Ethically, journalists aspire to report in an unbiased manner. However, this study raises questions about whether 'unbiased' should be the primary journalistic standard if it means that the media may avoid asking difficult questions. In this qualitative study, we examine two competing abortion initiatives in Nebraska, analyzing social media posts and news stories shared on X during the 2024 presidential election. Using the concept of news values of controversial political issues during a landmark presidential campaign, we explore how journalists explained the initiatives and, perhaps more importantly, what they omitted from their stories. Using Salda & ntilde;a's method for contextual analysis, we uncovered two themes focusing on power via financial largesse and nuanced conflict surrounding the ballot initiatives. While journalists acted as translators, gatekeepers, and sometimes amplifiers, highlighting their power in shaping democratic ideals, they primarily adhered to traditional news values. The resulting coverage from traditional journalists was sterile and lacked the nuance needed for audiences to understand the initiatives. Non-traditional journalists did not hesitate to use terms that were incendiary, yet familiar to many audiences, creating additional conflict.
Social Media Paradox Theory proposes that social media use is inherently paradoxical, producing both beneficial and harmful outcomes simultaneously rather than functioning along opposite ends of a single continuum. Using an exploratory sequential mixed methods design, Study One (qualitative, N = 217) informed Study Two (quantitative, N = 157), in which undergraduate students disclosed their perceptions on social media use. Qualitative findings revealed four enabling themes: (1) enhanced connectivity with family and friends, (2) increased self-awareness of communication patterns, (3) greater convenience in communication, and (4) heightened awareness of world events. Four disabling themes also emerged: (1) decreased in personal communication, (2) communication apprehension, (3) deterioration of communication etiquette, and (4) growing feelings of impatience. Study Three (quantitative, N = 164) used findings from the previous studies to conduct factor analyses on the proposed Social Media Paradox Theory Measure. Results demonstrated that college students simultaneously perceived social media as both enabling and disabling, supporting the theory's dual edged framework. Participant responses were adapted to develop a multidimensional measure of the phenomenon. Confirmatory factor analyses conducted on an independent sample provided preliminary psychometric support for the measure, although further validation across larger and more diverse populations remains necessary. Implications for future research, theory development, and continued scale validation are discussed.
The Roma are one of the most marginalized ethnic groups in Italy and more empirical and systematic research on how the media portrays individuals and communities are needed. This quantitative content analysis advances the literature on visual framing by examining the portrayal of Roma people in the top 12 Italian online news organizations. Visuals are scrutinized at the denotative, structural and ideological level. Overall, the most common visual frames were criminality and symbolic threat, while at the denotative and structural-level visuals emphasized emotional distance, lack of empathy, and a visual space of deviance, poverty, and illegality. Roma people were often portrayed with no eye contact or their faces covered. Surprisingly, differences between right-wing, left-wing, and centrist online news were limited and not as significant as expected. The study provides insights on the role of visuals and news bias in the coverage of Roma, and it offers a set of new variables that can be adapted to study the visual framing of Roma people in different media types and nations.
Even though anonymity can be an aspect of various uses of communication technologies, we have rather limited knowledge about the appropriateness of that anonymity. The research reported here examined two types of anonymous engagement behaviors (passive and active) and their perceived appropriateness. Several types of predictors for these appropriateness assessments were examined here: identity- and user-based differences (e.g. gender, time spent online) and various attitudes tied to anonymity. Survey results from a nationally representative US sample suggest age and annual income levels were consistent predictors of appropriateness assessments across passive and active anonymous engagement behaviors. Overall, attitudes linked to anonymity are generally even more predictive of appropriateness assessments for anonymous engagement behaviors; more specifically, trust in anonymous sources and pro-anonymity views are the strongest attitudinal predictors of both passive and active anonymous engagement behaviors.
Parental Mediation (PM) entails parents' management of their children's digital media (DM) habits, and their parental concerns with such mediation practices. PM typically encompasses four broad activities that parents undertake to monitor and manage their children's usage of DM devices, namely Gatekeeping, Informative, Discursive, and Diversionary Mediation. Through qualitative semi-structured interviews with 21 Singaporean dual-income parents, this study investigated PM of preschoolers' DM habits, and their affiliated parental concerns with the usage. This study found that PM practices for preschoolers predominantly centered on Gatekeeping and Informative Mediation, while Discursive and Diversionary Mediation were not frequently practised. Interestingly, this study found that PM is substantially impacted by siblings' and grandparents' behavior - either supporting or undermining parents' mediation efforts - exhorting the importance of Coalitional Mediation and offering a novel extension to the PM theory.
