Communication Commons^™

Sharing Your National Service Story: A Guide To Working With The Media, Corporation For National And Community Service

Service Learning, General

Running a national service program is more than a full-time job. Between developing projects, recruiting volunteers, managing finances, seeking resources, and filling out paperwork, it may feel like there’s no time to do anything else. With all the things a busy program manager has to do, you may wonder: “Why should I care about media coverage, and can it really help me?”

Overexposed: Issues Of Public Gender Imaging, Pamela K. Morris

School of Communication: Faculty Publications and Other Works

Make no mistake—it is popularity that makes pop culture important. And it is the powerful visual imagery of advertisements that helps define the largely artificial construction we call gender. Sex-role stereotyping and gender representations are typically studied in content analyses of television and magazine advertisements. Less common are investigations into outdoor advertising, a medium that is ubiquitous and the most democratic—everyone has equal access to visuals. This essay calls attention to and offers insights on advertisements in our outdoor visual space, focusing on gender representations. Capturing and analyzing these ephemeral images can show how they influence how we feel, think, …

Objectivity And The Embedded Reporter: An Examination Of A Reporter's Ability To Remain Objective While Embedded With Military Troops, Tamara Zaleski Turse

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

This thesis examines the program of embedding journalists into military units during the Second Gulf War to determine if journalists can provide an objective view of the war to the public back home. To fully understand the scope of embedding, this work first reviews the relationship between the media and the military by tracing the evolution of the American war correspondent starting with the U.S. Civil War through to the Second Gulf War. As public opinion is often formed, at least in part, by news reports, whether print or broadcast, this thesis surveyed the public to see if they felt …

When The Trumpet Call Is Unclear: A Rhetorical Analysis Of The Speech That Launched The Jesus Seminar, Mathew A. Cabot

Faculty Publications

Since the Jesus Seminar has become almost iconic in religious media coverage, it merits academic scrutiny. This article focuses on the Seminar's inaugural address given by founder Robert Funk on March 21, 1985, at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, California. In that address, Funk set forth the Seminar's mission and method that has guided the association ever since. The main thesis of this article is that clues to the Seminar's successes and failures may be found in Funk's inaugural address, which may be uncovered through a "text-in-context" analysis of the speech.

A Hundred Flowers Bloom: The Reemergence Of The Chinese Press In Post-Suharto Indonesia, Chang Yau Hoon

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

No abstract provided.

How Responsible Are “Responsible” Drinking Campaigns For Preventing Alcohol Abuse?, Joyce M. Wolburg

College of Communication Faculty Research and Publications

Purpose

– The purpose of this article is to question the misplaced efforts to curb alcohol abuse through “responsible” drinking messages from the alcohol industry, asking how responsible this strategy really is.

Design/methodology/approach

– This article cites published research that calls into question the effectiveness of “responsible” messages, particularly those that situate the problem of alcohol abuse within drunk driving and underage drinking without addressing heavy consumption. Examples of “responsible” messages are drawn from websites of three major beer companies.

Findings

– Problems with “responsible” drinking are identified, including the fact that such messages place the problem within the user …

Religious Experience In The Age Of Digital Reproduction, Frederick Mark Gedicks, Roger Hendrix

Faculty Scholarship

A religious experience is an extraordinary event that occurs against the backdrop of ordinary life, infusing that life with a meaning it would not otherwise have. Mass culture is now replete with portrayals of such experiences. Spiritually-themed television shows, movies, books, music, and fashion are now common and even popular. This is not necessarily good news for religion and religious experience. What mass culture portrays as sacred may be merely an imitation, resembling more the ubiquitous feel-good self-affirmance of popular psychology than authentic communion with the divine.

On the other hand, the appropriation and portrayal of religious experience by mass …

Cultural Performance Of Roadside Shrines: A Poststructural Postmodern Ethnography, Rebecca Marie Kennerly

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Marking the site of death on the road with a shrine, an increasingly popular cultural practice in the United States, is a deeply personal, private affair, however, because shrines are placed in the public right-of-way, they attract attention and invite participation, comment, and criticism. These sites, the materials that mark them, how people come to build them, the messages that those who build them hope to convey, and the accumulative force these sites bring to bear in various contexts offer unique insights into our complex, fragmented, and often confounding relationships with death, living memory, and selective forgetting. This project takes …

Illinois Legislators Revisited: A Comparison Of Legislators' Perceptions And Attitudes Toward Constituent E-Mail, Mary Louise Sheffer

