Suchergebnisse

A sample of 179 faithful viewers of religious television with divergent patterns of secular television exposure were found to possess significantly different perceptions of religious broadcasters in light of the PTL scandal. High consumers of secular television and magazine reports of the scandal became far more critical and increasingly negative. Low consumers were more supportive of religious broadcasters after the scandal. The interaction between viewer motives, media exposure, interpretive processing of media information and the effects on viewer perceptions are discussed.

Examines causes for the rise of political scandals in the early 1990s and provides an explanation for the outbreak of media stories on political corruption.

THIS ARTICLE EXAMINES THE CONSTANTLY SHIFTING PORTRAYAL OF U.S. PRESIDENT BILL CLINTON IN THE AMERICAN MEDIA. PUBLIC PERCEPTION OF CLINTON'S EFFECTIVENESS AND CHARACTER IS EXTREMELY VOLATILE. OSCILLATIONS IN PUBLIC OPINION ARE ENCOURAGED BY A MEDIA WHICH SEEMS DETERMINED TO KEEP CLINTON AND THE COUNTRY ROCKING--AND ROLLING.

THE NEWS FROM AMERICA IS (WHAT ELSE COULD IT BE?) BILL Clinton – America's first first-name-only-please President, informality and accessibility being hallmarks of democratic populism in the 1990s. It might seem as if this is the roller-coaster presidency: if you do not like Clinton's bad (good) reputation today, just wait a month and you can be sure that things will have turned upside down. When I started this piece in the spring, he was way, way down; today just a few months later, following a successful Japanese trip (his weak rivals in the G-7 group made him look good), his two successful judicial appointments (Ruth Bader Ginsberg to the Supreme Court and Louis J. Freeh to the FBI), his paper-thin but indispensable budget victory in the Congress, and his shepherding of the historic Israeli-Palestinian peace protocol, he's looking good. By the time you read this, however, he's likely to be down again, or perhaps down but once again up. His political career has been on a rollercoaster from the start and the media seem determined to keep him and the country rocking — and rolling.

Japan is one of the most media-saturated societies in the world. The circulations of its "big five" national newspapers dwarf those of any major American newspaper. NHK, its public service broadcasting agency, is second only to the BBC in size. And it has a full range of commercial television stations, high-brow and low-brow magazines (from widely read intellectual journals to the ubiquitous manga, or adult comic books), and a large antimainstream media and mini-media. Japanese elites, surveys show, rate the mass media as the most influential group in Japanese society. But what role do they play in political life? Whose interests do the media serve? As Japan's critics often hold, are they mainly servants of the state? Or are they watchdogs on behalf of the public, as the media themselves claim and as suggested by their role in uncovering late eighties and early nineties political scandals and in triggering political change in the summer of 1993? And what effects do the media have on the political beliefs and behavior of ordinary Japanese people? These questions, central for interpreting the media's role in any industrial society, are the focus of this collection of essays by leading political scientists, sociologists, social psychologists, and journalists. Japan's unique kisha (press) club system, its powerful media business organizations, the uses of the media by Japan's wily bureaucrats, and the role of the media in everything from political scandals to shaping public opinion, are among the many subjects of this insightful and provocative book