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News Stories (news + story)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	68%
Business, Economics, Finance and Accounting	10%

Selected Abstracts

Expressive Responses to News Stories About Extremist Groups: A Framing Experiment

JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION, Issue 2 2006
Michael P. Boyle
With the tension between national security and civil liberties as a backdrop, this study examines responses to news coverage of activist groups. This 2 × 2 experiment presented participants with news stories about government efforts to restrict the civil liberties of an "extremist" individual or group (news frame) advocating for a cause supported or opposed by the respondent (cause predisposition). Willingness to take expressive action was greatest for individual-framed stories about a cause opposed by the respondent and for group-framed stories about a cause supported by the respondent. We contend that when reporters frame stories about extremist groups around individuals, fewer people will speak out in favor of causes they agree with and more will rally against causes they oppose. [source]

Incidental framing effects and associative processes: a study of attribute frames in broadcast news stories

JOURNAL OF BEHAVIORAL DECISION MAKING, Issue 4 2005
Sandra L. Schneider
Abstract Most studies of the effects of framing decision alternatives either positively or negatively have focused on planned, intentional evaluations of those alternatives. To better understand these effects, we broadened the range of investigation to focus on the kinds of incidental evaluations that often occur in real-world contexts. Participants listened to one of four variations of a campus radio news broadcast, ostensibly to provide input for future programming. The stories in each broadcast included the same basic facts, but those facts were carefully phrased to create two positively and two negatively framed stories per broadcast. Based on an associative processing account, we hypothesized that valence-consistent framing effects would occur even though participants did not expect to evaluate the content of the stories. Results supported this hypothesis, with mixed evidence that the effects may generalize to related university experiences. We conclude that framing effects are likely to result from automatic valence-encoding processes coupled with inferential processes that help make sense of the larger context within which the description of an alternative is embedded. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]

Priming Crime and Activating Blackness: Understanding the Psychological Impact of the Overrepresentation of Blacks as Lawbreakers on Television News

JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION, Issue 2 2007
Travis L. Dixon
Two experiments examined the extent to which U.S. viewers' perceptions that Blacks face structural limitations to success, support for the death penalty, and culpability judgments could be influenced by exposure to racialized crime news. Participants were exposed to a majority of Black suspects, a majority of White suspects, unidentified suspects, and noncrime news stories. In addition, participants' prior news viewing was assessed. In Study 1, heavy news viewers exposed to unidentified perpetrators were less likely than heavy news viewers exposed to noncrime stories to perceive that Blacks face structural limitations to success. In addition, heavy news viewers exposed to unidentified perpetrators were more likely than heavy news viewers exposed to noncrime stories to support the death penalty. In Study 2, participants exposed to a majority of Black suspects were more likely than participants exposed to noncrime stories to find a subsequent race-unidentified criminal culpable for his offense. In addition, heavy news viewers were more likely to exhibit the above effect than light news viewers. The methodological and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed in light of chronic activation and the priming paradigm. [source]

Expressive Responses to News Stories About Extremist Groups: A Framing Experiment

Conceptualizing sources in online news

JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION, Issue 1 2001
S S Sundar
This study attempts a new conceptualization of communication ,sources' by proposing a typology of sources that would apply not only to traditional media but also to new online media. Ontological rationale for the distinctions in the typology is supplemented by psychological evidence via an experiment that investigated the effects of different types of source attributions upon receivers' perception of online news content. Participants (N=48) in a 4-condition, between-participants experiment read 6 identical news stories each through an online service. Participants were told that the stories were selected by 1 of 4 sources: news editors, the computer terminal on which they were accessing the stories, other audience members (or users) of the online news service, or (using a pseudo-selection task) the individual user (self). After reading each online news story, all participants filled out a paper-and-pencil questionnaire indicating their perceptions of the story they had just read. In confirmation of the distinctions made in the typology, attribution of identical content to 4 different types of online sources was associated with significant variation in news story perception. Theoretical implications of the results as well as the typology are discussed. [source]