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This is a follow up study to a 2000 report, which measured and compared Illinois state legislators’ attitudes and perceptions toward constituent e-mail, and its impact on personal political agendas. Along with measuring attitudes, this study sought to measure and compare the impact of advances in e-mail technology on Illinois legislators’ use of e-mail as a political tool of communication. The panel comparison consisted of 59% of respondents who participated in both the 2000 and the 2004 study. A survey conducted in February 2000 showed that 89% of Illinois legislators had an active e-mail address, but only 65% of those …

Creating Meaning In Organizational Change: A Case In Higher Education, Kathleen Barnett

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

As change is an inevitable part of organizational life, this study explores one aspect of communication in organizational change: the creation and use of meaning during the change process. The implementation of a new, higher education admissions criteria framework of a state master plan is the specific change under study. University administrators, contracted consultants, and board staff members participated in the study. Framed by symbolic interactionism and a stakeholder perspective, I pose four research questions: RQ1: What meanings were created during the particular process of change under study? RQ2: How were meanings intentionally and unintentionally created among stakeholders during this …

African-American Women's Reception Influence And Utility Of Television Content: An Exploratory Qualitative Analysis, Bettye A. Grable

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This qualitative study featured 33 in-depth interviews of college-aged, African-American women and offers baseline exploratory data about how a majority cultural artifact like televised depictions become utilized in the everyday lives of an underrepresented group in media studies. This research represents one of a few studies to explore how black females decode and utilize TV content, and offers a new theoretical framework to explain informants' decoded receptions, influence and utility of television. An inductive analysis of interview narratives found that viewers use TV content like a looking-glass to understand how they are seen by others and where they fit in …

Public Relations Ethics: A Cross-Cultural Analysis, Paul Stuart Lieber

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This two-part study employed 11 qualitative interviews, the Defining Issues Test (DIT) and a quantitative version of the five-factor TARES test to complete the first cross-cultural analysis of the ethical decision-making patterns of public relations practitioners. The DIT is an instrument based on Kohlberg’s (1969) moral development theory, the TARES test composed of 14 self-enforced, ethical consideration statements derived from the research of Baker and Martinson (2001). Results indicate no statistically significant difference in levels of moral development and ethical consideration between sampled practitioners in Australia, New Zealand and the United States (Lieber, 2003). This finding argues for a vocational …

Effects Of Gender Role On The Judgment Of Masculine Signs, Joseph C. Mitchell

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Masculinity is a multi-dimensional, fairly pliable construct that some scholars approach from a biological perspective, others approach from a social constructionist perspective, and others approach from a unifying perspective. Part of the environment that informs the meaning of masculinity to a given culture is the mass media. This study takes the constructivist theoretical perspective, which attempts to explain the activation of schemata. The schematic process for this study concerns how people perceive, process, and judge masculine signs. This study seeks to explain gender role orientation’s influences on the development of schemata for masculinity as evidenced by differences in assessments of …

The Effects Of Sex And Context On Student's Interpretation Of Teachers' High Immediacy Messages, Carolyn Hornsby Rester

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Teacher immediacy has been positively associated with many desirable academic outcomes, including quality student-teacher relationships, student participation in the classroom and in extra-class interaction, and increased student learning. Thus, scholars have consistently encouraged educators to increase their use of immediacy in contacts with students. However, some previous research found that high levels of teacher immediacy can be problematic in relationships and detrimental to desirable educational outcomes. Immediacy behavior tends to promote personal relationships and inclusion. However, excessive immediacy may change the meaning that students receive from the behavior. Using a message interpretation perspective, this study examined how sex of the …

Greenwashing: Visual Communication And Political Influence In Environmental Policy, Eric Jeffrey Jenner

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

Some contemporary theories in political science maintain that public lobbying is merely an expression of latent and resolute public opinion that is communicated to policymakers. Other theories contend that the public is highly manipulable and that public lobbying by extension can be considered a form of strategic framing that takes place through the news and paid media. Both theoretical approaches specify a function for words or text but are silent on the influence of photographs or images. In this dissertation, I hypothesize that environmental public lobbying operates as strategic framing and that text and photographs have unique and discrete effects …

Foreign News Coverage In Selected U.S. Newspapers 1927-1997: A Content Analysis, Cleo Joffrion Allen

