Disciplining the Workforce

This experiment investigated the effects of television news frames on (1) audience interpretations of a political issue, (2) the salience of news frames versus other information in the story, and (3) support for future policy. A sample of 145 adults watched an experimental television news bulletin produced in cooperation with reporters and editors at a national television news program about the enlargement of the European Union. A news story was manipulated to reflect a conflict frame or an economic consequences frame. The two frames provide direction to the audience's thoughts about the issue but do not yield different levels of policy support. Frames in the news are as important as core facts in a news story when citizens conceive of a political issue.

Adopting the approach that nationality is primarily a cultural phenomenon, this essay analyzes patterns of national news coverage in Canadian newspapers between 1890 and 1930. Based on an examination of 6,800 articles that appeared in 17 newspapers, the essay concludes that national news presented an image of the nation that focussed heavily and consistently on federal politics and government in Ottawa—the “state” part of the nationstate—and on the province of Ontario. The proportion of coverage devoted to Quebec steadily declined after 1900, while the volume of news about Western Canada increased. Beyond this, newspapers in different areas of the country printed a varying mix of national news (as did French- and English-language newspapers in Quebec), so that the image of the nation differed depending on one’s vantage point. Coverage also varied along rural-urban lines, with smaller localities depicted mainly as places where crime and accidents took place. Over all, national news coverage affirmed both unity and equality (in that all citizens shared a focus on Ottawa and Ontario) and, at the same time, hierarchy and difference (in that other parts of Canada received less attention).

Communicating health research through local and national print, television, and radio news can amplify the impact of research findings. However, relatively few health researchers work with the media to communicate their findings to a broader audience. In April 2024, we convened a group of specialists with expertise in traditional media, health news, and health advocacy for a webinar sponsored by the Helping to End Addiction Long-term (HEAL) Initiative. We present an overview of the discussion, including opportunities within the context of traditional media, guidance for health researchers on partnering with the media, and themes on translating health research to a general audience. Health researchers can use this article as a guide to working with the media to expand the influence of their research findings.

This article takes a closer look at the New York Times coverage of the Supreme Court from 1966 to 1984 in order build on the work done by Gregory Caldeira which found that the amount of Times coverage increased public confidence in the Court. In addition, it studies national television news coverage of the Court. By content analyzing both for the direction (positive, neutral, or negative) and focus (the Court or personnel), the assumption that coverage is “extraordinarily positive” is challenged and dismissed. Speculation is offered as to why volume of coverage coincides with public confidence when that coverage is predominantly neutral.

This article examines how the Liberal and New Democratic Accord was framed through and by national television news during the first week of December 2008. Using new institutionalism theory, this article argues that politicians must negotiate with journalists to present their framing of issues. While journalists may repeat and even balance competing frames, they also interpret politics strategically, and this is what dominates coverage. Based on a frame analysis, the study examines the national television coverage of the proposed coalition government. The analysis finds that TV news presented the preferred frames of the government and the coalition in similar proportion. However, the coverage spent significantly more time assessing performance and strategy and was highly critical of the strategy and performance of the key political players.

The present study seeks to establish the extent to which media coverage acknowledges alcohol's contribution to violent crime as well as to motor vehicle injuries and other injury incidents. The study content-analyzes a unique sample, closely approximating national representativeness, of local and national television news, local newspapers, and national magazines randomly sampled during a 2-year period. Alcohol's role in violent crime and, to a lesser extent, in motor vehicle and other injury incidents is underreported relative to available estimates regarding alcohol-attributable fractions. Relative frequency of various news frames for coverage of alcohol and illegal drugs and differences in coverage of alcohol and illegal drugs as a function of the type of story and news medium are described. The underreporting in the United States of alcohol's contribution to serious and fatal injury from these causes may reduce public perceptions of alcohol-related risks, potentially influencing behavior, including public support of alcohol-control policies. This provides an opportunity for media-advocacy approaches to improve public health content of news coverage.