During the initial outbreak of the Israel-Hamas war in October 2023, we examined whether stable dispositions and interpersonal concerns shape gratifications sought from media and whether media consumption intensity mediates these links. A national panel of Israeli adults (N = 500) completed an online survey during the third week of the conflict. We modeled integrative, emotive, diversion, and cognitive motives as outcomes, with trait anxiety, state anxiety, and concern for others as predictors and media consumption intensity as a mediator using path analysis. Interpersonal concern emerged as the sole consistent predictor across all four gratification types, showing significant direct associations with integrative and emotive gratifications and significant indirect associations with all four types via consumption. Contrary to theoretical expectations, neither trait anxiety nor state anxiety was significantly associated with any gratification type in multivariate models. Indirect associations via consumption were observed exclusively for concerns. The findings indicate that sociotropic concerns about the safety of family, friends, and community, rather than dispositional or transient anxiety, are the central correlates of wartime media use and the gratifications it affords. We discuss the implications for crisis communication, addressing identity, emotion, distraction, and information needs, and outline propositions regarding public alert adherence and social cohesion. Robustness analyses that controlled for religiosity and war justification reproduced the same substantive pattern, with interpersonal concern remaining a significant predictor of media consumption intensity and the concern-based indirect effects remaining significant across all four gratification outcomes.
Early in his short-lived radio program, Orson Welles Commentaries (1945-- 1946), dramatist Orson Welles responded to letters said to be sent from a 'woman from Weehawken.' Through rhetorical use of these letters, and his 'dialogue' with the alleged woman from Weehawken, Welles advanced and defended his progressive opinions that did not align with the post-WWII US political and cultural climate. In this essay, we argue Welles' rhetorical use of the letters crafted a mediated legend in the woman in Weehawken. The woman from Weehawken allowed the dramatist to introduce and defend his personal and political viewpoints to connect with, and potentially persuade, a national radio audience. Regardless of whether the letters were Welles' creation or real and faithfully represented, Welles' rhetorical fashioning of the woman from Weehawken allowed him to preemptively counteract potential critiques and ground political opinions as audience shared fact-based responses. This amalgamation of media, celebrity, politics, legend, and epistolary rhetoric provides a historical perspective in which to further explore the rhetoricity of twenty-first-century media messages and, with it, the relationship between content, creators, and their audiences.
The American electorate has become extremely polarized in recent years, with online partisan news sources and political discussions cited as key drivers of such affective polarization and ideological sorting. Analyses of two-wave survey data from the 2020 American National Election Survey (ANES) show that pro-attitudinal online news exposure is associated with polarization and perceptions of ideological sorting via interpersonal political discussions. Specifically, pro-attitudinal online news exposure has lagged associations with a) polarization by reducing positive feelings toward out-party presidential candidates and the out-party as a whole, b) a partisan's likelihood of being ideologically sorted, and c) perceptions of the out-party's ideological sorting through political discussions with family and friends.
Although stereotypes are stigmatized, people still use them. Research has typically been concerned with cognitive explanations, focusing less on why people communicate stereotypes despite the stigma. This project presents two studies examining stereotypes functions: (1) first-hand accounts of communicated stereotypes were analyzed for reported reasons why people communicate stereotypes, and results demonstrate that stereotypes function similarly to other forms of communication for affection (altruism), control, escape, inclusion, pleasure, and relaxation, as well as for efficiency, impression management, and reducing uncertainty; (2) a discourse analytic approach interrogated how these functions might be visible in language in naturally-occurring conversations where stereotypes arise spontaneously, and the analysis shows that self-report derived taxonomies resonate with analyses of conversation. Results suggest that self-reported accounts are productive for understanding stereotypes (study 1) and that there is value in testing an account taxonomy on naturally occurring interactions (study 2).
