This study finds that audience exposure and attention to three media—newspapers, television news, and radio news—are separate dimensions, based on a telephone survey of 234 individuals 18 years old and up in Bloomington, Indiana. The relationships among exposure and attention and knowledge gain, opinion direction, opinion strength, and actual behavior are less clear, although there is evidence that newspapers are more likely to influence cognitive learning while television influences both cognition and attitudes. Radio news was less influential.
Abstract In this article, Åke Pettersson writes about Sweden's only media programme that continued broadcasting without interruption for more than three decades. Called Vår grundade mening for the most part of its life, it ran into some problems in 2007 and came close to shutdown before re-emerging under the name of Publicerat, the appellation Pettersson prefers when talking about his programme. Since its inception in 1981 up to its demise in 2013, the radio programme has worked as 'watchdog' of the media scene in Sweden. Pettersson won several awards for his observations and discussions of media-related issues in Sweden and beyond. A close examination of the about 1500 episodes that he produced, edited and presented can tell volumes about the history of the Swedish media for over three decades. He starts with a few words about his own programme and then moves to the reaction and responses he has received from both public and private media outlets in Sweden. The article dwells on both positive and negative sides that emanate from a radio programme with a critical angle of the media. He touches upon the collaboration he has had as a practitioner with academia, namely, media journalism scholars. The article, although centring on the Swedish media scene, can have a lot of bearing on how the media may get involved in self-criticism to improve conditions and increase public awareness of media-related issues.
Abstract Based on longitudinal research on the media coverage of terrorist attacks, this article suggests a model of how the coverage of these attacks may be conceptualized as a media event and explores the function this serves within society. The main assumption of the model is that journalists change their ritual of news coverage when dealing with exceptional terrorist attacks; they abandon their usual normative professional frame that encompasses such activities as critical scrutiny of governmental actions, and assume a national-patriotic coverage frame that seeks to reestablish normality and restore order. The model can be useful in clarifying the media's role following terror event. While media run the risk of reinforcing the terror event by giving it the public stage its perpetrators seek, by acting as patriots and not as professionals, journalists subvert the message of the terrorists, so that instead of passing on a message of terror, dread, and alarm, the media give the attacked country and society a message of solidarity, partnership, and stubborn endurance against the terrorist threat. The model may also be useful for understanding media coverage of other crisis situations apart from massive terror attacks.
This article deals with the category of alternative media from a theoretical perspective. It aims to develop a definition and to distinguish different dimensions of alternative media. The article is a contribution to theoretical foundations of alternative media studies. The notion of alternative media as critical media is introduced. Critical media product content shows the suppressed possibilities of existence, antagonisms of reality, and potentials for change. It questions domination, expresses the standpoints of the oppressed and dominated groups and individuals and argues for the advancement of a co-operative society. Critical media product form aims at advancing imagination; it is dialectical because it involves dynamics, non-identity, rupture, and the unexpected. The category of critical media is connected to Negt and Kluge's notion of the counter-public sphere. Critical media can be seen as the communicative dimension of the counter-public sphere.
This contribution introduces, from a media education perspective, two concepts which may be useful for further theoretical reflection upon the rich empirical material provided in the other articles of this special issue. The first concept, 'cultures of media practice', refers to habitualized patterns of media practice collectively shared by members of a specific social group. The articles provide many examples of such cultures of media practices, including different 'experiential spaces' such as gender, ethnicity, social class and generation. The second concept, 'media- bildung', covers fundamental changes which people undergo in their attitude towards the subject-matter covered by the media and/or the media itself. In the contributions to this special issue such processes of 'media-bildung'can be identified along with processes of media learning in which people acquire new knowledge and/or develop new skills without transforming their orientations.
Abstract A growing literature on the impact of "fake news" accusations on legacy news outlets suggests that the use of this term is part of a much larger trend of increased and delegitimizing media criticism by political actors. However, so far, there is very little empirical evidence on how prevailing politicians' delegitimizing media criticism really is and under which conditions it occurs. To fill these gaps, we present results of a content analysis of media-related Facebook postings by Austrian and German politicians in 2017 (N = 2,921). The results suggest that media criticism, in general, is actually rare and that about half of it can be described as delegitimizing (i.e., characterized by incivility or absence of argumentation). Most often, media criticism is used by populist politicians, who accuse "the media" in general of bias and falsehoods.