Stress is a well-known trigger for primary headache yet its impact is difficult to demonstrate in large epidemiological studies. Israeli national TV news is often referred to as the “tribal fire”, as many Israelis watch national news coverage following terror attacks or military operations. We examined the association between exposure to television news and their content with headache related Emergency Department visits. This retrospective cohort study included data on daily Emergency Department visits with a chief complaint of headache in Soroka University Medical Center, during 2002–2012. Data on daily television news viewership ratings were obtained from the Israeli Audience Research Board and its content from Channel 2 headlines, the highest rated TV news program. To estimate the short-term effects of news rating during the evening news on the number of daily headache visits, we applied generalized linear mixed models. 16,693 Emergency Department visits were included in the analysis. An increase in five units of daily rating percentages was associated with increase in Emergency Department visits the following day, relative risk (RR) = 1.032, (95% CI 1.014–1.050). This association increased with the age of the patients; RR = 1.119, (95% CI 1.075–1.65) for older than 60-year-old, RR = 1.044 (95% CI 1.010–1.078) for ages 40–60 and RR = 1.000 (95% CI 0.977–1.023) for younger than 40-year-old. We did not find a specific content associated with ED visit for headache. Higher television news ratings were associated with increased incidence of Emergency Department headache related visits. We assume that especially among older persons, news viewership ratings provide an indirect estimate of collective stress, which acts as a headache trigger for susceptible subjects.

Journalists often localize news stories that are not explicitly about the community they serve by investigating and describing how those stories affect that community. This is, in essence, a form of personalization based not on a reader's personal interests, but rather on their ties to a geographic location. In this paper we present The Local Angle, an approach for automating the process of finding national and international news stories that are locally relevant. The Local Angle associates the people, companies, and organizations mentioned in news stories with geographic locations using semantic analysis tools and online knowledge bases. We describe the design and implementation of our prototype system that helps content curators and consumers discover articles that are of local interest even if they do not originate locally.

Editor's Note Nancy Tillman Romalov (bio) This special issue of The Lion and the Unicorn has its origins in a project begun at the University of Iowa two years ago. In 1992, the university's School of Journalism voted to induct into its Hall of Fame the first woman to earn a master's degree there, Iowa native Mildred Augustine Wirt Benson.1 In addition to her long and impressive career as a journalist—66 years after she graduated from Iowa, Benson still writes a weekly column for the Toledo Blade —Mildred Benson wrote 23 of the first 30 Nancy Drew books; she was, in fact, the first "Carolyn Keene." When this information went "over the wires" the School of Journalism was innundated with calls from people who wanted to talk about Nancy. The callers, mostly women, all had stories to tell about how instrumental Nancy had been in their lives and about how she had inspired, comforted, entertained them through their childhoods and, for a surprising number of women, well into adulthood. In the words of journalism professor Carolyn Stewart Dyer, "in journalistic terms, there seemed to be a story in this phenomenon," and she began to dig into it. Searching data bases for references to Nancy Drew in news sources, Professor Dyer turned up hundreds of stories, from sports articles to business reports. She discovered an industry that has sold more than 80 million books over 64 years and a fictional heroine turned cultural icon that has taken various guises—as star of stage plays, television, and film (Nancy has even made an appearance as a category on the television game show Jeopardy! ). Mostly though, Dyer uncovered stories by people for whom Nancy Drew is not just a dim childhood memory but a lived experience. One news story related the harrowing experience of a 10-year-old girl who had been abducted and locked in the trunk of a car. She escaped by dismantling the taillight and squeezing through the tiny space. When the police asked her how she thought of that solution, she replied that she just tried to think like Nancy Drew. Other accounts, while not so dramatic, are similar in tone; something about Nancy Drew has encouraged readers to overcome impediments and to make brave career choices and changes in their lives. Dyer also discovered unsolved mysteries and not a small amount of intrigue surrounding the authorship and production of the [End Page v] Nancy Drew books. She concluded a national conference was merited. That conference took place in April 1993 and was by any measure an extraordinary event. The "Nancy Drew Conference" attracted an audience of nearly 500 people ranging in age from 4 to 90 and representing groups as diverse as book collectors, librarians, and teachers; lawyers and journalists; students; and, of course, scholars, representing an equally varied group, from the fields of American studies, children's literature, English literature, history, library science, mass communication, and women's studies. The event also attracted more national news coverage than any other University of Iowa event in history (other than Rose Bowl appearances)—The New York Times put the story on their front page, and, on the opening night of the conference, Mildred Benson was the featured "person of the week" on ABC's evening news. The conference has also inspired some of the essays in this issue and, we hope, more to come. I was delighted to sign on to the conference planning committee as resident children's literature expert. Perhaps more than other steering committee members I was in a position to appreciate the recognition about to be given to a facet of our field that is still much underrepresented. I now find myself in the position of trying to evaluate the meaning of the passionate interest the conference generated. It is surprising that a publishing enterprise as successful and culturally powerful as the syndicate that produced Nancy Drew and scores of other series books has been so little studied. The sheer magnitude of the economic success and the cultural impact of the Stratemeyer Syndicate's series books should have generated more than the few studies that exist.2 There are material...

