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"Whether we are watching TV, surfing the Internet, listening to our iPods, or reading a novel, we are all engaged with media as a member of an audience. Despite the widespread use of this term in our popular culture, the meaning of the "audience" is complex, and it has undergone significant historical shifts as new forms of mediated communication have developed from print, telegraphy, and radio to film, television, and the Internet. Media Audiences explores the concept of media audiences from four broad perspectives: as "victims" of mass media, as market constructions & commodities, as users of media, and as producers & subcultures of mass media. The goal of the text is for students to be able to think critically about the role and status of media audiences in contemporary society, reflecting on their relative power in relation to institutional media producers."--

Philip M. Napoli's book is a broad and systematic analysis of the many economic factors that shape the business of measuring audiences for use in financial transactions in the broadcast, cable, and online industries in the United States. At first glance, then, Audience Economics
appears to boldly go where many scholars have gone before. Indeed, a number of seminal works have explored the processes by which media institutions conduct research about the audience and process this information into commodified abstractions which often bear little resemblance to actual
viewers (e.g. Ang 1991; Ettema and Whitney 1994; Gitlin 1983; Meehan 1984, 1990, 1993; Turow 1997; Webster and Phalen 1997). Summing up the thrust of much of this critique, Ang (1991) aptly described the notion of television audiences generated by media industries as little more than 'taxonomic
collectives'; intangible groups of individuals brought together simply by virtue of their simultaneous attention to the same audio-visual source.

View that political socialization leads to tolerance; based on interviews with members of Parliament, Knesset, and Congress, 1980-87.

THE ARTICLE DISCUSSES HOW OVER THE LAST 25 YEARS A NUMBER OF CONCLUSIONS CONCERNING THE DEVELOPMENT OF POLITICAL TOLERANCE HAVE COME TO BE WELL ACCEPTED IN THE LITERATURE ON POLITICAL BEHAVIOR. USING DIFFERENT SOURCES AND METHODS, THE AUTHOR REPORTS ON A CONTENT-CONTROLLED MEASURE OF TOLERANCE AND A MULTIVARIATE MODEL.

S. LIEBERSON'S INDEX OF DIVERSITY WITHIN POPULATION (SEE SA 18:6/70E5232) IS COMPUTED FOR THE 50 US STATES. IT REPRESENTS THE PROPORTION OF CHARACTERISTICS UPON WHICH 2 RANDOMLY SELECTED INDIVIDUALS WILL DIFFER, ON THE AVERAGE, ASSUMING SAMPLING WITH REPLACEMENT. THIS INDEX IS CORRELATED WITH INDICATORS OF PARTY COMPETITION (POSITIVE), DISCRIMINATION & INEQUALITY (NEGATIVE), & VARIOUS POLICY VARIABLES (POSITIVE). THE INDEX IS ALSO RELATED TO REGION IN AN ANALYSIS OF VARIANCE MODEL; THE WITHIN-REGIONAL VARIATIONS ARE TOO SMALL TO CONTROL FOR REGION WHEN EXAMINING THE OTHER RELATIONSHIPS. SOUTH VS NON-SOUTH COMPARISONS ARE EXAMINED, HOWEVER, & THERE IS A SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCE IN THE STRENGTH OF THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DIVERSITY & DISCRIMINATION--A STRONG RELATIONSHIP IN THE SOUTH, A WEAKER RELATIONSHIP IN THE NON-SOUTH. 6 TABLES. AA.

Fry and Winters, in a recent article in this journal, concluded that political variables are more important than socioeconomic variables in terms of redistributive policies. They based their analysis, however, on twelve political but only six socioeconomic variables. This research note re-examines these relationships, utilizing twelve political and twelve socioeconomic variables. The findings are strikingly reversed, whether one considers all twenty-four variables or the best five political and the best five socioeconomic variables. However, these findings reflect a shotgun approach, simply more and more variables added to a regression equation. To reduce and clarify the analysis, two criteria are suggested for selecting independent variables: the size of the zero-order correlations, and the degree of multicolinearity among the independent variables. When three political and three socioeconomic variables are compared using these criteria, the results are once again inconsistent with those reported by Fry and Winters.