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

This content analysis was designed to examine, in a single longitudinal study, trends in the quantity and kinds of world news coverage in selected U.S. newspapers during times of relative peace. Using complementary proportion and absolute-item frequencies, two constructed weeks in 1927, 1947, 1977, and 1997 in three newspapers, 168 issues in all, were analyzed. The findings indicate that the percentage of foreign news coverage compared to non-foreign coverage in the three newspapers actually increased between 1927 and 1997. The amount of foreign coverage spiked in 1947 and then started to decline. But even with the decline, coverage by proportion …

The Diffusion Of Gis In Journalism, Ben S. Wasike

LSU Doctoral Dissertations

The purposes of this study were to determine the likelihood of reporters to adopt Geographical Information Systems and to predict the future of the diffusion of GIS in the journalism industry using the diffusion of innovations theory. The study used two data collection methods: in-depth interviews and a Web survey. The indepth-interviews revealed factors that will influence the diffusion of GIS, including the availability of map data, competition between media agencies, the ease of getting management to buy GIS once its functionality has been demonstrated to them, and the general use of secondary GIS products. The Web survey showed that …

Advertising To New Parents -- An Examination Of The Ways Select Children's Product Manufacturers Attract New Parents As Potential Customers, John L. Mccullough Jr.

Seton Hall University Dissertations and Theses (ETDs)

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Habermas's Public Sphere : Politics And Australian News Media, Tim Balfour

Theses : Honours

Jurgen Habermas’s theory of an eroded public sphere is common to media studies that address the functions and shortfalls of news media in society. The theory tackles many aspects of society, but is most usually associated with the mass media and its role in facilitating informed public debate among private persons coming together as a public to hold institutions of power to account. The term has been used to such a degree that its authority is taken as rote, which has subsequently reduced the complexity, subtleties and strength of Jurgen Habermas’s original arguments. In turn, this has caused critics to …

Online Defamation: A Case Study In Competing Rights, Julie Dare

Theses : Honours

As a consequence of the dominant role the United States has played in its development, the Internet has become synonymous with a liberal interpretation of freedom of expression, heavily imbued with First Amendment free speech principles. This has resulted in an environment that supports an adversarial, aggressive style of interaction; an environment which has become a "defamation prone zone" (Edwards, 1997). However, resolving online defamation disputes is problematic, particularly in cross-jurisdictional cases involving defendants based in the United States. Incongruities in the balance of free speech and reputation between the United States and most other countries, as expressed through defamation …

Shifting Representations Of Aboriginality In Australian Cinema : Re-Presenting From An Anti-Colonial Perspective, Kylie Solonec

Theses : Honours

Recently there has been a significant shift in the way that Aboriginal people are being represented in Australian cinema. Some would argue that the social and political movements that have occurred since the 1960s through until today have had a significant effect and in turn have produced a third wave of Australian cinema. Concurrently with this process, there have been a number of Indigenous politicians, academics and filmmakers who have actively been striving to gain better resources and opportunities for Indigenous filmmakers to be able to tell their stories. A combination of these two projects has seen a shift in …

Girl Du Jour - Girl Of The Day, Sarah Perfrement

Theses : Honours

Girl du jour explores and discusses a select group of women's lives, as well as factors influencing the development of young women's identities. The project offers a personal and intimate insight into the women's lives through the use of documentary/photojournalism whilst also incorporating the choreographed image. Girl du jour explores the group of young women's lives both theoretically and visually, making reference to the performance of identity, women's issues, body image (including young women and the influence of the fashion industry) and motherhood. The women depicted are exposed in their intimate, public and social lives are depicted in an attempt …

Media Reality Versus Lived Reality: The Application Of Cultivation Theory To A Film Audience’S Perceptions Of Romantic Relationships, Nicholas Jensen

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Cultivation theory was only applied to the realm of media violence in previous academic studies, thus research needs to address the impact of this particular phenomena on a different sub-genre within society. Hence, romantic relationships and the application of intra-psychic or cultural scripting from Hollywood film, to peoples' interpersonal relationships in their lived realities. This research sets out to answer various questions relating to the broad topic of film audiences' perceptions of romantic relationships and as to whether they apply or act out what they have seen on the silver screen. This research aims to investigate such phenomena as: Do …