Echo chambers online?: Politically motivated selective exposure among Internet news users,

JOURNAL OF COMPUTER-MEDIATED COMMUNICATION, Issue 2 2009
R. Kelly Garrett
A review of research suggests that the desire for opinion reinforcement may play a more important role in shaping individuals' exposure to online political information than an aversion to opinion challenge. The article tests this idea using data collected via a web-administered behavior-tracking study with subjects recruited from the readership of 2 partisan online news sites (N = 727). The results demonstrate that opinion-reinforcing information promotes news story exposure while opinion-challenging information makes exposure only marginally less likely. The influence of both factors is modest, but opinion-reinforcing information is a more important predictor. Having decided to view a news story, evidence of an aversion to opinion challenges disappears: There is no evidence that individuals abandon news stories that contain information with which they disagree. Implications and directions for future research are discussed. [source]

Estimating the growth models of news stories on disasters

JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, Issue 9 2009
Jiuchang Wei
Understanding the growth models of news stories on disasters is a key issue for efficient disaster management. This article proposes a method to identify three growth models: the Damped Exponential Model, the Normal Model, and the Fluctuating Model. This method is proven to be valid using the 112 disasters occurring between 2003 and 2008. The factors that influence the likelihood of the growth models include disaster types, newsworthy material, disaster severity, and economic development of the affected area. This article suggests that disaster decision-makers can identify the respective likelihood of the three growth models of news stories when a disaster happens, and thereby implement effective measures in response to the disaster situation. [source]

Facts, Fiction, and the Fourth Estate

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS AND SOCIOLOGY, Issue 5 2004
"Jimmy's World", The Washington Post
This paper examines the reaction of the market to news that the Washington Post had won a Pulitzer Prize for a story that was demonstrably false. The reaction to the stock price of the Post as well as the stock prices of other newspapers is examined using dummy variables for two days, four days, and six days. The results show that while the decline in the Post's stock price was relatively small, the t-statistics for all of the dummy variables are significant. The paper also examines the McChesney (1987) hypothesis that the nature of the newspaper business is such that it is difficult for the residual claimants of the paper to receive the financial gains of important news stories. These rents, he points out, are distributed to others. We look to see whether or not residual claimants of that newspaper can be harmed if that newspaper publishes a false story and receives large amounts of bad publicity for its error. [source]

Examining the Mediators of Agenda Setting: A New Experimental Paradigm Reveals the Role of Emotions

POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 6 2007
Joanne M. Miller
Over two decades ago, Maxwell McCombs (1981) called for serious investigation of the mediators and moderators of media effects. Without rich, theory-based understanding of why and when agenda setting happens, he said, we cannot truly appreciate the phenomenon or its implications. This manuscript reports the results of a new experimental paradigm to examine the cognitive mechanism(s) of agenda setting. Challenging the assumption that accessibility is responsible for shifts in importance judgments, the current research shows that the content of news stories is a primary determinant of agenda setting. Rather than solely relying on what is accessible in memory, people pay attention to the content of news stories,to the extent that the content arouses negative emotions, national importance judgments follow. [source]

Rights and Morals, Issues, and Candidate Integrity: Insights into the Role of the News Media

POLITICAL PSYCHOLOGY, Issue 4 2000
David Domke
In recent American political discourse, elections and debates tend to be presented by the news media as collisions of basic principles, with opposing parties advancing beliefs about what is right and what is wrong. When news coverage of an election campaign focuses on issues that emphasize rights and morals, voting behavior may be affected in two ways: Citizens become likely to form and make use of evaluations of the integrity of the candidates, and citizens become motivated to seek an issue-position "match" with candidates on those issues for which discourse is ethically charged (particularly when they hold a similar interpretation of the issue). These ideas were tested in an experiment in which labor union members and undergraduate students were presented with news stories about the contrasting positions of fictional candidates for elective office. Across three political environments, all information was held constant except for systematic alteration of a different issue in each environment. These three issues (abortion, gun control, and health care) vary in the types of value conflicts emphasized in news coverage. The results shed light on how individuals process, interpret, and use issue coverage in choosing among candidates. [source]

