two of today’s most challenging science communication issues. Increasingly, these two issues are connected in messages proposing GM as a viable option for ensuring global food security threatened by climate change. This study examines the effects of messages promoting the benefits of GM in the context of climate change. Further, it examines whether attributing the context to “climate change” vs. “global warming” vs. “no cue” leads to different effects. An online sample of U.S. participants (N=1,050) were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: “climate change” cue, “global warming” cue, no cue, or control (no message). Compared to the control, all other conditions increased positive attitudes toward GM. However, the “no cue” condition led to liberals having more positive attitudes and behavioral intentions toward GM than the “climate change” cue condition, an effect mediated by message evaluations.
An Enhanced Theory of Planned Behaviour Perspective: Health Information Seeking on Smartphones Among Domestic Workers • Hattie Liew; Hiu Ying Christine Choy • This exploratory study investigates the antecedents of health information seeking via mobile smartphone (HISM) among migrant domestic workers. 320 Filipina workers in Hong Kong were surveyed. The Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB) was extended with health literacy and external factors like needs of workers’ family as predictors of HISM intention. Findings support the TPB as a predictor of HISM and suggest the importance facilitating health information literacy and technical know-how among migrant domestic workers.
Need for Autonomy as a Motive for Valuing Fairness in Risk Communication • Hwanseok Song, Cornell University • Research shows that people strive to restore autonomy after experiencing its deprivation. An experiment was used to test whether people’s need for autonomy explains why they value non-outcome fairness (i.e., procedural, interpersonal, informational) in risk management contexts. Partial support was found for this effect, moderated by attitudes toward the risk itself. After experiencing autonomy-deprivation, participants who were more negative about the risk valued non-outcome fairness more and technical competence of the risk manager less.
Humor Effects in Advertising on Human Papillomavirus (HPV): The Role of Information Salience, Humor Level, and Objective Knowledge • Hye Jin Yoon; Eunjin (Anna) Kim, Southern Methodist University • As human papillomavirus (HPV) is the most common sexually transmitted disease in the United States, it is imperative that health communicators seek message strategies that educate the public on prevention and treatment. Guided by the elaboration likelihood model (ELM), an experimental study tested the effects of sexually transmitted disease (STD) information salience, humor level, and objective knowledge in HPV public service advertisements (PSAs). The findings show objective knowledge moderating responses to advertisements varying in STD information salience and humor levels. Theoretical implications for humor and knowledge effects in health communication and practical implications regarding the design and targeting of HPV campaigns are provided.
Media Use and Antimicrobial Resistance Misinformation and Misuse: Survey Evidence of Information Channels and Fatalism in Augmenting a Global Health Threat • Jacob Groshek, Boston University; James Katz; Chelsea Cutino; Qiankun Zhong • Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is giving rise to a global public health threat that is not reflected in public opinion of AMR. This study thus proceeds to examine which individuals among the general public are more likely to be misinformed about AMR and report misusing AMR-related products. Specifically, traditional media (newspaper, radio, television) consumption and social media use are modeled as factors which may not only reinforce but perpetuate AMR misinformation and misuse.
Who is Scared of the Ebola Outbreak? The Influence of Discrete Emotions on Risk Perception • Janet Yang; Haoran Chu • Utilizing the appraisal tendency framework, this study analyzed discrete emotion’s influence on the U.S. public’s risk perception and support for risk mitigation measures. An experimental survey based on a nationally representative sample showed that discrete emotions were significantly related to public risk perception. Further, fear exhibited an inhibitive effect on the relationship between systematic processing of risk information and institutional mitigation support. Systematic processing, in contrast, had the most consistent impact on mitigation support.
Sexual Health Intervention Messaging: Proof Positive that Sex Negative Messages are Less Persuasive • Jared Brickman • As comprehensive sexual health education programs are adopted by universities, there is a need to evaluate what messaging approaches might connect best with students. This study measured reactions to sex positive or negative messages, framed as a gain or loss. Participants evaluated 24 messages on their mobile phones. Gain framing was preferred over loss framing, and sex positive messages were rated as more believable and persuasive. An interaction between the two concepts was also found.
Examining the Differential Effects of Emotions: Anxiety, Despair, and Informed Futility • Jay Hmielowski, Washington State University; Rebecca Donaway, Washington State University; Yiran Wang, Washington State University • Using survey data collected during the fall of 2015, we examine the role of different emotions in increasing and decreasing active information seeking and processing behaviors. We replicate results from the Risk Information Seeking and Processing (RISP) model focusing on anxiety as a key variable that triggers these active information seeking behaviors. We also test the informed futility hypothesis, which proposes that learning about an issue leads people to become disengaged with solving the problem.
Public Support for Energy Portfolios in Canada: How Cost and National Energy Portfolios Affect Public Perception of Energy Technologies • Jens Larson; Jiawei Liu, Washington State University; Zena Zena Edwards; Kayla Wakulich; Amanda Boyd, Washington State University • In this study, we examine current energy perceptions in Canada, exploring how regional differences of current electricity-producing energy portfolios and evaluable information affect support for energy sources. Our results show that individuals support electricity-producing energy portfolios that vary significantly by region. We demonstrate through the use of a portfolio approach that evaluable information could significantly change support for electricity-producing energy technologies.
The effects of gain vs. loss framed medical and religious breast cancer survivor testimonies on attitudes and behaviors of African-American female viewers • Jensen Moore, University of Oklahoma • African-American women are at elevated risk for the most advanced form of breast cancer due to late detection. This 2 (Message Type: Religious/Medical) X 2 (Message Frame: Loss/Gain) X 4 (Message Replication) experiment examined breast cancer narratives aimed at African-American women ages 35-55 who had not had breast cancer. Narratives contained medical/religious messages and gain/loss frames. Effects of the narratives on attitude, credibility, behavioral intent, arousal and emotions were examined. Results suggest medical, gain framed narratives were the most effective. Specifically, gain framed narratives increased attitudes, mammogram behavioral intentions, arousal, and positive emotions while medical narratives increased credibility, mammogram behavioral intentions, and arousal.
Gap in Scientific Knowledge and the Role of Science Communication in South Korea • Jeong-Heon Chang; Sei-Hill Kim; Myung-Hyun Kang; Jae Chul Shim; Dong Hoon Ma • Using data from a national survey of South Koreans, this study explores the role of science communication in enhancing three different forms of scientific knowledge (factual, procedural, and subjective). We first assess learning effects, looking at the extent to which citizens learn science from different channels of communication (interpersonal discussions, traditional newspapers, television, online newspapers, and social media). We then look closely into the knowledge gap hypothesis, investigating how different channels of communication can either widen or narrow the gap in scientific knowledge between social classes. Our data indicated that among the four mass media channels examined, television was the most heavily-used source for science information in South Korea. Also, television was found to function as a “knowledge leveler,” narrowing the gap between highly and less educated individuals. The role of online newspapers in science learning is pronounced in our research. Reading newspapers online indicated a positive relationship to all three measures of scientific knowledge. Contrary to the knowledge-leveling effect of television viewing, reading online newspapers was found to increase, rather than decrease, the gap in knowledge. Implications of our findings are discussed in detail.
Beyond the worried well: Emotional states and education levels predict online health information seeking • Jessica Myrick, Indiana University; Jessica Willoughby • This study combined conceptual frameworks from health and risk information seeking, appraisal theory of emotions, and social determinants of health literatures to examine how emotional states and socioeconomic status individually and jointly predict online health information seeking. Using nationally representative data from the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS 4, Cycle 3), we found that different discrete emotions predicted information seeking in different ways. Moreover, education levels interacted with anxiety to predict online information seeking.
The Effect on Young Women of Public Figure Health Narratives regarding HPV: An Application of the Elaboration Likelihood Model • Jo-Yun Queenie Li • “The Genital Human Papillomavirus (also called HPV), the most common STD which causes virtually all cases of cervical cancer in the U.S, has been overlooked by society due to a lack of knowledge and stigma surrounding STDs. This study explores the effectiveness of public figure health narratives and different media platforms on young women’s awareness of HPV and their behavioral intentions to receive vaccination. An online between-groups experiment with
275 participants based on the Elaboration Likelihood Model revealed that the effectiveness of public figure health narratives on individuals’ awareness and behavioral intentions are maximized when the messages appear in newspapers rather than in social media, and when the
message recipients are in high involvement conditions. The interaction among the three variables is discussed, along with implications for health communication and HPV promotion campaigns.”
“I believe what I see:” Students’ use of media, issue engagement, and the perceived responsibility regarding campus sexual assault • Jo-Yun Queenie Li; Jane O’Boyle, University of South Carolina; Sei-Hill Kim • “Abstract
The topic of campus sexual assault has received much news media attention recently, prompting scholars to examine media effects on students’ attitudes and behaviors regarding the issue. Our survey with 567 college students examines how students’ media use have influenced their engagement with the issue of campus sexual assault and their perceived responsibility regarding the issue, looking particularly at the question of who is responsible and the perceptions of rape myths. Results revealed that newspapers’ coverage regarding campus sexual assault may contribute to college students’ victim-blaming and enduring victim myths. However, these may be minimized by raising students’ perceived importance about the issue. And the most effective media channel in which to increase students’ perceived importance is social media. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.”
