Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

George W. Bush, The American Press, And The Initial Framing Of The War On Terror After 9/11, Stephen D. Cooper, Jim A. Kuypers, Matthew T. Althouse

Communications Faculty Research

President George W. Bush's speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations on November I 0, 200 I, marks an important moment in the history of the War on Terror. 1 It followed closely upon the joint U.S.-Northern Alliance military capture of Mazari Sarif, Afghanistan, which significantly disrupted the Taliban's operations and arguably marked the official beginning of America's War on Terror. As President Bush stated, "The time for sympathy has now passed; the time for action has now arrived."2 In some ways, the speech offered nothing new. It reiterated words and ideas that the president frequently used to …

The Opppositional Framing Of Bloggers, Stephen D. Cooper

Communications Faculty Research

As a new feature of the media system, the blogosphere is an extremely interesting subject for scholarly inquiry. One might spend research time along a variety of lines: why people blog, why people read blog content, the relationship of the blogosphere to the established media outlets, the who/what/when of blog content production and consumption, the subject matter of blog posts, the effects of exposure to blog content, the potential for and limitations on interactions, and so on, for quite a long list. Given that the blogosphere is a recent addition to the media mix, and itself a (presumably) unintended consequence …

The President And The Press: The Framing Of George W. Bush’S Speech To The United Nations, Stephen D. Cooper, Jim Kuypers, Matt Althous

Communications Faculty Research

In this essay, we provide a brief overview of how frames work, discuss the relationship of frames to the news media, and perform a qualitatively based, comparative framing analysis of President Bush’s speech to the United Nations and the mainstream American press response that followed. Findings suggest that by the end of formal military operations in Afghanistan, the press was increasingly framing its reports in such a way that President Bush’s public statements were inaccurately transmitted to the public at large. Three key findings are advanced: one, the press depicted the Bush administration as an enemy of civil liberties; two, …

Social Issues In America, Stephen D. Cooper

Communications Faculty Research

One of the more contentious issues in social science at this time is the question of media bias. Both the scholarly and popular literature are thick with writings on this topic, yet for all the interest in it and work devoted to it we are far from a consensus on how media bias can be defined, conceptualized, or researched. Ironically enough, many writings on the subject of media bias do take the position that the news content distributed to the public fails, in one respect or another, to accurately and fairly represent real events, issues, personalities, and situations. Studies differ …

A Comparative Framing Analysis Of Embedded And Behind-The-Lines Reporting On The 2003 Iraq War, Jim A. Kuypers, Stephen D. Cooper

Communications Faculty Research

Although a contested position, we believe that reporters and editors frame the news in a way that reflects their personal feelings and newsroom culture (Kuypers, 1997, 2002, 2005; Cooper, in press). Audiences usually receive their political news from only a few press sources; rarely do they read the original statements of those being reported upon.

Bringing Some Clarity To The Media Bias Debate, Stephen D. Cooper

Communications Faculty Research

Jim A. Kuypers’ recent book, Press Bias and Politics, has made a significant advance in the methodology of inquiring into this issue—although it’s a safe bet that many in the scholarly community will be tempted to dismiss it out of hand. That’s a shame, if so, because even if one is disinclined to accept Kuypers’ conclusion that the press tends to favor ideas associated with the political left, his method can at least put the debate on a firmer footing.

Embedded Versus Behind-The-Lines Reporting On The 2003 Iraq War, Stephen D. Cooper

Communications Faculty Research

A 2003 study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that “Most Americans (53%) believe that news organizations are politically biased, while just 29% say they are careful to remove bias from their reports ... More than half—51%—say that the bias is ‘liberal,’ while 26% discerned a ‘conservative’ leaning. Fourteen percent felt neither phrase applied” (Harper, 2003). Now add to this that even some academicians are finally accepting the idea that journalists, as a group, are more liberal than the population as a whole. However, whether political or other biases (Hahn, 1998) affect news coverage …

