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Television political advertising has been criticized for focusing too much on candidates' image rather than on their issue positions. Yet, image advertising has been largely ignored by the press as a source for news stories. This study examined the effects of a proposed type of television adwatch story—one that critiqued political advertisements that focused on a candidate's image. Image adwatches produced less positive candidate evaluations than the control group, which saw no adwatches. This pattern did not hold for issue adwatches. Participants did not apply information from either the issue or image adwatch to ads that were different from those critiqued in the adwatches. Recall of the ad was lower for issue adwatches, but only when they critiqued a different ad. Participants did not penalize journalists for their image adwatch stories. Findings are discussed in an information processing perspective.

Television news is routinely blamed for a decline in political knowledge and for a deepening cynicism among the American electorate. Yet studies attempting to measure the effects of TV news have produced decidedly mixed results. This study, using survey data from a 1994 U.S. Senate campaign in Missouri, finds that using TV news for political and government information is positively associated with knowledge about candidates and not associated with cynicism toward politicians. These results run counter to the popular notion that TV news induces "videomalaise" among viewers.

Authors of the knowledge gap hypothesis predicted television's potential to narrow the gaps in some circumstances. This online experiment aimed to bound the conditions that facilitate the leveling role of audiovisual news for a foreign-born audience ( N = 137) residing in the United States. Results showed that audiovisual news narrowed the gaps by improving learning for those who scored low on language or U.S. education and by attenuating improvements in learning for those with high language or education scores. Conversely, text news widened the gaps by sizable gains in learning for those with better language or more education.

Experiments are a powerful method for understanding causal relationships in journalism and mass communication research. In this essay, the authors examine seven aspects of experimental quality that reviewers should include as criteria in their evaluations. They note that there are complex interrelationships among these indicators. In cases where aspects of the standards are controversial, the authors attempt to summarize the conflicting arguments. Where different methodological conclusions can be rationalized as appropriate, the authors' suggestion is that the researcher make clear what decisions were made in the experimental design and why, so that readers can evaluate those decisions.

There have been contradictory findings concerning the direct effects of ideal body image advertising on women's body concerns. Despite numerous studies, the mechanism of how women are affected negatively by such imagery is still unclear. The current study explored why women are influenced negatively by ideal body image in the third-person effect framework. In particular, the authors proposed gendered "others" and hypothesized that when those others were men, exposure to the ideal body would create larger third-person perceptions; there would be a negative relationship between third-person gaps and body area satisfaction. Findings confirmed the importance of gendered others, such that women estimated close male friends would be more affected by ideal body image than close female friends.

Effects of various mass media on political learning during the 1992 presidential campaign are examined via analyses of two voter surveys conducted in different states. Three indicators of political knowledge are compared: differences on issues between parties (Republican vs. Democratic), differences on issues among candidates (Bush vs. Clinton vs. Perot), and personal knowledge about the candidates (Bush, Clinton, and Perot). Campaign media, including both news coverage and special events (conventions, debates), added significantly to the prediction of both kinds of knowledge about the candidates, even after controlling for major demographic variables and for habitual uses of news media. Of the new forms of media campaigning that became prominent in 1992, at least the interview / talk show format apparently added to voter learning about candidates. Television sources of various types tended to contribute more to learning about the candidates, whereas the newspaper was the medium more associated with knowledge of policy differences between the two major parties.