Suchergebnisse

THIS PAPER UTILIZES THE CONCEPT OF AUTHORITARIANISM TO EXPLORE THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF REVOLUTIONARY IDEOLOGY AND BEHAVIOR AS SEEN IN THE WEST GERMAN NEW LEFT.

Last year's election night blunders by the networks highlight the extent to which the news media—and particularly television—have become major actors in presidential elections. This article employs a content analysis to examine how thorough, balanced, and substantive network news was in Campaign 2000 as compared with 1996, 1992, and 1988. Although the principal focus is on the broadcast networks, data on other news genres, as well as candidate discourse, are brought to bear on the research questions. The study finds little or no improvement in election coverage over time despite numerous reform efforts from inside and outside the newsroom. The amount of coverage has declined, along with the airtime available to candidates. Attention to the horse race increased sharply in 2000, but issue coverage did not. The tone of coverage has remained consistently negative, but Democrats sometimes fared better than Republicans. Media discourse was also less substantive and more negative than candidate discourse, and voters continued to give the media low marks for their performance. These findings call into question the effectiveness of recent efforts to make election news more useful to voters.

Content analysis of the 2000 presidential campaign, compared to those of 1996, 1992, and 1988, finding little or no improvement over time; US.

Explores changing portrayal of civilian-sector employees and elected officials and depiction of themes involving governmental practices and performance in prime time television programming, and extent to which the public's increasingly negative attitudes might be formed by the programs; US. Based on a study of 9,588 characters in 1,234 programs, of whom 561 (6%) were either public officials or federal, state, or local civil servants.

Changing U.S. attitudes toward new technologies are examined, as are explanations of such changes. We hypothesize that increased concern with the risks of new technologies by certain elite groups is partly a surrogate for underlying ideological criticisms of U.S. society. The question of risk is examined within the framework of the debate over nuclear energy. Studies of various leadership groups are used to demonstrate the ideological component of risk assessment. Studies of scientists' and journalists' attitudes, media coverage of nuclear energy, and public perception of scientists' views suggest both that journalists' ideologies influence their coverage of nuclear energy and that media coverage of the issue is partly responsible for public misperceptions of the views of scientists. We conclude with a discussion of the historical development of the environmental movement in the 1960s and 1970s and the relation of this movement to the public's declining support for nuclear energy.

For some time we have been engaged in a large scale study of various leadership strata in the United States. Our goal is to clarify similarities and differences in background, ideology and personality among members of such strata. We are also interested in the relationship between these variables and the manner in which members of different leadership groups perceive 'reality'. This article reports preliminary findings on two groups – leading business executives and top level journalists. Our work has been partly informed by hypotheses developed by social scientists as diverse as Max Weber, Harold Lasswell, Joseph Schumpeter, S. M. Lipset, Alvin Gouldner, Jurgen Habermas, Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell and others.