Cultural Representations of Gender and Science: Portrayals of Female STEM Professionals in Popular Films 2002-2014 • Jocelyn Steinke, Western Michigan University; Paola Paniagua Tavarez, Western Michigan University • This study focused on a textual analysis that examined representations of female STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) characters in speaking roles and portrayals of female STEM characters in lead, co-lead, and secondary roles in popular films that featured STEM characters from 2002 to 2014. Findings indicated that female were outnumbered by male STEM characters in speaking roles by 2 to 1. Portrayals of female STEM characters were varied. Some portrayals revealed gender stereotypes although scientist stereotypes were rare. Most female STEM character were portrayed as equal members of research teams, almost all portrayals focused on their attractiveness, and about half of the portrayals highlighted their romantic relationships. The findings from this study were compared with those from previous research in order to trace changes in cinematic representation and portrayals of female STEM characters over time. A discussion of the implications for future research in this area and implications for broadening participation in STEM will be addressed.
“You Made Me Want to Smoke”: Adaptive and Maladaptive Responses to Tweets from an Anti-Smoking Campaign using Protection Motivation Theory • Jordan Alpert, Virginia Commonwealth University; Linda Desens • The F.D.A. developed the Real Cost campaign to prevent and reduce the number of teens who experiment with smoking and become lifelong tobacco users. The $115 multimedia campaign utilizes channels such as television, radio, print and online, including social media. Since social media allows for interaction and immediate feedback, this study analyzed how Twitter users responded to anti-smoking messages containing fear-appeals created by the Real Cost. Over 300 tweets exchanged between a Twitter user and @KnowtheRealCost were gathered between 2015 and 2016. Through the lens of Protection Motivation Theory, content analysis discovered that 67% (220) of responses were maladaptive and 33% (111) of tweets were adaptive (intercoder reliability, κ = .818). Iterative analysis was also performed to identify and categorize themes occuring within threat and coping appraisals. For threat appraisals, it was found that perceived vulnerability was lessened due to incidence of the boomerang effect, perceived severity was reduced by comparison to other dangerous activities, and rewards included relaxation and reduced anxiety. Coping appraisals included evidence of self-efficacy and social support. Results of the study indicated that although users reacted in a maladaptive manner, Twitter can be a powerful platform to test messages, interact with users and reinforce efficacious behavior.
“Pass the Ban!” An Examination of the Denton, Texas, Fracking Ban • Judson Meeks, Texas Tech University • This paper examines how groups on both sides of the fracking debate presented their cases to the public by conducting a visual and textual analysis to examine campaign materials. The study found that anti-fracking advocates presented the issue as one about local control and unity, whereas the pro-fracking advocates presented the issue as an economic threat the local community and the financial well-being of future generations.
Promoting Healthy Behavior through Social Support in Mobile Health Applications • Jung Won Chun, University of Florida; Jieun Cho; Sylvia Chan-Olmsted, University of Florida • Mobile health applications serve as a venue for promoting personal well-being by allowing users to engage in health-promoting behavior, such as sharing health information and health status/activities with each other. Through social interactions enabled by mobile health apps, people are likely to engage in healthy behavior and well-being with support from others. The current study explored which factors of smartphone use and motives for using health applications influence the perceived social support from mobile health applications. It also investigated the effect of perceived control as a mediating variable on the relationship between perceived social support in the applications and healthy behavior and well-being. The results showed that perceived social interaction and technological convenience were the main predictors of perceived social support in mobile health apps, which have indirect effects on exercise and perception of well-being. Perceived control positively mediated the relationship between perceived social support in the applications of both exercise and well-being.
Are you talking to me? Testing the value of Asian-specific messages as benefits to donating healthy breast tissue • Kelly Kaufhold, Texas State University; Yunjuan Luo; Autumn Shafer, University of Oregon • The Komen Tissue Bank at the Indiana University collects breast tissue samples from volunteers but suffers from a dearth of donations from Asian women. This two-part study was devised to test messages targeting Asian women. Applying Health Belief Model to a survey and five focus groups, low perceived susceptibility and severity yielded increased barriers and lower benefits among Asian women. Asian-specific messages showed significantly higher benefits for Asian women who suggested even more Asian-specific messaging.
Sources of Information About Emergency Contraception: Associations with Women’s Knowledge and Intentions to Use • Kyla Garrett, University of North Carolina; Laura Widman; Jacqueline Nesi; Seth Noar • Emergency contraception (EC) is a highly effective form of birth control that may lower rates of unintended pregnancy among young women. Currently, lack of adequate information and misunderstandings about EC hamper efforts to disseminate EC to women who need it. The purpose of this study was to determine the sources from which women had learned about EC (including health care providers, friends or interpersonal sources, media sources, or no information sources), and to examine whether source credibility was associated with accuracy of knowledge about EC and intentions to use EC. Participants were 339 college women (M age = 18.4) who reported where they had received information about EC, if anywhere, along with their EC knowledge and behavioral intentions. In total, 97% of women had heard of EC from at least one source and 49% indicated they were highly likely to use EC in the future, if needed. Results demonstrated significant positive relationships among higher credibility of EC information sources, more accurate EC knowledge, and greater intentions to use EC. Moreover, EC knowledge mediated the relationship between source credibility and intentions to use EC. Future EC education efforts should capitalize on credible information sources to positively influence EC knowledge and increase uptake of EC in emergency situations. Additional research is needed to examine the content, quality, and frequency of messages young women receive about EC.
Stymied by a wealth of health information: How viewing conflicting information online diminishes efficacy • Laura Marshall, UNC Chapel Hill; Maria Leonora Comello, UNC Chapel Hill • Confusing information about cancer screening proliferates online, particularly around mammography and prostate antigen testing. Whereas some online content may highlight the effectiveness of these tests in preventing cancer, other sources warn these tests may be ineffective or may cause harm. Across two experiments, we found support for the notion that exposure to conflicting information decreases self-efficacy and response efficacy, potentially discouraging the likelihood of behavior change that could prevent cancer.
Thematic/Episodic and Gain/Loss Framing in Mental Health News: How Combined Frames Influences Support for Policy and Civic Engagement Intentions • Lesa Major • This current research tests whether changing the way online stories frame depression affects how audience members attribute responsibility for depression and their civic engagement intentions towards policy solutions for depression. This study uses two framing approaches: 1) emphasis on an individual diagnosed with and living with depression (individualizing the coverage or episodic framing) and 2) emphasis on depression in more general or broader context (thematic or societal framing).This research examines gain (emphasizes benefits – e.g. lives saved) and loss (emphasizes costs – lives lost) frames to measure the interaction effects of frames (e.g. thematic-loss coverage or episodic-gain coverage) in news stories .A significant contribution of this research is the construction of the episodic frame. Findings of this research indicated loss-framed stories increased support for mental health policy solutions for depression, but the episodic frame increased societal attribution of responsibility for causes associated with depression.
Obesity News: The Effects of Framing and Uncertainty on Policy Support and Civic Engagement Intentions • Lesa Major • This study examined the effects of episodic (individual) frames and thematic (societal) frames in news on the causes (causal attribution) of and treatments (treatment attribution) for obesity. Interactions are investigated in this research by including gain and loss frames. Gain and loss frames have been examined in health messages, but have not received as much scholarly attention in terms of framing effects in health news. Finally, this study explored the effects of uncertainty and certainty on responsibility attribution. Findings suggest combined frames could influence support for obesity related policies.
Examining Ad Appeals in Over-the-Counter Drug Advertising in Japan • Mariko Morimoto, Sophia University • A quantitative content analysis of Japanese OTC drug TV commercials broadcasted during prime time was conducted to provide an overview of pharmaceutical advertising in Japan. In the sample of 204 ads, nutritional supplement drinks were the most frequently advertised drug category. Ad appeals including effective, safe, and quick-acting were popular. Additionally, these ads predominantly used a product merit approach, and celebrity endorsers, particularly actors/actresses and “talents” (such as TV personnel and comedians), were frequently featured.
Effects of Persuasive Health Information on Attitude Change and Health Behavioral Intentions in Mobile Social Media • Miao Miao; Qiuxia Yang; Pei-Shan Hsieh • Previous research has shown that online health information suffers from low credibility. Drawing on the elaboration-likelihood model (ELM), the central and peripheral routes were operationalized in this study using the argument quality and source credibility constructs respectively. We further examined how these influence processes were moderated by receivers’ health expertise. A between-groups, 2 (argument quality) × 4 (source of credibility) factorial design was tested from WeChat which is the dominant mobile social media in China.
Health Literacy and Health Information Technology Adoption: The Potential for a New Digital Divide • Michael Mackert, The University of Texas at Austin; Amanda Mabry, The University of Texas at Austin; Sara Champlin, The University of North Texas; Erin Donovan, The University of Texas at Austin; Kathrynn Pounders, The University of Texas at Austin • Approximately one-half of American adults exhibit low health literacy. Health information technology (HIT) makes health information available directly to patients through electronic forms including patient portals, wearable technology, and mobile apps. In this study, patients with low health literacy were less likely to use HIT or perceive it as easy/useful, but perceived information on HIT as private. There is room to improve HIT so that health information can be managed among patients of all abilities.
Sharing Health-Related Information on Facebook: An Integrated Model • Ming-Ching Liang, Metropolitan State University • This study proposes a model that explains proactive and reactive information sharing behaviors. In the context of sharing influenza-related information on Facebook, a survey study (N=338) was conducted. Results confirmed the applicability of the proposed information sharing model in current research context. Perceived norms of information sharing, need for self-presentation on SNSs, and sense of virtual community were identified as predictors for proactive and reactive information sharing behaviors. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
The Impact of Fear Appeals in The Tailored Public Service Announcements Context • Nam Young Kim, Sam Houston State University • In the context of an anti-binge drinking health campaign, this study particularly tested how the emotional content (i.e., fear appeals) in tailored messages influences people’s messages processing as well as their attitudinal/behavioral changes. Using a 2 (regulatory fit: fit vs. non-fit) X 2 (level of fear appeals: low vs. high) experimental design, the findings indicate that the influence of tailored messages should be discussed cautiously, because the tailored message’s effectiveness is reduced when combined with a high fear appeal. The findings have theoretical and practical implications on the use of emotional appeals in tailored communication.
