Mass Communication Commons^™

Reading Is Remembering: The Effect Of Reading Vs. Watching News On Memory And Metamemory, Hesham M. Mesbah

Speaker & Gavel

From which news medium can audiences acquire information best? To what extent does the news source affect receivers’ feelings of knowing? Will the effect of a news source on confidence in knowledge, if any, stay over time?

Exposure to either print or electronic news media is a daily habit for an average person in today’s world. Computerized news transmitted via networks and online services led to more diversification in news presentations. Such diversity inspired many scholars to investigate the comparative effectiveness of news media on memory processes. The study reported here examines the effect of exposure to different news media …

Through The Linguistic Looking Glass: An Examination Of A Newspaper As Negotiator Of Hybrid Cultural And Linguistic Spaces, Anthony Spencer

Speaker & Gavel

I contend English-language media outlets could and should be viewed as minority-language media outlets as they are cultural negotiators for tourists, sojourners and other transnational migrants. To better understand the cultural and linguistic forces these English-language media outlets exert upon the host cultures and nations in which they exist, I performed three months of ethnographic observations at a newspaper in Costa Rica and conducted in-depth interviews with staffers. I particularly focus on the hybrid identities of the staffers as they in turn instruct their readers how to navigate this hybrid community. I identify and explain the themes, which emerged in …

Newspaper Coverage Of The 2008 General Election Presidential Campaigns, William L. Benoit, Jayne R. Goode, Mark Glantz

Speaker & Gavel

News coverage of political campaigns is very important to the political campaign process. Some voters pay little attention to debates or other sources of information about the candidates and their policies. The news is one important source of this information. Newspapers can also supplement and reinforce the information possessed by voters who do attend to campaign messages. This study content analyzed news coverage of the 2008 general election presidential campaign (New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today). Horse race coverage was most common topic (45%), followed by themes about character (32%), and policy (23%). The tone of newspaper coverage was …

News Coverage Of The 2008 Presidential Primaries, William L. Benoit, Corey Davis, Mark Glantz, Jayne R. Goode, Leslie Rill, Anji Phillips

Speaker & Gavel

President George W. Bush was completing his second (and final) term in office and Vice President Dick Cheney decided not to run for president. Thus, the 2008 American presidential primary is the first “open” campaign (with no sitting president or vice president competing) since 1952 with highly competitive primaries for both major political parties. This study uses content analysis to investigate news coverage (national newspapers, network television news, and local newspapers) of the 2008 American presidential primary campaign. Most themes in the news concerned the horse race (66%) with somewhat more emphasis on the candidates’ character (18%) than their policy …