4. William S. Hoffman, Ph.D., is Director (retired), Michigan Health and Social Security Research Institute, International Union - United Auto Workers, Detroit, Michigan, 48214.From 1979 to 1984, more than 11.5 million workers lost their jobs because of closings in the nation's industries. Manufacturing industries provide 20% of the nation's employment and have experienced tremendous cutbacks and closings (Bluestone & Harrison, 1982; Perrucci, Perrucci, Targ, & Targ, 1988). Various causes for closing have been identified, including poor corporate planning, ill-founded federal policy, capital flight, decreasing profit rates, and the pursuit of lower labor costs. The automotive industry continues to be severely affected by shutdowns. Although the corporate terminology may change--plant closings are sometimes called plant idling--the effects on workers and their families are similar and severe.Almost 40% of all the U.S. auto employment has been located in Michigan. As a result of the 1980s recession in the auto industry, Michigan's economy suffered considerably. The Detroit and Flint area economies were especially hurt by industrial decline. In 1982, annual unemployment rates in these areas were as high as 16% and 21.2%, respectively, and in January 1988 the rates were still far above the national average of 5.8%-10.3% in Detroit and 17.7% in Flint.Jobs demanding skills and training such as those required in the automotive industry are becoming increasingly scarce. Although the service industry sector of the economy has continued to expand in the 1980s and 1990s, many of the available jobs are low paying with commensurate low skill requirements. Thus, for the worker, shutdowns mean lower pay (if work can be found), long periods of unemployment, and eventual loss of benefits such as health coverage and unemployment compensation.Many studies have similarly argued that marriage and family life are negatively affected by the unemployment experience (Atkinson, Liem, & Liem, 1986; Dew, Bromer, & Shulberg, 1987; Elder & Caspi, 1988; Jackson & Walsh, 1987; Liem & Liem, 1988; Liem & Rayman, 1982; Moen, 1979; Moen, Kain, & Elder, 1983; Nowak & Snyder, 1984; Schlozman & Verba, 1979; Voydanoff & Donnelly, 1988). This work shows conclusively how emotional distress arising from job loss affects both the job loser and other family members. Some studies have linked unemployment to levels of violence in the family (Straus, Gelles, & Steinmetz, 1980). Others have reported an increase in levels of family friction, tension, and arguments as a result of unemployment (Grayson, 1985; Hakim, 1982; Komarovsky, 1962). Further, a recent review documents many negative effects of parents' unemployment and associate financial distress on children (McLoyd, 1989).In this paper, we examine data on unemployment, and assess its impact on workers and their families. We first review the methods employed to collect the data upon which our analyses are based.MethodsTHE SURVEYSIn November 1986, General Motors (GM) announced that it would be closing nine plants and parts of two others by 1990; most closings were scheduled to occur by the end of 1987. We designed a prospective quasi-experimental panel survey, comparing workers from four of the closing plants with workers from twelve non-closing plants at three points: three months before the closings, one year after, and two years after.The Wave 1 survey was an approximately one-hour long interview, conducted face-to-face during August-October 1987. The measures in this survey included items about workers' financial status, mental and physical health, family conflict, self-blame and coping, social support, life events, employment history, and future plans. Respondents were drawn from four closing and twelve comparison group plants located in the Detroit and Flint areas of southeastern Michigan. …