Testing the effects of dialogic communication on attitudes and behavioral intentions related to polarized and non-polarized scientific issues • Nicole Lee, Texas Tech University • Dialogue has been presented as an alternative to the deficit model. This online experiment tested the impact of dialogue on trust in science, relationship qualities, and behavioral intentions. In order to examine the influence of political polarization, the issues of climate change and space exploration were compared. Dialogue significantly affected relationship qualities and behavioral intentions for space exploration, but not climate change. Results serve to integrate public relations theory and science communication scholarship.
Science in the social media age: Profiles of science blog readers • Paige Jarreau, Louisiana State University; Lance Porter, Louisiana State University • Science blogs have become an increasingly important component of the ecosystem of science news on the Internet. Yet we know little about science blog users. The goal of this study was to investigate who reads science blogs and why. Through a survey of 2,955 readers of 40 randomly selected science blogs, we created profiles of science blog users based on demographic and science media use patterns. We identified three clusters of science blog readers. Super users indicated reading science blogs for a wide range of reasons, including for community seeking purposes. One-way entertainment users indicated reading blogs more for entertainment and ambiance. Unique information seeking users indicated reading blogs more for specific information not found elsewhere. But regardless of science blog users’ motivations to read, they are sophisticated consumers of science media possessing high levels of scientific knowledge.
Using Weight-of-Experts Messaging to Communicate Accurately about Contested Science • Patrice Kohl; Sharon Dunwoody, University of Wisconsin-Madison • Research indicates that balanced news coverage of opposing scientific claims can result in heightened uncertainty among audiences about what is true. In this study, we test the ability of a weight-of-experts statement to enhance individuals’ ability to distinguish between more and less valid claims. An experiment found that the WOE narrative led participants to greater certainty about what scientists believed to be true, which made participants more likely to “buy in” to that belief.
Framing climate change: Competitive frames and the moderating effects of partisanship on environmental behavior • Porismita Borah • The present study conducted both focus groups and experiments to understand the influence of frames on environmental behavior intention. The focus groups and the first experiment were conducted with undergraduate students for pilot testing while the main experiment used an U.S. national sample. Findings show that a message with elements from both problem-solving and catastrophe frames increases individuals’ environmental behavior intention. This relationship is moderated by political ideology, such that only those participants who identified as Democrats and Independents showed more willingness to pro-environmental behavior. Over all, Republications were low on pro-environmental behavior intention compared to the Democrats. But within the Republicans, participants showed more likelihood for pro-environmental behavior intention in the catastrophe framed condition. Implications are discussed.
Abstract or Concrete? A Construal-level Perspective of Climate Change Images in U.S. Print Newspapers • Ran Duan, Michigan State University; Bruno Takahashi; Adam Zwickle; Kevin Duffy, Michigan State University; Jack Nissen, Michigan State University • Climate change is one of the most severe societal environmental risks that call for immediate actions in our age; however, the impacts of climate change are often perceived to be psychologically distant at a high level of construal. This research presents an initial exploration of newspapers’ visual representations of climate change using a construal-level perspective. Focusing on the recent years from 2012 to 2015, this study content analyzed a total of 635 news images with regards to image themes and nine other factors in relation to construal level (e.g., image formats, chromatic characteristics, etc.) Unexpectedly, the results show that overall, climate change has been visually portrayed as a relatively concrete rather than abstract issue and has mostly been portrayed with a high level of specificity. In particular, USA Today visually covered the issue as most concrete, followed by the New York Times, and Wall Street Journal. Human themed images were the most concrete images as compared to nature themed and industry themed images. Findings indicate that construal level aspects in the news images provide another way of understanding and interpreting climate change imagery in the media in the U.S.
“Standing up for science”: The blurring lines between biotechnology research, science communication, and advocacy • Rebecca Harrison, Cornell University • Targeted for their vocal support for genetic engineering and their work in science outreach, upwards of 50 academic agricultural biotechnologists have received Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests since February 2015. The U.S. Right to Know (US-RTK), a self-described watchdog organization who filed the requests, sought to uncover any conflicts of interest (COI) between industry and tax-payer-funded scientific research on genetically modified organisms (GMOs). The action has been called a “witch hunt” and “bullying” by supporters of the scientists, and an October 2015 Nature Biotechnology Editorial challenges its audience to “stand up for science” in the wake of this “smear campaign.” The dominant view of science communication is rooted in the idealized assumption that the very act of communication is nothing more than an apolitical transfer of a simplified version of scientific knowledge. The conceptualization of general COI by the scientific community often reflects this outdated framework. But, as scientists become politically engaged as advocates for their own work, this framework is challenged. Using the 2015 case of biotechnology researchers and records requests, this paper explores the question: Why is “scientific outreach” often considered categorically different than “research” — both structurally at the university level, but also as a distinction internalized by these particular scientists — and therefore perceived as immune to charges of COI?
Effects of Heuristic-Systematic Information Processing about Flu and Flu Vaccination • SangHee Park, University of Michigan, Dearborn • This study applied the heuristic-systematic model (HSM) in order to explore risk perceptions of flu and the flu vaccination because the HSM explains individual’s information processing as an antecedent to attitude. Accordingly, this study examined how people process different types of risk information applying a 2 (Message framing: heuristic information message vs. systematic information message) by 2 (expert source vs. non-expert source) online experiment. The experiment found that risk perception of flu illness was positively related to benefit perception of the flu vaccination. The result also indicated that heuristic messages affected risk perception of the flu vaccination, but not flu illness perception. Implications and limitations of these findings were discussed.
Exploring the Multi-Faceted Interpersonal Communication Strategies Used By College Students to Discuss Stress • Sara Champlin, The University of North Texas; Gwendelyn Nisbett, University of North Texas • Mental health issues are a prevalent problem on college campuses yet stigma remains. We examine patterns of college students either seeking help for personal stress or providing help to a stressed friend. Textual analysis was used to extract themes of participant comments and identify common behaviors. Results suggest that students use direct, indirect, and avoidant approaches to addressing stress with friends. Distinctions are blurred in self help-seeking behavior. Implications for creating interpersonal campaigns are discussed.
“Warrior Moms”: Audience Engagement and Advocacy in Spreading Information About Maternal Mental Illness Online • Sarah Smith-Frigerio, University of Missouri • One in seven women will experience a maternal mental illness, yet little is known about why individuals seek information about maternal mental illness and treatments, or how they make use of messages they find. By employing a grounded theoretical approach, involving a close reading of Postpartum Progress, the world’s most read online site concerning maternal mental illness, as well as analysis of semi-structured audience interviews of 21 users of the site, this study contributes a more nuanced understanding of how participants use information and peer support on the site. In addition, the research explores how participants move beyond seeking information anonymously online about a stigmatized mental illness or use private support forums for peer support, to engage in online and offline advocacy efforts.
From Scientific Evidence to Art: Guidelines to Prevent Digital Manipulation in Cell Biology and Nanoscience Journals • Shiela Reaves, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Steven Nolan, University of Wisconsin-Madison • As technological advances have made it easier to digitally manipulate images, the scientific community faces a major issue regarding ethics of visual data. A content analysis of editorial guidelines for the scientific images in cell biology and nanoscience journals demonstrates differences between the two disciplines. Cell biology images in high impact journals receive detailed guidelines about digital manipulation. However, nanoscience journals and low-impact journals have less detailed instructions to prevent misleading visual data.
The Influence of Internal, External, and Response Efficacy on Climate Change-Related Political Participation • Sol Hart, University of Michigan; Lauren Feldman, Rutgers University • This study examined how changing the type and valence of efficacy information in climate change news stories may impact political participation through the mediators of perceived internal, external, and response efficacy. Stories including positive internal efficacy content increased perceived internal efficacy, while stories including negative external efficacy content lowered perceived external efficacy. Perceived internal, external, and response efficacy all offered unique, positive associations with intentions to engage in climate change-related political participation.
Recycling Intention Promotes Attitudinal and Procedural Information Seeking • Sonny Rosenthal; Leung Yan Wah • Information seeking is more likely to occur when the information has utility to the seeker. Prior scholarship discusses this property of information in terms of instrumental utility and, more recently, informational utility. Research on information seeking describes various factors that may motivate information search, but none has directly modeled behavioral intention as an antecedent. The current study examines the effect of recycling intention on intention to seek two kinds of information: attitudinal and procedural. Results show strong effects, which suggest that in the context of recycling, information seeking may serve functions of behavioral and defensive adaptation. Additional findings suggest that recycling personal norms and recycling-related negative affect influence information seeking, albeit indirectly, as forms of cognitive and affective adaptation. Results have implications for selective exposure theory and the practice of environmental communication.
The Effects of Environmental Risk Perception, and Beliefs in Genetic Determinism and Behavioral Action on Cancer Fatalism • Soo Jung Hong, Huntsman Cancer Institute • This study investigates the effects of environmental risk perception, and beliefs in genetic determinism and behavioral action regarding cancer development on cancer fatalism, as well as the moderation effect of education and the mediating role of environmental risk perception on those associations. Nationally representative data from the National Cancer Institute’s (NCI) 2013 Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) was employed. Findings reveal interesting and meaningful dynamics between those variables and suggest directions for future research.