Closed captioning has existed since the 1940s and was designed for the deaf and hard-of-hearing communities. Recently, however, there has been an increase in caption use, particularly among younger adults aged 18 to 25. As captions are typically used by the deaf and hard-of-hearing communities, the use of captions by hearing individuals is often overlooked. This study examines this growing phenomenon through a cross-sectional survey of 542 individuals and explores both demographic differences and motivations for caption use through the lens of uses and gratifications theory. Results indicated that women use captions more than men and that younger adults use captions more frequently than older adults. Among the six motivations studied (sound quality, attention, academic, foreign language, outside influence, and hard of hearing), sound quality and attention ranked highest, while hard of hearing was the least common motivation reported. These findings suggest that caption use has expanded beyond accessibility needs, highlighting how demographic factors shape motivations for modern caption use and contributing to communication scholarship on evolving media consumption practices and audience agency.
This study investigates the relationships among the use of information sources, vaccine knowledge, and conspiracy beliefs. It aims to identify how these information sources are associated with public understanding and attitudes toward vaccines and assess the psychological factors affecting vaccination decisions. Data from a survey of 1,083 Louisiana residents indicate that using government health agencies and healthcare professionals as information sources is most strongly associated with vaccine knowledge, while individuals relying on alternative medicine practitioners, social media, and religious leaders tend to have less vaccination knowledge and are more likely to hold conspiracy beliefs about vaccines. The study also explores how vaccine knowledge and conspiracy beliefs interact with psychological determinants of vaccination, such as confidence, complacency, and collective responsibility. Findings emphasize the need for multidimensional public health strategies that combine education with targeted efforts to combat misinformation and conspiracy theories, particularly to address complacency and encourage vaccination.
Manga are graphic novels that tell serialized stories, typically dramatic or imaginative fiction. A common belief is that manga are a sexualized medium, but whether this is actually true of popular mainstream manga has not been studied. Because research has documented strong associations between media exposure and youth behavior, the growing popularity of manga serves as an impetus to better understand the medium's content. To obtain a generalizable estimate of sexual behavior in mainstream manga, we examined 500 randomly selected chapters from among the all-time best-selling Sh & omacr;nen (targeting males, ages 8-18 years) and Seinen (targeting adolescent and young adult males) series. Thirty chapters (6%) had any depiction of sexual behavior, few of which were explicit. Compared to Sh & omacr;nen, Seinen more frequently presented female adults engaged in sexual behavior (Fisher's exact test, p < .01). Among the depictions of sexual behavior, explicit consent was rare (one Sh & omacr;nen chapter). Contrary to our expectations, our content analysis indicates that popular mainstream manga infrequently depict sexual behavior. However, because many of the most popular manga series have ceased publication, these findings may not be generalizable to newer mainstream manga and other manga genres.
Although people who communicate openly with their partner during the transition from dating to cohabitation (deciders) tend to be more relationally satisfied than those who do not (sliders), little inquiry has examined the degree to which deciders and sliders both engage in topic avoidance (TA) during the transition. Further, existing research has typically focused on whether cohabitors avoid topics, not how or why they avoid them. The present study examines how topics, reasons, and strategies for TA are linked to relationship satisfaction. The study analyzed survey data from 519 individuals who have transitioned from dating to cohabitation. Results revealed that the frequency of cohabitors' TA, their reasons for engaging in TA, and the strategies they use for TA were associated with their satisfaction. Strategies but not reasons moderated the association between the frequency of TA and satisfaction.
Drawing on Bandura's social cognitive theory, this study examined the motivational and psychological dimensions of group-based student learning from the perspectives of psychological capital (PsyCap), group flow, and academic self-efficacy. The existing literature offers limited insight into how students learn from group projects. To fill this gap, the present study examined the role of group interaction, self-efficacy, and students' sense of immersion in the group learning process. The findings indicate that students' PsyCap on conducting groupwork, their flow experiences during collaboration, and their academic self-efficacy significantly predicted learning. Moreover, both PsyCap and academic self-efficacy predicted students' flow experience. A path model was constructed to assess the direct and indirect relationships among variables. It was further found that individuals' flow experience in a group served as a mediator explaining how and why PsyCap and academic self-efficacy affected student learning. The path model explained 51% of the variance in learning. Results from this study could be applied beyond higher education and be used in other contexts.
