Hispanics in Politics

February 2, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Share

Within the past four years, Hispanics have become the largest minority in the United States, but their roles in both American and international politics remains limited.

According to the Pew Hispanic Center, in the 2006 U.S. midterm elections, Latinos only comprised 8.6% of all votes cast. Two studies published in the journal Mass Communication and Society indicate that political participation among Hispanics is not proportional to their ever growing population. The findings for these studies were based on research and statistics from the 2004 Presidential election, since research from the recent 2008 election is yet to be examined and analyzed. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Research Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

Why conservatives are a political force in America

January 26, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Share

As John McCain seeks the presidential nod in the general election, his vice presidential pick clearly emphasizes his need to reach the conservative voter, the powerful political voting block that emerged from a coalition of splinter groups pulled together in the 1950s by the writers of National Review magazine according to a recent study.

National Review is a political magazine that is known for its conservative perspective. In an article just released in the scholarly journal Mass Communication and Society, Susan Currie Sivek, assistant professor of mass communication and journalism at California State University, Fresno, credited National Review for its impeccable ability to strategically construct media frames that influenced Americans from three smaller subgroups to merge under the conservative banner. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Research Tagged With: , , ,

New research finds Fox News exhibited a Kerry bias in 2004 election

January 26, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Share

A study that was just published in the scholarly journal Mass Communication and Society, which is edited at Illinois State University, suggests that structural bias was apparent on many of the major television networks during the 2004 presidential election in a direction that may surprise many.

Frederick Fico, professor of journalism at Michigan State University, and his co-authors of the article Broadcast and Cable Network News Coverage of the 2004 Presidential Election, compare news coverage of Presidential candidates John Kerry and George Bush on ABC, CBS, NBC, MSNBC, Fox News, and CNN. They find that Fox News showed more structural bias toward Democratic candidate John Kerry than any other network, and that its bias was stronger than that on other networks. This was true contrary to criticism cited by Fico in which former CBS anchor Walter Cronkite labels Fox News as a “far-rightwing organization.” [Read more...]

Filed Under: Research Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

Retaliatory aggression and the effects of point of view blood in violent video games

January 26, 2010 By Leave a Comment
Share

Playing violent video games can make young adults behave more violently, but the game features selected during play are responsible for the resulting aggression according to a new study published this month in Mass Communication and Society.

Modern video game systems often give the player options to choose to turn blood effects on or off and to change the color of the blood. They also allow players to change their own perspective from being a first person shooter to a third person observer of the character doing the shooting in violent video games like Hitman II, Silent Assassin, which was used in this study. [Read more...]

Filed Under: Research Tagged With: , , ,