The AJT Report: News and issues that affect organ and tissue transplantation

AMERICAN JOURNAL OF TRANSPLANTATION, Issue 7 2009
SUE PONDROM
This month The AJT Report looks at the LYFT kidney-allocation concept, and where it may have gone wrong, as well as research that shows how television news stories about transplants often leave out important information for donors. [source]

News reports through policy governance eyes

BOARD LEADERSHIP: POLICY GOVERNANCE IN ACTION, Issue 82 2005
John Carver
Thousands of persons who have learned Policy Governance are amused or dismayed by news stories that cover the actions of boards in all their varieties, whether they are called boards, councils, or commissions and whether they operate in the political, busi ness, or nonprofit arena. In this article, John Carver reflects on a number of such news stories, though he has altered the locations, names, and other identifying data as an act of charity. [source]

Losing the voters' trust: evaluations of the political system and voting at the 1997 British general election

BRITISH JOURNAL OF POLITICS & INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, Issue 2 2001
Charles Pattie
Questions of standards in public life came to the fore of British politics during the 1992,1997 parliament. Concerns were expressed over the probity of individual politicians and of political parties and worries extended to the health of the British system of government as a whole. Underlying these news stories, however, were wider issues concerning attitudes towards government. Furthermore, these concerns about standards were also extensively reported during the 1997 election campaign, and were widely held, in popular accounts, to have played a part in the Conservative government's dramatic defeat. But, surprisingly, few academic analyses have tried to gauge either the extent of public concerns in 1997, or whether they really had an impact on party support. More generally, recent political science interest has focused on fears of declining public trust in the democratic system, throughout the western world. This article explores British voters' trust in their polity. [source]

Role of Knowledge in Assessing Nonuse Values for Natural Resource Damages

GROWTH AND CHANGE, Issue 1 2001
F. Reed Johnson
Measuring nonuse values is one of the most controversial topics facing environmental economists today. One important issue that has received little attention is determining who has economic standing with respect to nonuse losses from natural resource injuries. In this paper, a conceptual model for determining compensable nonuse losses is developed that is consistent with the Kaldor-Hicks principle of potential Pareto improvement, and then that model is applied to the results of a telephone survey on industrial water pollution in the lower Passaic River in northern New Jersey. One proposition from this model indicates that only people who have knowledge of the injured resource (i.e., 10 to 44 percent of respondents) can incur a compensable nonuse loss. A second proposition from the model indicates that demand for information about an injury to a familiar resource is a necessary condition for compensable nonuse losses. It was found that 81 percent of the respondents who were familiar with the lower Passaic River were likely to read, listen to, or watch a news story about the river. However, far fewer respondents familiar with the lower Passaic River were willing to engage in more active, and costly, information-acquisition activities (such as conducting research at the library and attending public meetings). Finally, the model suggests that geographic proximity to nondescript resources may affect nonuse values, information costs, or both, helping define the potentially affected population. The empirical results for the lower Passaic River support this third proposition. The overall conclusion is that only a small fraction of the population in New Jersey and New York might reasonably experience a nonuse loss as a result of industrial water pollution in the lower Passaic River. [source]