Cameras In Court: A Utilitarian Ethical Approach, Kylie L. Greene

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Cameras in Court: A Utilitarian Ethical Approach is a theoretical discussion that establishes ethical guidelines for journalists and judges concerning cameras in court. Using utilitarian and deontological ethics the research will show that the current professional codes for journalists and judges are not sufficient and that a more utilitarian approach is necessary. Although still cameras were allowed in courtrooms in the early 1900s, it was the 1995 trial of football star O.J. Simpson that many say forever changed the way journalists, judges, and the public viewed cameras in court. Today, many judges are restricting camera access in high-profile cases, while …

The Spring Break Effect: The Relationship Between Individual Self-Objectification And Physical Fitness Behavior, Brett Dobesh

Dissertations and Theses @ UNI

Research findings focusing on the theoretical foundation for self-objectification suggests that women are more likely to have high levels of objectification for a variety of reasons. To extend this body of research the purpose of this investigation is two-fold: (1) to assess the influence that spring break attendance may have on levels of self-objectification for fraternity and sorority members, and (2) to observe the connections between SO levels and increased levels of physical fitness. This study consisted of (n = 153) college students actively involved in the Greek System at two Mid-west universities. The students were asked to complete three …

U.S.A. & France: I Love You ~ Neither Do I, Dirk Chatelain, Patti Vannoy, Rachael Seravalli, Kevin Abourezk, Erin Hilsabeck, Laura Schreier, Alyssa Schukar

College of Journalism and Mass Communications: Student Media

The Reporting
The Relationship by Dirk Chatelain
The History by Patti Vannoy
The American Inparis by Dirk Chatelain
The Expats by Rachael Seravalli
The Native Love by Kevin Abourezk
The Parisian Wild West by Kevin Abourezk
The Montauban by Kevin Abourezk
The Tourists by Erin Hilsabeck
The Art Capital by Erin Hilsabeck
The Famous Book Store by Laura Schreier
The Images by Alyssa Schukar
The Pop Culture by Laura Schreier
The Small Screen by Rachael Seravalli
The Veil Debate by Patti Vannoy
The Immigrants by Dirk Chatelain
The Rights Of Women by Patti Vannoy
The European Leader by Erin Hilsabeck …

Multi-National Project Team Communications And Cultural Influences, Morgan E. Henrie

Engineering Management & Systems Engineering Theses & Dissertations

This exploratory case study dissertation examined multinational project teams' communication satisfaction as influenced by the project team's cultural attribute of power distance. Utilizing a exploratory case study, semi-guided interview research approach, ordinal scale data and open-ended contextual based question responses was obtained. This data was gathered from United States---Russia and Canada---Angola multi-national, complex, high technology oil transportation project teams. Triangulation data gathering techniques were utilized to obtain empirical data from multiple sources of data and multiple data types. Subsequent data analyses combined descriptive statistical analysis, graphical analysis, cluster analysis, and content analysis techniques to derive a theoretical construct of multi-national …

Life After The White House: The Public Post-Presidency And The Development Of Presidential Legacies, Lori Cox Han, Matthew J. Krov

Political Science Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"This chapter considers two distinct yet related issues: First, we examine the role that continuing press coverage of a former president plays in the development of a presidential legacy; and second, we consider the impact of Clinton’s lingering presence in the news media in the first year after he left office and how that has shaped the early phase of his legacy. While the historical rankings and public approval ratings of former presidents can and do shift—sometimes dramatically—in the years after leaving office, news coverage during the first year can be important in setting a tone as to how the …

The Rose Garden Strategy Revisited: How Presidents Use Public Activities, Lori Cox Han

Political Science Faculty Books and Book Chapters

"The overall goal of this study was to determine how often, and in which formats, presidents choose to go public, and if differences exist in that pattern during their reelection efforts. This chapter also considers the major developments within the public presidency during the twentieth century, and how those developments contributed to the patterns in public activities that have emerged for Presidents Hoover through Clinton."

Drawing The Line Between Targeting And Patronizing: How “Vulnerable” Are The Vulnerable?, Joyce M. Wolburg

College of Communication Faculty Research and Publications

Purpose – This article aims to address the nature of vulnerability and the basis for protecting certain audiences from targeted goods and services. It aims to evaluate the need for protection as well as marketers’ defense that protection merely patronizes audiences.

Design/methodology/approach – This article cites published research that offers guidelines for determining vulnerability in the marketplace and examines conclusions from a case study that argue for holding companies to have standards of both individual and collective responsibility.

Findings – Categories of vulnerability are offered, and distinctions are drawn between the vulnerable and the disadvantaged to provide a rationale for …