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A comparison of attitudes of Filipino and Indian students in the U.S. toward the mass media supports a general hypothesis that the media are many things to many people.

The literature on the MM & att's is surveyed & some findings & general conclusions from a questionaire study of the effects of the 6-part TV series 'Curry & Chips' on 208 secondary Sch children in England are presented. It was held that the way race-related material is handled by the MM serves both to perpetuate negative perceptions of blacks & to define the situation as one of intergroup conflict. The impact of the media is seen to operate on 2 levels: (a) within the given culture, using cultural symbols, & (b) through the pattern of coverage of an event as determined by `news value'. Data show that a number of factors pertaining to traditional culture, to the media as instit's, their technologies & their related ideologies, & to the interplay between these factors, operate to structure the news coverage of race related matters in a way that causes people to see the situation primarily as one of actual or potential conflict. Blacks come to be seen as conflict-generating per se & the chances that people will think about the situation in more productive ways are reduced. The result is that real conflict is amplified. But this pattern is not inevitable. The (apparently) unconscious assumptions that underlie the sense of `what is news' do not need to remain unconscious & the unintended consequences of news reporting do not need to go unrecognized; nor does unwitting bias need to remain either `unwitting' or `bias'. Neither is it inevitable that the sort of media ideology that defines the media as passive & impartial mirrors of society, reflecting but not affecting events, should hold indefinite sway. Appendix: attitude Scores of White Secondary Sch Children; 1 Table. M. Maxfield.

In preparing this study on the image of woman in Egyptian feminine mass media, the researchers chose the women's magazine "Hawwa", a weekly periodical, as a medium of research. "Havvvva" has a wide circulation in Egypt and other Arab countries, adressing itself primarily to the average woman.

Data from 4 types of res-news diffusion studies, time trends, a newspaper strike, & a field exp-are consistent with the general hypothesis that increasing the flow of news on a topic leads to greater acquisition of knowledge about that topic among the more highly educated segments of society. Whether the resulting knowledge gap closes may depend partly on whether the stimulus intensity of MM publicity is maintained at a high level, or is reduced or eliminated at a point when only the more active persons have gained that knowledge. AA.