Facebook to Add Friends in Washington

March 29, 2011 By Leave a Comment
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From Miguel Heft and Matt Richtel from New York Times, March 28 – Facebook is hoping to do something better and faster than any other technology start-up-turned-Internet superpower.

Befriend Washington.

Facebook has layered its executive, legal, policy and communications ranks with high-powered politicos from both parties, beefing up its firepower for future battles in Washington and beyond. There’s Sheryl Sandberg, the former Clinton administration official who is chief operating officer, and Ted Ullyot, a former clerk forSupreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia who is general counsel, among others. The latest candidate is Robert Gibbs, President Obama’s former White House press secretary, whom Facebook is trying to lure to its communications team. Read More

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Book Review: Rhetoric Online: Persuasion and Politics on the World Wide Web

June 22, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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Rhetoric Online: Persuasion and Politics on the World Wide Web. Barbara Warnick. New York: Peter Lang Publishing Inc., 2007. 160 pp. $25.95 pbk.

Rhetoric Online is a concise and economical look at how the Internet affects rhetorical criticism, and how this relatively new medium has forced the communication field to examine and modify its conventional means of analysis.

The beauty of this small book is indeed its brevity and the author’s ability to pack much information in a relatively small space. Another part of its appeal is the author’s writing style; Barbara Warnick summarizes what she is about to say, she says it, and then gives a capsulized summary of what she says. [Read more...]

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Political Conventions Draw a Bigger Audience than Beijing Opening Ceremonies

April 30, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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The 2008 Democratic and Republican Party conventions drew a bigger average nightly television audience than did the opening ceremonies of the Beijing Olympic Games, according to recent research by University of Oklahoma scholars Jill A. Edy and Miglena Daradanova.

Most media pundits and journalists insist that the national nominating conventions are a dying institution that draws few viewers and produces no news. However, Edy and Daradanova found that over the last four decades, the average size of the nightly audience for the conventions was larger than the audience for the opening night of the Summer Olympic Games unless the Games were held in the United States. The lone exception was the 2000 Games in Sydney, which marginally outdrew the 2000 nominating conventions. [Read more...]

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Citizens’ Local Political Knowledge Threatened By New Media

April 12, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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As new digital media replace traditional sources of news, the public’s knowledge of local affairs may be undermined.

This result headlines a new study by Lee Shaker, a researcher at Princeton University, that examines the effect of increased media choice upon citizens’ local and national political knowledge. The article, “Citizens’ Local Political Knowledge and the Role of Media Access”, is available in the current issue of Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly (winter 2009). Based on data from a 2007 survey of 1000 Philadelphia residents, a clear, negative relationship between having access to cable TV or satellite radio and citizens’ local political knowledge is depicted in the piece. A similar relationship does not materialize between new media access and national political knowledge. These results reinforce the fears voiced by many regarding the decline of local media – especially newspapers. [Read more...]

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Why conservatives are a political force in America

January 26, 2010 By Leave a Comment
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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...]

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