News videos delivered from different sources constitute a huge volume of daily information. These videos, overall, form a huge collection of news stories that are intertwined with various novel and old topic themes. To date, it remains a challenging task on how to automatically extract a concise view of news stories according to topic themes. This doctoral thesis studies the issues in story dependency threading and topical auto-documentary in news stories. Initially, a co-clustering algorithm is proposed to perform the news story clustering by exploiting the duality between stories and multi-modal concepts. Then, the novelty and redundancy detection is performed to capture the relationship among stories of a topic. To facilitate the fast navigation of news topic, a novel topic structure is then proposed to chains the dependencies of stories. A main thread is extracted to highlight the important aspects of a theme. A news video editing optimization algorithm can be directly applied to automatically select suitable video and speech contents from the original video source to create an edited video documentary.

Existing research on news video analysis mainly concentrates on structure analysis, semantic concept detection, annotation and search. However, little work has been contributed to news video people community analysis, which is helpful for users to understand the event. In this paper, we propose a novel approach to classify the people appearing in the news video into different communities. In our approach, the people appearing in the news video are first identified by associating their faces with names. The faces are detected from the video frames, and the names are obtained from the text. Then, the people belonging to the same organization are clustered. After that, the relationships between these organizations are determined using sentiment analysis. The sentiment words are diverse in each news story and contain both positive and negative ones. However, we have news title, which is the summary of the story and the sentiment of which is clear, to help us to mine the relationships between the organizations. At last, social networks are built to classify those people/organizations into different classes, and the people/organizations are ranked in each community according to their influence. The main contributions of the paper are two folds: 1) we propose a novel approach to present the news video event according to communities; 2) we propose to use the sentiment analysis and social network to classify the news people/organizations. The experimental results on the selected news topics demonstrate that the proposed approach is effective.

An empirical analysis of 3,334 state and local television news stories in 10 cities clarifies the reluctance of commercial television newscasters to cover state government. Contrary to what many television news directors assert, television's minimal attention to state government cannot be attributed to an alleged negative relationship between state government and newscast ratings. Rather, it appears to stem from the high cost of obtaining filmed coverage of state government in a timely fashion.

Public and commercial news follow distinct logics. We evaluate this duality in television news coverage on immigration. First, by means of a large-scale content analysis of Flemish television news ( N = 1630), we investigate whether immigration coverage diverges between both broadcasters. Results show that, despite an overall negativity bias and relative homogeneity between the broadcasters, commercial news contains slightly more sensational and tabloid characteristics than public news. The latter promotes a more balanced view of immigration. These differences are stable over time. Second, using cross-sectional and panel data, we assess whether a preference for public versus commercial news is associated with an attitudinal gap in anti-immigrant attitudes. Findings demonstrate that individuals who prefer commercial news are more negative towards immigrants. We suggest that differences in news content may explain this attitudinal gap. In light of the debate around ‘public value’ offered by public service media across Europe, we tentatively conclude that public broadcasters have the potential to foster tolerance and provide balanced information by prioritizing a normative view over a market logic. The linkage between news coverage and the gap in attitudes between commercial and public news viewers warrants closer investigation in the future.

An ill president and public relations: Before and after Jim Hagerty (A PR history footnote)