Communication Technology and New Media Commons^™

The Alt-Right's Use Of President Donald Trump's Twitter Account As A Propaganda Device, Erin Nicole Jorden

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The long campaign to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act situated President Donald J. Trump in a context where attacks on President Barack Obama’s signature legislation symbolized a broader repudiation of his legacy. Even more than mainstream Republican partisans, the altright blogosphere celebrated the demise of the law to symbolically cleanse the nation of Obama’s influence. Trump attempted to honor his pledge to end Obamacare in his first year of office with his support of the American Health Care Act (March 2017), Better Care Reconciliation Act (July 2017), and the Graham-Cassidy Bill (September 2017). Members of the alt-right reframed …

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 …

An Assessment Of The Fundamental Differences Between Mainstream And Independent Media : A Content Analysis Of The Print Media, Chadford D. Roush

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The mainstream media in the United States is an institutional arrangement of structural power within the political economy of capitalist society. The concentration and centralization of the media corporations creates the structural constraint for ideological social control. A few multinational corporations control a vast amount of media access that creates a filtering process for information. The mainstream media is extremely powerful in American society. The media helps to mold opinions on an array of news topics. Major media sources in the US are conforming their news coverage to be “industry friendly”. In simply terms the American people are only getting …

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 …

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.