Perceptions of Sexualized and Non-Sexualized Images of Women in Alcohol Advertisements: Exploring Factors Associated with Intentions to Sexually Coerce • Stacey Hust; Kathleen Rodgers; Stephanie Ebreo; Nicole O’Donnell, Washington State University • The purpose of this study was to identify factors associated with college students’ intentions to sexually coerce. An experiment was conducted with (N= 1,234) participants from a college sample. One condition was exposed to sexualized alcohol advertisements and a second condition to non-sexualized alcohol advertisements. Identifying as a man, adherence to traditional gender roles and heterosexual scripts, and exposure to alcohol advertisements with sexualized images of women were positively associated with intentions to sexually coerce.
Enabling Tailored Message Campaigns: Discovering and Targeting the Attitudes and Behaviors of Young Arab Male Drivers • Susan Dun, Northwestern University in Qatar; Syed Owais Ali, Northwestern University in Qatar; Rouda almeghaiseeb, Northwestern University in Qatar • Citing the preventable nature of traffic accidents and the unacceptably high number of causalities, the World Health Organization recently issued an international call for action to combat the needless loss of life and injuries (Nebehay, 2015). Because of dangerous driving behaviors 18-25 year old men are the highest the risk group for accidents, yet they are resistant to typical risk communications. Young Arab men are particularly at risk within this group. The study reported here discovered the driving attitudes and behavioral intentions of young Arab men to enable communication campaigns to specifically tailor persuasive messages for this high-risk yet understudied group in a bid to save lives and decrease the injuries from accidents. We suspected that they are high sensation seeking, fatalistic, and as members of a collectivistic, masculine culture, likely to engage in risking driving behaviors. Using a culturally contextualized focus group setting, we confirmed that they fatalistic, value assertive driving by equating good driving with high-risk behaviors, dislike fear appeals and blame other drivers for accidents. Suggestions for risk communication campaigns are provided. We discovered tensions in their belief systems that could provide an avenue for persuasive messaging, by exposing the contradictions and resolving them in a pro-attitudinal direction. Basic safety beliefs need to be targeted as well, such as the importance of seat belts and defensive driving. Finally, a novel campaign that is not recognizable as a dramatic or sad safe driving campaign is a must, especially initially, or the message is likely to be ignored.
MERS and the Social Media Impact Hypothesis: How Message Format and Style Affect TPE & Perceived Risk • T. Makana Chock, Syracuse University; Soojin Roh, Syracuse University • This study examined the effects of narrative transportation and message context on third person effects (TPE), perceived risk, and behavioral intentions. A 2 (Format: Narrative/Factual news) X 2 (Context: news site, news story on Facebook page) plus 1 (personal account on a Facebook page) between-subject experimental design (N=269) conducted in South Korea examined the differences between reading news stories about the risks of The Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS) in different media contexts – online news sites and Facebook pages – and different formats — narrative, factual, and personal accounts. TPE were found for factual news stories read on news sites, but not for the same story when it was read on a Facebook page. Narrative versions of the story elicited greater transportation and limited TPE regardless of whether the news stories were read on news sites or Facebook pages. TPE was found for personal accounts read on a Facebook page. Source credibility and identification were found to partially mediate the relationship between narrative transportation and perceived story effects on self. In turn, perceived effects on self contributed to personal risk perceptions and risk-prevention behaviors.
Tracking public attitudes toward climate change over time: The declining roles of risk perception and concern • Tsung-Jen Shih, National Chengchi University; Min-Hsin Su; Mei-Ling Hsu • Increasing public risk perception of and concern over climate change has long been regarded as an effective strategy to motivate environmental-friendly behaviors. However, the levels of risk perception and concern may be volatile. For one thing, people may deny the existence of climate change when they feel threatened and, at the same time, do not know what to do. Furthermore, the concept of “issue fatigue” may occur when people are chronically exposed to threatening information. Based on two nationally representative telephone surveys conducted in Taiwan (2013 and 2015), this study examines how people’s risk perception and concern may change over time and whether the impacts on the adoption of pro-environmental behaviors will be different. The results indicate that, although people were more likely to take actions aimed at mitigating climate change in 2015 than in 2013, the levels of risk perception and concern declined significantly. Regression analyses also showed that the effects of risk perception and concern were moderated by time. Implications of the findings will be discussed.
On the Ever-growing Number of Frames in Health Communication Research: A Coping Strategy • Viorela Dan; Juliana Raupp • Recent years have brought a large number of studies citing framing as a theoretical guide in science and health communication research. Keeping track of this literature has become increasingly difficult due to a “frustrating tendenc[y]… to generate a unique set of frames for every study” (Hertog & McLeod, 2001, p. 151). In this study, in an attempt to assist those intending to keep track of this literature, we report the results of a systematic review of literature on news frames in the media coverage of health risks. In the studies scrutinized (k = 35), we found forty-five frame-names for just fifteen frames. They were: attribution of responsibility, action, thematic, episodic, medical, consequences, human interest, health severity, economic consequences, gain, loss, conflict, uncertainty, alarmist, and reassurance. In the paper, we address the overlap between some of these frames and other concepts and frameworks. Also, as some frames entail others or intersect with others, we provide a visualization of how frames relate to each other (see Figure 1). We suggest that building framing theory is stalled by the use of various frame-names for the same frames; yet, we realize that scholars using framing in their studies may follow other goals than building framing theory. However, those new to the field may have difficulty coping with the ever-growing number of frames. In this regard, we hope that our systematic review can help towards reaching consistency, a characteristic indispensable to any theory.
Who Are Responsible for HPV Vaccination? Examination of Male Young Adults’ Perceptions • Wan Chi Leung • HPV vaccination is an important public health issue, but past research has mostly been done on the HPV vaccination for females. An online survey was conducted on Amazon Mechanical Turk, and responses from 656 males aged 18-26 in the United States were analyzed. Attributing the responsibilities for getting HPV-related diseases more to women and to the self were associated with weaker support for the HPV vaccination for males. Attributing the responsibilities for getting the HPV vaccine more to women and to the self were associated with stronger support for the HPV vaccination for males. Findings point to suggestions for future promotions of the HPV vaccination for males.
Media Use, Risk Perception and Precautionary Behavior toward Haze Issue in China • Xiaohua Wu; Xigen Li • The study examined to what degree people’s risk perception of the haze in China was affected by mass media exposure, social network sites involvement and direct experience towards haze. The risk perception was examined in two levels: social risk perception and personal risk perception. Impersonal Impact Hypothesis was tested in the digital media context. The study also explores the influencing factors of precautionary behaviors. The key findings include: 1) mass media exposure and SNS involvement regarding haze issue mediate the effect of direct experience on risk perception; 2) Impersonal Impact Hypothesis was not supported in the context of multi-channel and interactive communication; 3) vulnerability slightly moderates the effect of mass media exposure on personal risk perception; 4) mass media exposure and SNS involvement positively affect precautionary behavior mediated through personal risk perception.
Expanding the RISP Model: Examining the Conditional Indirect Effects of Cultural Cognitions • Yiran Wang, Washington State University; Jay Hmielowski, Washington State University; Rebecca Donaway, Washington State University • This paper attempts to connect literature from the Risk Information Seeking and Processing model with the cultural cognitions literature. We do this by assessing the relationship between cultural cognitions and risk perceptions, then examine whether these risk perceptions are associated with the three outcomes of interest relative to the RISP model: Information seeking, systematic processing, and heuristic processing, through a full serial mediation model using 2015 data collected from ten watersheds communities across the U.S.
Introducing benefit of smoking in anti-smoking messages: Comparing passive and interactive inoculation based on Elaboration Likelihood Model • Yuchen Ren • This study tested the effect of message interactivity in inoculation (interactive inoculation message versus passive inoculation message) on children’s attitude towards smoking based on elaboration likelihood model. Eighty-two primary school students were recruited from Shenzhen, China. Experiment results showed that compared with passive inoculation message, interactive inoculation message generated more negative attitude towards smoking and higher involvement in both central route and peripheral route. Moreover, mediation analysis showed that only the central route indicator mediates the effect of message interactivity on children’s attitude towards smoking. In conclusion, this study not only introduces message interactivity to inoculation theory in smoking prevention context, but also reveals the mechanism of the proposed persuasion effect.
Adolescents’ Perceptions of E-cigarettes and Marketing Messages: A Focus Group Study • Yvonnes Chen; Chris Tilden; Dee Vernberg • “Prior research about e-cigarettes has rarely focused on young adolescents exclusively and explored their perceptions of the industry’s marketing efforts. This focus group study with adolescents (n=39) found that factors that motivate them to experiment with e-cigarettes (e.g., looking cool, curiosity, flavors) are identical to traditional tobacco uptake among adolescents. E-cigarette advertising was memorable because of color contrast, sleek design, and promised benefits. Restricting flavors and advertising may reduce e-cigarette experimentation and future tobacco use.”
Is a Picture Worth a Thousand Texts? Investigating the Influence of Visuals on Text-Based Health Intervention Content • Zhaomeng Niu; Yujung Nam; QIAN YU, Washington State University; Jared Brickman; Shuang Liu • Healthy eating and exercise among young people could curb obesity. Strong messaging is needed for weight loss interventions. This study evaluated the usefulness of visual appeals in text messages. A 2 (gain vs. loss) X 2 (picture vs. no picture) design with pretest and posttest questionnaires (N=107) revealed text-only messages with loss frames had an influence on affective risk response, while text messages with pictures had a positive effect on attitudes, intentions, and self-efficacy.