Press Controls In Wartime: The Legal, Historical, And Institutional Context, Stephen D. Cooper

Communications Faculty Research

News coverage of warfare poses a dilemma for social systems with a free press, such as the United States. In an era of high-tech weaponry and nearly instantaneous global communications, conflict is inevitable between the obligation of the press to inform the general public and the obligation of the military to successfully conduct war. The importance of secrecy to the conduct of warfare heightens the issue in the current counterterrorism operations. The competitive advantage of live coverage raises the stakes in a crowded media market. The military’s control over newsgathering during the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War set off a controversy …

Collaborative Musical Expression And Creativity Among Academics: When Intellectualism Meets Twelve Bar Blues, Gary P. Radford, Stephen D. Cooper, Robert W. Kubey, David S. Mccurry, Jonathan Millen, John R. Barrows

Communications Faculty Research

The Professors are a blues, rock, and sometime heavy metal band made up of communication professors from a number of New Jersey schools. Formed in 1995, the band has played in clubs in New York City as well as a number of academic venues, including the annual conference of the International Communication Association in Chicago in 1996 and the annual conference of the National Communication Association in New York City in 1998. The Professors have been featured in both local and national press, including the Chronicle of Higher Education. When we learned of the call for papers for this special …

An Effect Of The Medium In News Stories: “The Pictures In Our Heads”, Stephen D. Cooper

Communications Faculty Research

This study used an experimental design to test for a channel effect in news stories. Four television news stories were recorded off-air, then the narrations were transcribed to form a print news story containing the same words; the broadcast video and the print story were the two treatment levels. Subjects received the stories in one of the treatment levels, and were asked to judge the blameworthiness or praiseworthiness of the actors named in the story. Logistic regressions could predict with substantial accuracy the medium in which subjects had received the story from these judgments, indicating a channel effect on their …

Common Law, And Privacy In Computer-Mediated Environments, Stephen D. Cooper

Communications Faculty Research

Computer-mediated environments pose a special challenge to our legal and cultural protections of privacy. These environments are unprecedented in the way commercially valuable information can be generated in their very use. The ease and low cost with which electronic information can be gathered and disseminated in these environments have led many to advocate regulation protecting privacy interests from commercial encroachment. At the same time, the use of digital communications to support criminal or terrorist activities have led others to advocate regulation allowing law enforcement agencies to eavesdrop or intercept. The cultural history of the Internet as a self-regulating, almost anarchical, …

Military Control Over War News: The Implications Of The Persian Gulf, Stephen D. Cooper

Communications Faculty Research

News coverage of warfare poses a difficult problem for political systems with a free press, such as ours in the United States. In an era of high-tech weaponry and nearly instantaneous global communications, conflicts are inevitable between the obligation of the press to inform the general public, and the obligation of the military to successfully conduct war. The military’s controls over news-gathering during the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War set off a controversy still smoldering during the Haiti occupation of 1994. This paper examines the legal, historical, and technological aspects of this issue.

Privacy And The News Media, Stephen D. Cooper

Communications Faculty Research

The right of the public to know and the right of the individual to be let alone are inherently in conflict. The origins of these rights are quite different: the former derived from the First Amendment's protection of a free press, the latter in a law journal article published in the late nineteenth century. So, too, has the development of these ideas followed different paths: the former as Constitutional law, the latter as tort law. This article examines the relationship between privacy law and the press. A century ago two lawyers called for legal relief from aggressive newspaper reporters. At …

News Media Objectivity: How Do We Ask The Questions?, Stephen D. Cooper

Communications Faculty Research

There is a lively and often public debate in progress concerning the objectivity of the news media, or the lack of it Scholars have approached this topic from three distinct angles: content analysis, values, and the economics of the news industry. Their conclusions have varied markedly, apparently guided by their particular frames of reference.

This article suggests that while we seem to have lost our fix on objectivity as a measurable attribute of news products, the news work routine of objectivity encourages fairness in our public discourse, and deserves attention in scholarly research.