Suchergebnisse

Even at the low development level of a small Andean village, there are persons receiving messages from the modern mass media. The study suggests that the process of media audience building may be fundamentally the same in this quite different culture as in the United States.

As communications technologies increase human-kind's ability to send more messages across greater distance at even faster speeds, the opportunities multiply for broader and deeper transnational information-sharing—but threats to the fair and free use of the mass media increase as well. The more massive the communications systems become, the smaller the number of communicators who can control what larger numbers of receivers can see or hear. The trend toward concentration of ownership of the mass media continues in the United States and other free countries but it does not seriously inhibit the choice of American citizens. Some Third World countries which have one-party systems and government-owned news media are slowly relaxing restrictions on domestic journalists. Harsh information controls in the Soviet Union and elsewhere have not provided successful models for the development of Third World countries. Developing nations have valid reasons to criticize Western coverage of their societies. Such objections need not be met by hampering the free flow of information—as press-control states contend—but by broadening and diversifying the flow of ideas.

Mass media have been described as all- pervasive cultural institutions which both reflect and project society's values. They are shown to have played a role throughout history, whenever new developments have threatened established values, and often are singled out as important facilitators and accelerators of social change. As such, it is not surprising that various charges have been leveled against the mass media for their purported role in the recent and significant escalation of psychoactive drug use and abuse. Some critics have attempted to relate the act of viewing or experiencing the mass media to problems of drug use; others have focused their charges on, and label as villains, the contents of the media, as in advertising, television entertainment and popular song lyrics. The intent of this paper is to examine some of these accusations and to explore the issues and the evidence in the current con troversy over the role of mass media in the use and abuse of psychoactive drugs.

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 objective of the present article was to verify if — controlled by the factors education and degree of urbanization — there exists a relation between the use of the mass media newspaper and television on the one hand and active sports practice on the other hand. The basic assumption was that persons using the mass media in a motivated way, as source of information, practice more sports during their leisure hours, and that persons interested essentially in the recreative part of the paper or of the television programmes will practice active sports in a lesser measure (congru ency hypothesis). The data on which the article is based proceeded from the investi gation "Performance and Talent''. As technique of analysis the multiple linear regression analysis was used. The results proved that the interest shown for the more informative part of the paper or the television programmes had a positive relation to sports practice, and that interest for the rather recreative part of the mass-media had a negative relation. The signifi cance of the mass-media variables as predictor of sports practice was however small, compared to the significance of the education level. Of course these results are only valid for the variables used in this study, and with the applied technique of analysis.

The paper provides a professional overview of the development of media technology, as well as the influence of technology on media content and its interpretation. The aim of communication is definitively to connect the source with the receiver. It means to solve the main problem – to overwhelm the obstacle of space and time. Technological goals since the dark ages were aimed at increasing the physical features of man as direct carrier or to replace him by a more efficient one.

In light of the importance of culture for the autonomy, sense of identity, and self-respect of individuals, cultural minorities have a right that their cultures flourish. Since cultural minorities are frequently in a disadvantaged position in the cultural market-place, a commitment to equality implies that the state ought to take steps to assist these minorities in preserving their cultures. This Article examines the ways the mass media can assist cultural minorities in preserving their cultures. For instance, when the media present contents that relate to the cultures of minorities, individual members of the minority group are exposed to their culture; media designated for cultural groups facilitate dialogue between group members, thus enabling the cultural group to determine which parts of its culture to retain and which parts to change. With that said, contemporary media frequently provide insufficient cultural contents due to the influence of commercial operational logic. This Article examines why the motivation for profit leads to under-production of cultural materials for minorities and to insufficient inclusion of cultural minorities in the public discourse. It is argued that the inequality caused by the media—which provide minorities with too little of the cultural contents so pertinent to the realization of their right to culture—merits corrective intervention. The Article examines possible forms of State intervention with the media on behalf of cultural minorities, taking into consideration that such intervention is a sensitive issue, since it has ramifications concerning the scope of the freedom of the press. Accordingly, it is argued that the State ought to be permitted to create legislation which intervenes, mainly by means of subsidies and structural regulation, to improve the manner in which the media fulfill their roles in a multicultural democracy. In contrast, there should be sparse use of conditionality in the issue of licenses for media operators.

Like other landmark historic events, the war on the territory of the former Yugoslavia has been explained by three types of theories: mythological, scientific and common-sensical, the latter making use of certain pseudoscientific arguments. The author claims that the theory blaming the media in all six republics of the former Yugoslavia for the outbreak of the war belongs to the latter type. The empirical data gathered on the eve of the war show that ethnic tolerance was highest in the republics which were later struck by the war: Bosnia and Hercegovma and Croatia. The author provides an alternative explanation of the role of the media in paving the way for the war. Only in Serbia did mass media in the circumstances of the prevailing authoritarian orientation of the population before the war, serve to the aggressive nationalist leadership for political mobilization which aroused in the Serbian people a feeling of imperilment and a sense of omnipotence. After the outbreak of the war in Croatia and Bosnia and Hercegovina, the media have been only one of the elements in an ever-expanding spiral of hatred and violence. (SOI : PM: S. 187)

Claims regarding the power of the mass media in contemporary politics are much more frequent than research actually analysing the influence of mass media on politics. Building upon the notion of issue ownership, this article argues that the capacity of the mass media to influence the respective agendas of political parties is conditioned upon the interests of the political parties. Media attention to an issue generates attention from political parties when the issue is one that political parties have an interest in politicizing in the first place. The argument of the article is supported in a time-series study of mass media influence on the opposition parties' agenda in Denmark over a twenty-year period.