Advertising 2016 Abstracts
Professional Freedom & Responsibility (PF&R) Papers
Advertising Alcohol in the Evidence-based Way: Constructing a Threatful and Harmful Drinking Advice Campaign for the General Population in Hong Kong • Annisa Lee, The Chinese University of Hong Kong • With the rapid increase in alcohol consumption, developing an anti-alcohol campaign is needed to raise cultural relevant awareness of adverse health effects of alcohol for the Hong Kong public. We conducted a two-phased study for this purpose. The first phase is a formative reasearch, involving a literature review of 103 articles from MEDLINE and 36 papers from EMBASE databases, four focus groups and a general population survey of 506 respondents. Results generate ten major messages and show that various physiological and psychological harms are stopping factors, more effective than the facilitating factors like social pressure. The second phase develops the harm theme, with four focus groups, by pre-testing the campaign theme, empirically supported claims, appeals and media deliverables. Results show that the theme ‘Drinking Will Harm You’ is effective with the fear appeal, instead of the dark humorous appeal used in comparison. The fear level should be staged progressively, with the more effective physiological harms first, followed by non-physiological ones, including sexual violence. Ten ad claims are ranked according to the health belief model. Using the Department of Health logo increases credibility of the claims. Most participants preferred recovered alcoholics as spokespersons and scientific claims on media channels such as bottle packaging, TV/newspapers, MTR stations, and social media.
Organic Literacy, Involvement, Information Processing, and ‘Green’ Consumer Behavior: A Preliminary Investigation • S. Senyo Ofori-Parku, The University of Alabama • This study extends previous work on ‘green’ marketing, advertising and consumer behavior. It explores concepts such as organic literacy, involvement (and information processing), chronic organic food consumption behaviors, and how they relate to consumer a
Research Papers
Effects of Disclosure of Native Advertising and Knowledge of Marketing Communication Tactics on Ad Evaluation • A-Reum Jung, Louisiana State University; Jun Heo, Louisiana State University • Although the belief that the effects of native advertising is from the unrecognizable format is widely accepted, it is hard to find empirical studies that examine the effect of native advertising. In particular, there is a harsh criticism that advertisers try to increase ad effectiveness by using unclear ad disclosure language which makes people not to recognize native advertising. However, there is no definite answer that the effects of disclosure language on ad effectiveness. On one hand, persuasion knowledge model posits that high knowledge people are more likely to resist advertising. However, previous studies tried to develop conceptual relationship between persuasion knowledge and negative ad effects, rather than empirical examination. Thus, one of the purposes of this current study is to examine the influence of disclosure on the evaluation of native advertising on social media platforms. Another purpose of this study is to explain how people’s knowledge regarding persuasion marketing tactics influences the response to the marketing messages. Studies found that different language of ad disclosure does not affect ad recognition, and ad effectiveness. However, once people recognize content as advertising, they negatively response to the content. Studies also found that high knowledge for advertising tactic generates positive responses to advertising even though people recognize advertisers’ persuasive intention. Based on the results, marketing implication and suggestions for future research are also discussed.
“I didn’t see that label!” Using eye-tracking to evaluate native advertising news stories • Bartosz Wojdynski, University of Georgia; Nathaniel Evans, University of Georgia • The past two years have seen a rapid growth in the publication of sponsored content online, as news organizations and advertisers alike have sought to improve return on investment in online advertising. However, the potential deceptiveness of paid advertisements that strongly resemble a publisher’s editorial content has raised the concern of critics and regulators regarding how consumers evaluate whether a given piece of content is or is not paid advertising. Recent research in this area has shown that design characteristics of disclosures — labels that identify sponsored content as distinct from other content on the site –may influence consumers’ ability to recognize sponsored content as advertising (Wojdynski & Evans, 2016). The present research seeks to add to knowledge of how consumers evaluate sponsored content by examining how participants (N=60) view and evaluate six diverse published sponsored online news stories. Eye-tracking measures were employed to capture participants’ overall attention to disclosures, and time required to notice the disclosures, and open-ended measures were used to capture participants’ perceptions of sponsorship transparency and suggestions for improving transparency. Findings showed that variations in disclosure design and layout lead to differences in attention to the disclosure, time to notice the disclosure, and perceived sponsorship transparency of the article. Implications of these findings for practitioners and regulators are discussed.
Placing Snacks in Children’s Movies: Cognitive, Evaluative, and Conative Effects of Product Placements With Character Product Interaction • Brigitte Naderer; Jörg Matthes, U of Vienna; Patrick Zeller • No studies have explored the role of character product interaction (CPI) for product placement effects on children. We exposed N = 363 children aged 6–15 years to a movie containing no placement, static placement, or CPI placement. The presence of placements affected cognitive and conative brand outcomes. However, children’s product memory and consumption were higher for CPI placements compared to static placements. Results were independent of the children’s ages and prior movie familiarity.
That Ad’s So Bad, It’s Criminal: Advertising Meets the Federal Fraud Statutes • Carmen Maye, University of South Carolina; Erik Collins, University of South Carolina • In the United States, legal repercussions for deceptive advertising traditionally have been meted out by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which has at its disposal a variety of civil remedies. The FTC’s civil authority over deceptive commercial expression in the marketplace is generally acknowledged. Less well known within the advertising industry is the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) power to criminally punish those who disseminate what it may deem deceptive advertising. Advertisers, who clearly should expect FTC oversight and whose practices likely are geared toward satisfying the FTC’s stated expectations, also must be aware, if not beware, of the DOJ. Recent DOJ actions, triggered by car-dealer advertising, serve as useful reminders that the FTC is not the only governmental regulatory authority looming in the advertiser’s rear-view mirror. Prosecutorial discretion is essentially all that stands between a deceptive advertiser and a federal, criminal prosecution. The danger for advertisers lies in an environment where “I don’t like your ads” may inspire federal prosecutors to investigate an advertiser’s business practices in search of conduct to which fraud and related criminal statutes may be applied.
Effects of Perceived Social Distance on Consumer Attitudes and Purchase Intentions among College Students • Carolyn Lin; Linda Dam • Little research addresses the ways in which perceived social distance – the level of acceptance individuals feel towards a different racial background – may impact consumer responses toward advertising spokespersons from different racial groups. The purpose of this study is to investigate whether perceived social distance between consumers and multiracial advertising spokespersons will influence purchase intentions and consumer attitudes. This research also explores whether the two related concepts – consumer social identity and perceived similarity with racially congruent advertising spokespersons – have an impact on consumer decision-making. The study design entails three experimental conditions, each featuring a Caucasian, Asian, or African American advertising spokesperson. Study participants (N = 363) were randomly assigned to one of three study conditions. Results demonstrated that lower levels of perceived social distance predicted more positive consumer attitudes and purchase intentions. Partial support was also found for the effects of perceived social identity and perceived similarity toward the multiracial spokesperson on consumer attitudes and intentions to purchase the product. Discussion of multicultural advertising implications and future research addressing strategic communication are discussed.
Personalizing an ad for a consumer versus personalizing a consumer for an ad: A test of reversed personalization effects • Cong Li, University of Miami • Research on the effects of personalized communication has grown tremendously over the past decade. Prior studies have widely discussed how a message can be personalized for a person and why a personalized message is more effective than a non-personalized message, which is often labeled personalization effects. However, no known research has theorized on the possibility of personalizing a person for a message. The current study aims to make a unique contribution to the literature by illustrating how a person can be personalized for a message via priming tactics and why it can lead to reversed personalization effects. It is argued that an individual’s evaluation of a personalized or non-personalized message can be influenced by a prime. A non-personalized message may generate more favorable effects than a personalized message if a prime activates a certain mental representation associated with it, leading to reversed personalization effects. The effects of priming on personalization are moderated by perceived prime credibility and mediated by perceived message relevance.
Exploring the prevalence and execution of brand placements in Hong Kong prime time television programs • Fanny Fong Yee Chan, Hang Seng Management College; Ben Lowe, University of Kent • Product placement involves the planned integration of branded products into media content with the aim of influencing audiences. A majority of product placement research tend to be focused on understanding its impact on consumer behavior variables such as brand recall, attitudes, and purchase intentions (Chan 2012). Less research, however, examines the nature of placement execution, and those which do are outdated and are focused mainly on western contexts such as the US. This study utilizes and extends the framework developed by La Ferle and Edwards (2006) to document and explore the execution of product placement in Hong Kong. Specifically it examines 1) the prevalence of brand appearances; 2) the characteristics of programs with brand appearances; 3) features of placed brands/products; 4) modality of brand appearances; 5) extent of character interaction with placed products; and 6) general characteristics of placement context. An extensive content analysis of five weeks of prime-time programming on three free-on-air television channels in Hong Kong was conducted. A coding protocol was developed with items adapted from earlier studies (Ferraro and Avery 2000; La Ferle and Edwards 2006; Smit, van Reijmersdal and Neijens 2009) and a few items added specifically for the current study. In the 225 hours of prime time television programming, 1225 brand appearances were identified. It is equivalent to about one brand appearance in every 11 minutes of programming. The results provide valuable insights to communication scholars and brand practitioners with regards to brand placement strategies.
