Suchergebnisse

Novelist Evelyn Waugh's assignment as the London Daily Mail's Addis Ababa correspondent reporting the Italo-Ethiopian War of 1935–1936 inspired him to write Scoop, a biting satire of the Addis Ababa correspondents. While journalism scholars are aware that Waugh's wartime experiences inspired Scoop, researchers have not investigated the book's origins in depth. This study examined Waugh's criticisms of the correspondents' scoop mentalities by investigating the real scoop satirized in Scoop-of Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie's secret deal with an American business consortium to excavate the country's mineral and oil reserves. In their obsession to get scoops, the correspondents colluded with high-level sources and failed to question sources' motives. Waugh's criticisms of the correspondents' obsessions to get scoops, although not original, reached a wide audience and influenced popular beliefs about war reporting and war correspondents.

Complaints about media coverage of presidential elections have raised concerns that the public may support restrictions on election campaign messages. This study, based on a nationwide telephone survey (N = 549), investigated perceptions of media influence and support for campaign message restrictions during the 1996 presidential campaign. The study was theoretically grounded in the third-person effect approach. The results confirmed the perceptual component hypothesis for individuals to perceive greater media influence on people other than themselves. They also confirmed the behavioral component hypothesis for third-person perception to lead to support for restrictions on election messages. The implications of the results are discussed.

This study of quotations in newspaper coverage of Hurricane Andrew showed that individuals who were not affiliated with government or business were quoted most often. Most sources were quoted as experts, with individuals represented as suffering victims, providing the news media with human interest quotations. Further, most sources praised themselves and blamed others.

A nationwide telephone survey of 721 adults examined the impact of the third-person effect on individuals' perceptions of the media's general influence and immorality effects with three issues. The third-person effect perceptual hypothesis predicts that individuals will perceive media messages to have greater effects on other people than on themselves. A behavioral hypothesis predicts that third-person perception (i.e., seeing others as more influenced) will lead to support for restrictions on media messages. The findings reaffirmed robust support for the perceptual hypothesis. Regarding the behavioral hypothesis, effect perceptions were found to be issue dependent. For television violence, the issue with the clearest moral dimension, perceived immorality effects predicted support for restrictions. In contrast, perception of the media's general influence was a key predictor of support for restrictions on televised trials and negative political advertising. The failure of past research to distinguish dimensions of perceived effects may account for the less than robust findings regarding the behavioral hypothesis.

This study examined sports journalists' beliefs about the problems in their field. It used a combination of a standardized survey and in-depth follow-up interviews. The sports journalists saw their concerns as distinctly different from those of journalists in other news departments. Still, there were areas of shared concern, including professionalism and economic and job-related issues. Open-ended interviews with a representative sample of the sports editors highlighted the interrelatedness of various problems. There were, for example, close relations between problems connected to content and reporting. Competition also appeared to be associated with other concerns including professionalism, economic troubles, and job-related problems. The open-ended interviews also revealed how some problems (e.g., competition, diversity), although not at the top of the list of most important problems, were intertwined with many other problems. The sports journalists expressed considerable hostility toward broadcast sports journalists for diminishing their status.

South Florida residents who experienced Hurricane Andrew evaluated the credibility of the hurricane-related information from television as more trustworthy than other sources. Contrary to what was hypothesized, the broadcast medium of television (but not radio) was evaluated on the dimension of expertise as being higher than newspapers. As predicted, interpersonal sources were judged high on trustworthiness, but much lower on expertise than any of the mass media sources. The findings indicated that when people wanted factual information and self-help information, they expressed reservations about the credibility of other people (friends, neighbors or relatives). In such cases, there was a marked tendency to place emphasis (or faith) in television.