News Images, Race, and Attribution in the Wake of Hurricane Katrina

JOURNAL OF COMMUNICATION, Issue 3 2010
Eran N. Ben-Porath
This study looks at the effect of news images and race on the attribution of responsibility for the consequences of Hurricane Katrina. Participants, Black and White, read the same news story about the hurricane and its aftermath, manipulated to include images of White victims, Black victims, or no images at all. Participants were then asked who they felt was responsible for the humanitarian disaster after the storm. White respondents expressed less sense of government responsibility when the story included victims' images. For Black respondents this effect did not occur. Images did not affect attribution of responsibility to New Orleans' residents themselves. These findings are interpreted to support the expectations of framing theory with the images serving as episodic framing mechanisms. Les images médiatiques, la race et l'attribution à la suite de l'ouragan Katrina Eran N. Ben-Porath & Lee K. Shaker Cette étude explore l'effet des images médiatiques et de la race sur l'attribution d'une responsabilité quant aux conséquences de l'ouragan Katrina. Les participants, Noirs et Blancs, ont lu la même nouvelle concernant l'ouragan et ses suites, l'histoire ayant été manipulée pour inclure des images de victimes blanches, des images de victimes noires ou aucune image du tout. On a ensuite demandé aux participants de dire qui était selon eux responsable du désastre humanitaire ayant suivi la tempête. Les répondants blancs ont exprimé moins d'impressions de responsabilité gouvernementale lorsque l'histoire incluait des photos de victimes. Cet effet n'est pas apparu chez les participants noirs. Les images n'ont pas eu d'effets sur l'attribution de responsabilité aux résidents de la Nouvelle-Orléans. Ces résultats sont interprétés de manière à appuyer les attentes de la théorie du cadrage, les images servant de mécanismes de cadrage épisodique. Mots clés : attribution, race, cadrage de responsabilité, ouragan Katrina Nachrichtenbilder, Rasse und Zuschreibung im Fall Hurrikan Katrina Eran N. Ben-Porath & Lee K. Shaker Diese Studie betrachtet die Wirkung von Nachrichtenbildern und Rasse auf die Zuschreibung von Verantwortlichkeit für die Konsequenzen von Hurrikan Katrina. Die Teilnehmer schwarzer und weißer Hautfarbe lasen die gleichen Nachrichten über den Hurrikan und dessen Folgen. Die Bilder zeigten entweder weiße Opfer, schwarze Opfer oder es wurde auf eine Bebilderung verzichtet. Die Teilnehmer wurden dann gefragt, wen sie für die humanitäre Katastrophe nach dem Sturm verantwortlich machten. Weiße Teilnehmer zogen die Regierung weniger in die Verantwortung, wenn Bilder von Opfern gezeigt wurden. Für schwarze Teilnehmer zeigte sich dieser Effekt nicht. Die Bilder beeinflussten nicht die Zuschreibung von Verantwortlichkeit auf die Einwohner von New Orleans selbst. Diese Ergebnisse werden im Sinne der Annahmen der Framing-Theorie interpretiert, bei denen Bilder als episodische Framing-Mechanismen dienen. [source]

Conceptualizing sources in online news

Echo chambers online?: Politically motivated selective exposure among Internet news users,

Public perceptions of biotechnology

BIOTECHNOLOGY JOURNAL, Issue 9 2007
Alan McHughen Dr.
Abstract The very term ,Biotechnology' elicits a range of emotions, from wonder and awe to downright fear and hostility. This is especially true among non-scientists, particularly in respect of agricultural and food biotechnology. These emotions indicate just how poorly understood agricultural biotechnology is and the need for accurate, dispassionate information in the public sphere to allow a rational public debate on the actual, as opposed to the perceived, risks and benefits of agricultural biotechnology. This review considers first the current state of public knowledge on agricultural biotechnology, and then explores some of the popular misperceptions and logical inconsistencies in both Europe and North America. I then consider the problem of widespread scientific illiteracy, and the role of the popular media in instilling and perpetuating misperceptions. The impact of inappropriate efforts to provide ,balance' in a news story, and of belief systems and faith also impinges on public scientific illiteracy. Getting away from the abstract, we explore a more concrete example of the contrasting approach to agricultural biotechnology adoption between Europe and North America, in considering divergent approaches to enabling coexistence in farming practices. I then question who benefits from agricultural biotechnology. Is it only the big companies, or is it society at large , and the environment-also deriving some benefit? Finally, a crucial aspect in such a technologically complex issue, ordinary and intelligent non-scientifically trained consumers cannot be expected to learn the intricacies of the technology to enable a personal choice to support or reject biotechnology products. The only reasonable and pragmatic alternative is to place trust in someone to provide honest advice. But who, working in the public interest, is best suited to provide informed and accessible, but objective, advice to wary consumers? [source]