Image or Recruitment: The Relationships between Cue and Military Advertising Strategy on Military Attitudes and Intentions to Enlist • FuWei Sun, The University of Oklahoma; Glenn Leshner, The University of Oklahoma • This study tested the effects of two factors—cues (extrinsic and intrinsic) and the military advertising strategies (image and image + recruitment)—on participants’ attitudes and behavioral intentions. In a 2 × 2 mixed design experiment, participants saw three military advertisements in one of four conditions. The results of this study suggest that participants’ evaluations of the advertisements and the military are generally driven by intrinsic cues rather than extrinsic characteristics. However, cue effects do not influence receivers’ enlistment intentions. Further, there is no significant difference between the strategies, participants’ evaluations of the military, and their enlistment intentions. These results are discussed in the context of military advertising and its impact.
Beyond gains/losses to compliance/non-compliance: effects of framing, need-for-cognition and mood on organic food advertising effectiveness • George Anghelcev, Penn State University; Ruoxu Wang, Penn State University; Yan Huang, The Pennsylvania State University; Sela Sar, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign • Two message framing techniques have been investigated with predilection by advertising researchers: gain vs. loss and promotion vs. prevention. In this study, we bridge these separate approaches and consider four advertising frames informed by the theoretical frameworks of Regulatory Focus Theory and Prospect Theory. We investigate the joint impact of mood on these four message frames on advertising promoting organic foods. The findings support our predictions that it is neither a gain/loss approach nor a promotion/prevention approach that leads to effective messages for consumers who experience positive or negative moods. Rather, the winning strategy consists of framing the ads in terms of compliance (gain and non-loss) and noncompliance (loss and non-gain). As expected, NFC moderated the postulated effects.
Only Other People Post Food Photos on Facebook: How Social Media Fits into Our Lives and The Third Person Effect • Giang Pham; Matthew Shancer; Danyang Guo; Tao Jailin; Yi Peng; Yanyun Wang; Michelle Nelson, UIUC – Advertising Department • Understanding consumers’ perceptions about social media is important for advertisers. Interviews with Millennials and Baby-Boomers revealed differences in social media use and perceptions of use. Third-person perceptions (TPP) emerged among millennials: they believed the content they shared was very different from that of ‘others’. A survey of Millennials showed TPP effects scaled with the social distance corollary. Individuals perceived their behaviors were very different from those of ‘acquaintances’ and less so with close friends.
The Impact of Erotic Imagery on Visual Attention within Advertisements: An Eye-Tracking Study • Glenn Cummins; Tom Reichert, University of Georgia; Zijian Gong, University of Tampa • An eye-tracking experiment (N = 120) was conducted to gauge how the use of erotic models in advertisements impacted visual attention to the ad, model, and other ad execution elements, thus moving beyond indirect self-report measures of attention from previous research. Findings revealed a distraction effect for ads containing erotic models. Attention to ad copy suffered when erotic models were employed, and viewers were less likely to remember the brand name or ad content.
Advertising Skepticism Effects on Chinese Consumer Attitudes toward Green Ads: A Mediating Role of Consumer Attribution of Green Advertising Motivation • Jason Yu • This study examined how advertising skepticism in general as a consumer characteristic affects consumer attitudes toward green ads (AGreen-ad) in three dimensions: hedonism, interestingness and utilitarianism. The results suggested a significant effect of advertising skepticism on consumer utilitarian AGreen-ad, which was mediated by consumer attribution of the motive behind the green ad. The insignificant correlation of advertising skepticism and hedonism implies that a consumer’s advertising skepticism might be irrelevant to his hedonic AGreen-ad if his disbelief of the environmental claims in the ad is not substantial enough to arouse negative feelings such as a feeling of being deceived or cheated.
Political advertising saturation: A natural experiment • Jay Newell, Iowa State University • This research explores the results of political advertising spending under conditions of advertising saturation, in which candidates and their supporters chose to advertise in selected markets with nearly complete reach and very high frequencies, versus the same candidates and supporters advertising in different markets using more moderate levels of reach and frequency. Combining a two-phase telephone survey of more than 700 registered voters with a tally of more than 3000 broadcast advertising contracts, the research explores the connection between political advertising spending, political participation, and election outcomes.
When It Just Feels Right: The Impact of Regulatory-Fit on Consumer Responses to Fundraising Campaigns • Ji Mi Hong, University of Texas at Austin; Wei-Na Lee • This research investigates whether the fit between an individual’s chronic regulatory focus and the type of regulatory focus used in fundraising messages enhances persuasion effects. A content assessment of current fundraising ads suggests that regulatory focus was indeed employed as a persuasion strategy. An experimental study was then carried out to test the main and interaction effects of two independent variables (chronic regulatory foci x regulatory-focused message frames) on three dependent variables (attitudes toward the ad, attitudes toward the non-profit organization, and willingness to donate). Findings suggest that individuals with a chronic promotion-focused orientation responded more favorably toward the promotion-framed message emphasizing the potential environmental benefits of making a donation, whereas individuals having a chronic prevention-focused orientation were more positive toward the prevention-framed message highlighting the potential environmental dangers of not making a donation. Implications of the findings and suggestions for future research are provided.
Telling Compelling Stories for Worthy Causes? A Content Analysis of Philanthropy Ads • Ji Mi Hong, University of Texas at Austin; Wei-Na Lee; Hwanjong Cho, University of Texas at Austin; Chohee Sung, University of Texas at Austin • “As a first step toward understanding non-profit organizations’ communication, this research examined their philanthropy ad messages in terms of four key elements: what the philanthropy goal is (regulatory focus), who the beneficiary is (self-construal), when the fundraising impact is expected (temporal orientation) and how the suggested donations are appraised (efficacy-appraisal). A content analysis was carried out to systematically study philanthropy ads from non-profit organizations on the Philanthropy 400 list. Specifically, the frequency of appearance of each type of message elements and the relationships among them were analyzed. The findings of this research show that most non-profit organizations actively utilized four types of message elements in their philanthropy ads, while mainly focusing on desired, positive donation outcomes (promotion focus), dominantly indicating others as beneficiaries of the support (interdependent self-construal), mostly emphasizing the easy of actions (self-efficacy) and highlighting immediate fundraising effects (present orientation). However, with respect to the combination patterns among message elements, the findings indicated that the current practice did not follow the guidelines suggested by previous literature. In this respect, more research is needed to understand the discrepancy and provide better guidelines for future communication strategies.”
Positive News Are Better Than Negative News in Improving Brand Attitude and Recall for Pre-Roll Ads • Jiachen Yao, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Zongyuan Wang; Mike Yao, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign • Current study explored how the valence of news headlines (positive vs. negative) and news type (hard vs. soft) influenced participants’ mood, their memory and brand attitude towards the pre-roll video ads. We found that negative news headlines led to lower mood, lower brand attitude and worse brand recall than the positive condition. There was also an interacting effect found of news valence*news type on mood. Implications were given for advertising industry.
Understanding Age Segmentation in Persuasion: The Effects of Experiential and Material Messages • Jing (Taylor) Wen, University of Florida; Naa Amponsah Dodoo, University of Florida; Linwan Wu, University of Florida; Il Young Ju, University of Florida; Sriram Kalyanaraman, University of Florida • Despite the growing significance of message segmentation strategies based on consumers’ age, the psychological effects of age on decision making remain somewhat unexplored. Building on prior studies, this research examined the influence of age on consumers’ responses to different advertising messages. In particular, this study examined whether framing a specific product (automobile) as either material or experiential would influence consumer responses to the product. Experimental results revealed a main effect of message type and interaction between message type and age on attitude toward the ad. Specifically, individuals reported more favorable attitudes toward a material rather than an experiential message type. An interaction effect showed that younger people had more positive attitudes toward the material message while no difference was found for older people. Additionally, younger people had more favorable brand attitudes when exposed to a material rather than an experiential message, while, older people did not exhibit this pattern. The results also revealed the mediating role of ad credibility such that perceived ad credibility mediated the relationship between message type and ad attitude. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
Consumer Attention to and Recall of Information in Prescription Drug Advergames: An Eye-Tracking Study • Jisu Huh, University of Minnesota; Jennifer Lueck, University of Minnesota • This study investigated cognitive effects of advergames on consumers’ attention to and memory of information in a prescription drug advergame. Applying limited cognitive capacity theory as a theoretical framework, consumers’ attention was examined using both self-reported and eye-tracking measures, and the relationships between the two types of attention measures and information memory were tested. The eye-tracking attention measures revealed somewhat different findings than self-reported attention, and the results provide interesting insights regarding advergames’ cognitive effects.
Nudity of Male and Female Characters in Television Advertising Across the Globe: A Comparative Analysis • Jörg Matthes, U of Vienna; Michael Prieler, Hallym University • There is a lack of comparative studies on nudity in television advertising. We sampled N = 1,755 ads from 13 countries. The main characters’ nudity was higher for females compared to males, more likely with decreasing age, and occurred more often for congruent than incongruent products. Multilevel analyses showed that nudity was independent of a country’s gender-indices and preclearance policy. The role of culture for predicting nudity in advertising is thus smaller than commonly thought.
Framing Financial Retirement Advertising: The Effectiveness of Intertemporal Choice • Ken Kim, oklahoma state; Lori McKinnon • The current study was designed to show the effectiveness of retirement financial services advertising (RFSA) in consumer intertemporal choice. The obtained data indicated that people in the loss framing (vs. gain framing) condition had a stronger tendency to choose the earlier investment option over the delay option when an advertisement emphasized how much they need to invest (that is, process framing). In contrast, the advantage of gain framing (vs. loss framing) was found when an advertisement focused on how much they need to retire (that is, outcome framing).
In-Feed Native Advertising on News Websites: Effects of Advertisement on Internet Users’ Reactions • Lijie Zhou, The University of Southern Mississippi; Fei Xue • This study examined viewers’ reactions to in-feed native advertising on news sites. Results showed in-feed native advertising generated stronger brand interest and purchase intention than banner ads. Product involvement moderated effects of advertising format and website reputation on attitude-toward-the-ad, brand interest, and purchase intention. Its moderating power is stronger for low-involvement product, where advertising format and website reputation have served as peripheral cues. Positive correlations between website credibility and ad credibility were also identified. Advertising Division Research Papers Psychological Mechanisms in Narrative Advergaming Lu Zheng; Danny Pimentel Nine side-scrolling advergames were created to examine the potential impact of types of advergames and music tempo on one’s affective (game attitude and brand attitude) and conative responses (product trial and purchase intent) in the context of narrative advergaming. Moreover, three psychological states (flow, transportation and presence) that game players are likely to experience were also investigated. The study demonstrated that neither type of advergames nor music tempo employed in the advergames was significant in influencing one’s affective and conative responses. What remains invariably significant across nine experimental conditions is the positive relationship between the three psychological mechanisms and one’s game attitude, brand attitude, and behavioral intentions. Implications and limitations are also discussed.
The Moderating Role of Age on Behavioral Effects of Product Placements in a Real-World Setting • Maren Birgit Marina Beaufort • This paper provides findings on how product placements influence young children’s selection behavior in real-life viewing and shopping scenarios, showing why realistic settings are superior to laboratory studies in this context. For the first time, kindergarten-aged children were included. Results show a major susceptibility to product placements via implicit persuasion. In contrast to previous laboratory findings, a highly significant age effect is present that is conceivably traceable to the competitive influences in the real-life scenario.
Cultural Adaptation in U.S. and Mexican Beer Ads: The Moderating Effect of Automatic Bias Against Hispanics on Eye-Tracking Measures • Yadira Nieves-Pizarro, Michigan State University; Juan Mundel, Michigan State University; Tao Deng, Michigan State University; Guanxiong Huang, Michigan State University; Duygu Kanver, Michigan State University; Elishia Johnson, Michigan State University; Michael Nelson, Michigan State University; Rashad Timmons; Saleem Alhabash, Michigan State University • With continued growth in advertising and marketing to specific ethnic groups, like Hispanics in the United States, it becomes important to understand the intricacies of cultural adaptation in advertising. The current study investigates the effects of cultural adaptation in branded advertising for domestic (US) and foreign (Mexican) products on visual attention to advertising elements. Using a 2 (country of origin: USA vs. Mexico) x 2 (cultural symbol congruence: congruent vs. incongruent) x 3 (ad repetition) mixed factorial design, participants (White only: N = 83) viewed three ads for either an American or Mexican brand with either congruent or incongruent cultural symbol. Results showed that participants exposed to American brand ads fixated more often (total fixation count) and for a longer period of time (total fixation duration) on the cultural symbol when it was congruent than incongruent, while no differences were detected for Mexican brand ads. Additionally, this effect was moderated by automatic bias against Hispanics. Findings are discussed within the context of tailored approaches to advertising and advertising unintended effects.
Boundaries of Message Framing in Charity Advertising: Effects of Anchor Points and Need for Cognition • Yan Huang, The Pennsylvania State University; Anli Xiao, Penn State University; Denise Bortree, Penn State University • The study examined the persuasiveness of message framing and anchor points in the context of a charitable appeal on social media. A 2 (Framing: loss vs. gain) × 2 (anchor points: presence vs. absence) online between-subjects experiment was conducted (N = 211). Results showed that the influence of message framing was dependent on whether anchor points were provided in the message. When anchor points were present, the gain-framed message resulted in a greater level of cognitive elaboration and donation intention; when they were absent, the loss-framed message triggered more cognitive elaboration on the donation request. Moreover, need for cognition (NFC) moderated the persuasive effect of message framing. The effect was more salient among low NFC participants. The study also revealed a three-way interaction effect between message framing, anchor points, and need for cognition on cognitive elaboration. The theoretical and practical implications for charity advertising are discussed.
Inseparable Duos: The Effects of Message Framing and Presentation on College Students’ Responses to Flu Vaccine Public Service Advertisements • Yen-I Lee, University of Georgia; Yan Jin; Glen Nowak, University of Georgia • Previous research on how message framing affects influenza vaccination attitude and intentions has yielded mixed results. The current study examined the effects of message framing and presentation in flu vaccine public service advertisements (PSAs) using a 2 (gain vs. loss framing) x 2 (image-based vs. text-only presentation) between-subjects experiment with a sample of college students (N = 122) from a large public university in the U.S. The findings indicated that flu vaccine PSAs that utilized a gain-framed image-based message or a loss-framed text-only message elicited positive outcomes, including greater confidence in flu vaccine, positive affect toward the advertisement, and positive attitude toward flu vaccine. In contrast, a loss-framed image-based message and a gain-framed text-only message triggered negative attitudes toward flu vaccine. Implications for strategic health communication theory building and vaccine communication practice are discussed.
Consumer Socialization through Social Media: Antecedents of Acceptance of Native Advertising on Social Networking Sites • Yoo Jin Chung, University of Florida; Eunice Kim, University of Florida • Despite the growing popularity of native advertising in the industry, few studies have examined the factors that influence consumer acceptance of native advertising on SNSs. The present study examined the influences of consumer socialization agents on acceptance of native advertising on SNSs. Findings showed that positive peer communication, social media dependency, and attitude toward social media advertising significantly predicted consumer acceptance. The results further revealed the moderating effects of perceived appropriateness of native advertising.
Interaction Effects of System Generated Information and Consumer Skepticism: An Evaluation of Issue Support Behavior in CSR Twitter Campaigns • Yoon-Joo Lee, Washington State University; Nicole O’Donnell, Washington State University; Stacey Hust • Success of corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives often relies on issue support from consumers. The current study analyzes issues support for an alcohol company’s drunk driving prevention campaign on Twitter. A 2×2 experiment (n = 212) tested how consumers’ skepticism interacts with system generated information (low v. high number of followers). Skepticism on issue support changed significantly depending on the number of Twitter followers. Implications are discussed for attribution theory and CSR skepticism research.
Advertising’s Male Body: A Content Analysis of Male Models in Esquire Magazine Ads from 1955-2005 • Zienab Shoieb; Eric Haley, University of Tennessee • This paper reports a content analysis of portrayals of the male body in ESQUIRE Magazine from 1955 to 2005. Specifically, the study examined male model muscularity and fat in relation to time and product categories. The study is positioned within the literature on media images and body disturbance issues.
Processing Capacity in Visual Search: The Impact of Visual Salience and Involvement on Attention • Zijian Gong, University of Tampa; Glenn Cummins • Despite the long tradition of examining individual factors and aspects of print ad design and execution, the attention allocation process to different ad execution elements has not been specified. This study reconceptualized and examined potential moderators – namely visual salience and involvement– in terms of cognitive load to predict their real-time combined impact on attention and subsequent processing of magazine advertisements. Eye-tracking data indicated automatic bottom-up attention precedes controlled top-down processing when attending to magazine advertisements. Additionally, results revealed that involvement moderated the impact of visual salience on selective attention to ad execution elements, such that insufficient resource allocation to advertisements for low involvement products inhibited consumers’ attention to visually non-salient ad elements compared to advertisements for high involvement products, as indexed by gaze duration. The findings suggested selective attention is not unitarily driven by message properties or individual factors, and both message and individual level factors should be considered to creative effective print advertisements.
Redefining Rational and Emotional Advertising Appeals as Available Processing Resources: Toward an Information Processing Perspective • Zijian Gong, University of Tampa; Glenn Cummins • This paper redefined emotional and rational advertising appeals in terms of changes in cognitive load they place on viewers’ limited capacity processing system, which helped predict how thoroughly advertising messages are processed under high and low personal relevance condition. Results indicated emotional advertisements elicited better message recall than rational advertisements, but the available resources in the emotional and rational condition remained at the same level. The interaction effect between personal relevance and advertising appeal type on available resources was also observed, such that personal relevance exerted a more significant influence on available resources when viewing rational advertisements than emotional advertisements. The findings suggested that when an advertisement has low personal relevance, rational appeals should be used with caution as viewers may withdrawal their attention and stop processing the message. In contrast, the use of emotional appeals may be a way to sustain attention for low relevance products.
Special Topics Papers
Comparing social media advertising attitudes between advertising and non-adverting majors: A situated learning perspective • Anan Wan, University of South Carolina • This study explored whether advertising majors and non-advertising majors hold different attitudes toward advertisements on social media in terms of their advertising education and their social media self-efficacy, based on a pilot study of 20 interviews and a survey study of 165 responses. It provides a look at the current advertising majors’ perceptions of and attitudes toward social media advertising as the insiders and future professionals. The findings from both studies demonstrate that advertising students have more positive attitude than non-advertising majors toward social media advertising. Theoretical of the Situated Learning Theory were discussed.
Message strategies in Korean cosmetic surgery websites • Gawon Kim, University of Tennessee; Ron Taylor, University of Tennesse, Knoxville • The purpose of this study was to investigate message strategies used in South Korean cosmetic surgery websites. The paper uses Taylor’s six-segment message strategy model to analyze the Korean sample websites and conducted a content analysis. The outcome of the content analysis revealed that Informational and Transformational strategy was both equivalently used. Additionally, it found out that ration and ego strategy was the most frequently practiced strategy. Result, implication and limitations will provide more information on this paper’s result and future research.
Snap or Not: Young Consumers’ Interpretation of Snapchat Marketing • Huan Chen, University of Florida • A qualitative research was conducted to explore young consumers’ interpretation of Snapchat and marketing via Snapchat. The themes that emerged regarding those young consumers’ understanding of the photo-and-video-sharing social medium are being intimate, being casual, and being dynamic, and the themes regarding the participants’ interpretation of marketing information on Snapchat include freedom of choice, seamless integration with the social medium, and eventful and festival orientation. Theoretical and practical implications were offered.
The Myth of Big Data: Chinese Advertising Practitioners’ Perspective • Huan Chen, University of Florida; Liling Zhou • A qualitative study was conducted to explore Chinese advertising practitioners’ perceptions and interpretations of big data in Chinese market. 22 in-depth interviews were conducted to collect data. Four overarching themes emerged regarding their perception of Chinese advertising market, definition of big data, application of big data, and future development of big data. Based on the themes, a theoretical model was developed to demonstrate big data’s application and development in Chinese market. Theoretical and practical implications were offered.
Proposing Social Cue as a New Social Media Ad Tactic in Unfamiliar Product Adoption • Hyejin Kim, University of Minnesota – Twin Cities; Keonyoung Park, University of Minnesota Twin Cities; John Eighmey • This study proposed and tested the effect of new social media advertising tactic, a social cue, on unfamiliar product adoption. Findings demonstrated that participants with extremely large social network were particularly susceptible to the socially-cued advertising. Their purchase intention showed an inverted U shape as the number of product purchase predecessors increases. This study is expected to contribute to social media advertising literature by providing proactive insights on simple yet innovative ad tactic.
“The Ultimate Cliffhanger:” Campaign Strategies and Extreme Drinking Rituals for Turning 21 • Joyce Wolburg, Marquette University; Nathan Gilkerson, Marquette University • “This qualitative study examined the drinking ritual of the 21st birthday celebration among college student binge drinkers to gain insights that can lead to more effective campaign strategies. Through depth interviews, a pattern of intense peer pressure emerged, not only for the person turning 21 but also for friends. Because each has a role to play in a ritual that celebrates the “ultimate cliffhanger,” campaign strategies aimed solely at the person turning 21 are not sufficient to change behavior.”
Student Papers
Corporate social responsibility (CSR): the effects of cause-related marketing (CRM) message, cause proximity and cause involvement • Hannah Kang, University of Kansas • This study examined the effects of the type of corporate social responsibility (CSR), cause proximity and cause involvement on attitude toward brand, attitude toward company, attitude toward campaign, and campaign participation intention. This study also examined how CSR type, cause proximity and cause involvement affect individual’s risk perceptions toward a particular risk issue. The experiment was a 2 (CSR type: CSR advertising message with CRM/ CSR advertising message without CRM) X 2 (cause proximity: national/international) X 2 (cause involvement: high/low) between-subjects factorial design. A total of 239 undergraduates participated. This study found that a CSR advertising message with CRM components produced a more positive attitude toward a company, a more positive attitude toward a campaign, and a higher campaign participation intention than a CSR advertising message without CRM components. Moreover, the main effects of cause involvement were found on attitude toward brand, attitude toward company, attitude toward campaign, campaign participation intention as well as risk perception toward a cause and importance of a cause.
Corporate Ethical Branding on YouTube: CSR Communication Strategies and Brand Anthropomorphism • Jing (Taylor) Wen, University of Florida; Baobao Song • Even as ethical branding gain increasing prominence, the effectiveness of specific communication and branding strategies remains somewhat unexplored. A content analysis was conducted to examine Fortune 500 companies’ corporate social responsibility (CSR) advertisements and user comments on YouTube. The results showcase the importance of involvement strategy of CSR communication and brand anthropomorphism on generating positive consumer responses, and a positive correlation between these two strategies. The findings further suggest that the success of ethical branding on social media lies in more interactive and engaging communication as well as branding strategies.
The Younger Maintain, the Older Regulate: The Generational Effects on Sequential Mixed Emotions • Jing (Taylor) Wen, University of Florida; Naa Amponsah Dodoo, University of Florida; Linwan Wu, University of Florida • Ads with mixed emotions can capture audience’s attention and therefore be persuasive. By using Socio-emotional Selectivity Theory as a theoretical framework, this research examines the influence of generations and sequential mixed emotions on persuasion. Findings indicate that Baby Boomers exhibit more favorable evaluation than Millennials when exposed to an appeal with improving mixed emotions (i.e., negative then positive), because Baby Boomers are better at emotion regulation. In contrast, when exposed to declining appeal (i.e., positive then negative), both generations evaluate the ad positively, because both age groups are able to maintain positive emotions. Theoretical and practical implications are also discussed.
Overcoming Skepticism toward Cause-Related Marketing Claims: The Role of Consumers’ Attributions of Company Motives and Consumers’ Perceptions of Company Credibility • Mikyeung Bae • This study examined two situational factors that might interfere with the intended outcome of a cause-related marketing (CRM) ad on social network sites (SNSs): statements about the motivation of the sponsoring company for supporting a social cause and types of appeals (emotional or informational). This study also explored how highly skeptical consumers and consumers with lower levels of skepticism differ in their responses to CRM ads. An online experiment with 409 college students showed that a firm’s acknowledgements of firm-serving motivation as well as of public-serving motivation could be an effective marketing strategy to reduce consumer skepticism about a firm’s motives. Highly skeptical consumers are less doubting about a company’s intention behind its support of social causes when the company honestly states firm-serving benefits as well as public-serving benefits in its CRM ads. The procedure by which a consumer perceives and evaluates the motives of a company determines the effectiveness of the company’s CRM ads. Finally, a consumer’s perception of a company’s credibility has a great impact on the consumer’s intention to join that company’s brand page. This study advances theories about consumers’ defensive mechanisms that can help predict their favorable responses to the brand pages featuring CRM on SNSs.
Animal Crackers in My…Book? Effects of Shared Reading on Parents’ Memory for Product Placement in Children’s Books • Steven Holiday, Texas Tech University • The shared reading of children’s picture books fosters involvement, engagement, and communication, and results in socialization and development of both parents and children. It can also make readers susceptible to product placements used in the medium, a practice that exists despite its notable absence from academic research. Using experimental design and quantitative statistical analysis, this study explores how social and multi-sensory aspects of shared reading positively affect parents’ recollection of product placements in children’s books.
The Golden Touch: How Screen Touches Influence Product Attitude and Purchase Intention • Xiaohan Hu, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign • The widespread usage of touch screen devices such as smartphones and tablets has changed how people interact with mediated information. The physical action of touch is more direct in that people interact with the information on the screen, rather than indirectly via input devices like a mouse or trackpad. The goal of this study is to examine whether different ways of physically interacting with media influence consumers’ attitude and purchase intention in online shopping, and how haptic congruity between specific product and touchscreen may moderate this effect of interaction. The study reported here showed that consumers assigned more value when product information was acquired by touching. However, main effect of physical interaction on attitude and purchase intention, and interaction effect between interaction and haptic congruity were not found.
The Influence of Persuasion Knowledge on Consumer Responses to Celebrity Endorsement in Social Media • Yiran Zhang, University of Minnesota Twin Cities • This paper explores the effects of consumers’ persuasion knowledge of celebrity endorsement in social media on their attitude toward the celebrity and the endorsed brand, and the moderating role of parasocial interaction. Results show that recognition of advertising intent is negatively associated with consumers’ attitude toward the celebrity. Additionally, parasocial interaction strengthens the relationship between attitude toward the celebrity and brand attitude, but doesn’t interfere with persuasion knowledge to influence brand attitude.
Teaching Papers
From Introducing the World Wide Web to Teaching Advertising in the Digital Age: A Content Analysis of the Past Twenty years of the Journal of Advertising Education • Emory Daniel, North Dakota State University; Elizabeth Crawford, North Dakota State University; David Westerman, North Dakota State University • For twenty years, the Journal of Advertising Education (JAE) has “toiled in the vineyards of advertising academé” to become a highly reputable source for advertising scholarship (Johnson, 1996 p.3). For the purposes of this study, we explored the last twenty years of literature in JAE. A content analysis was implemented to uncover patterns in areas such as areas of focus, methodologies, authorship, and Carnegie classifications of the universities represented.
Student-Run Communications Agencies: Providing Students With Real-World Experiences That Impact Their Careers • Lee Bush, Elon University; Daniel Haygood, Elon University; Hal Vincent • This study examined how current industry professionals perceived the benefits of their student agency experiences and how they applied those experiences to their careers. Graduates placed value on the real-world experience gained from student agencies, learning how a professional agency functions, and working with a diverse set of clients and people in team-based settings. Graduates reported that their student agency involvement separated them in job interviews, better preparing them versus their peers for entry-level positions.
What Do Students Need To Know About Technology And Idea Generation: Voices From The Agency • Robyn Blakeman, University of Tennessee, Knoxville; Maureen Taylor, University of Tennessee, Knoxville; Robert Lambert • The advertising field is constantly changing and educators should identify if changes in the industry prompt changes in the classroom. This paper inquires into the most fundamental part of the advertising process: the idea generation stage. Technology has changed the way art directors interact with design. But the extent of that change, and its implications for advertising pedagogy, are still unknown. This study reports the results of a survey of 38 advertising creatives to describe what is happening in conceptualization at advertising agencies around the country. The findings suggest ways forward in advertising pedagogy, especially curricula in the design sequences.
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