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Africans' voices and contributions to communication scholarship are of interest to many Africanists. Some discourses have explored reasons for this interest. This article continues this conversation. It recognizes the challenges contributing to the limited influence of the African voice in global communication scholarship and contributes to the theorizing of the African media. There are a range of factors impeding robust African engagement in global communication scholarship. These factors are explored in this paper. However, African scholars should look beyond these factors. The first part of the article explores reasons for the lack of active African input in this discussion. The second part of the paper explores the peculiarities of Africa that should form building blocks for the emergence of African media typologies. The extant normative media theories fail to consider the realities of African governance structures and philosophies. These should lead to a media framework more reflective of the realities of Africa. Indeed, the article proposes a conversation of four media typologies that closely match the continental conditions: pragmatic authoritarianism, pragmatic progressive, pragmatic libertarianism, and civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analysis of two Miami newspapers (one daily, one weekly) reveals that both relied heavily on individuals rather than institutions as news sources in the aftermath of civil disturbances during January, 1989. While the daily used relatively similar proportions of commercial and nongovernment personnel, more than a third of the weekly paper's sources were either residents or administrative personnel and staff in government agencies. Of the 181 different sources identified, the two papers shared 27. Most of the papers' reporter information channels were through interviews. Suggestions are made regarding further analysis of both newspapers' stake in the business community and maintenance of the area's economic status quo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes representations of Simone Biles in media coverage of two major gymnastics events in 2019. It asks which, if any, gendered and racial stereotypes identified in previous scholarship about media coverage of Black and women athletes are also present in coverage of Biles. It also interrogates in what ways these stereotypes intersect as distinct forms of representation of Biles as a Black woman. Employing the tenets of feminist theory and Black feminist thought through an intersectional lens, a qualitative textual analysis of 34 articles revealed that both gendered and racial stereotypes were present in coverage of Biles. The most prominent stereotypes include feminized emotions, lack of mental fortitude, negative attitudes, and physicality. These intersecting representations underscore the persistence of these stereotypes in contemporary discourse. This paper contributes to, and advances, the literature on media representations of women athletes, Black athletes, and Black women athletes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Child marriage is a problem that has continued to attract global attention. The media have been identified as critical to the fight against the scourge as it discusses the capacity to raise awareness of the issue as well as trigger action in solving the problem. The report of the alleged abduction of a minor, Ese Oruru by one Yunusa Dahiru for marriage jolted the nation and sparked public outcry for her release. This study explored newspaper framing of the incident. Drawing from qualitative frame analysis, it examined how Punch and Daily Trust newspapers framed the alleged abduction saga. The study found that there was contrastive framing of the incident with Punch newspaper portraying the issue as abduction while Daily Trust newspaper depicted it as elopement. The influence of socio-cultural leanings of these papers on the contrastive framing is discussed. The implication of the divergent framing of the saga on the fight against child marriage is highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines 59 online articles written about a photograph of Nancy Pelosi standing up in the White House cabinet room and pointing her finger toward Donald Trump. Trump released the photo and tweeted his own interpretation of it; online articles followed discussing descriptions and/or interpretations of the image and the surrounding events. This paper focuses on how the media discourse of this moment reflects views about the expression of power in politics, its tie to emotion and emotionality, and its sometimes subtle connection with gender. Analysis of the articles showed that the media interpreted the nonverbal cues in the photograph as reflective of individual power displays, relative power as enacted through dominance and submissiveness nonverbal cues, and changing relative power through one person's nonverbal cues lowering another's apparent power position. It also reflected an existing cultural belief that emotionality and power are generally inconsistent in politics, with some exemptions for anger displays, and the particular challenges of emotional display for women in politics. In doing so, the media coverage continued its masculinization of the political sphere in less visible ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractA 1968 complaint by a black, blue-collar worker, Wendall A. Payne, at the Times-Picayune in New Orleans, led to a federal appeals court in 1976 issuing a consent decree that required the newspaper, one of the major dailies in the South, to hire more black employees including journalists. At other dailies nationally in the late 1960s to early 1970s, racial integration occurred in the newsroom because newspapers were affected by provisions of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the need for black reporters to cover urban uprisings, the Kerner Commission report, and/or a “moral imperative.” Notwithstanding, litigation was not necessary to induce the dailies to hire black full-time reporters. The Picayune, however, required pressure from Payne’s complaint that led to an EEOC employment discrimination lawsuit against the paper. Subsequently, the Picayune diverted from its white-centered trajectory and traveled on a path leading to racial inclusiveness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes how Trump uses metadiscourse as a strategy for denying accusations of racism. We conduct a discourse analysis of press event interactions where Trump denies journalists' accusations of racism or where Trump himself voices others' accusations of racism and then denies these accusations. Analysis of 8 excerpts illustrates how Trump a) uses metadiscourse to reframe his own talk as "accurate" instead of "racist," b) uses "fake news" as humor to delegitimize media and display amicable relationships with his African American supporters and c) labels questions from journalists who ask about his racist actions as "racist" or "nasty." These metadiscursive strategies reproduce racist ideologies that position Trump as well intentioned, not racist, and thus not blame-worthy for racist actions and those who question Trump as unreasonable and sometimes, racist themselves. Thus, Trump uses his authority to control definitions of what counts as racism and is able to perpetuate racism while attempting to maintain a "not-racist" identity. Overall, we highlight how close analysis of forms of metadiscourse as used in particular interactional and relational contexts is consequential for understanding ways that racism is justified and maintained more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decision to run or not run lesbian and gay commitment announcements—or "wedding" announcements—in newspapers is inherently political, involving choices about how to represent the world and whose definitions to use. ! begin by examining oppression, media representations of lesbians and gays, and the politics of visibility. Then, drawing on interviews with editors at papers that run the announcements, I point out the limitations of basing a decision to run the announcements on the ideology of objectivity. While supporting that decision, I argue that journalists should more openly address the politics of newsmaking. The retreat to objectivity, while sometimes a good short-term strategy for deflecting critics, is counterproductive and dishonest, journalists should make a commitment to a liberatory politics that explicitly works for people who are oppressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many institutions, including governments, universities and corporations are confronting their involvement in slavery and racial discrimination and grappling with the issue of reparations. But what about the responsibility of news media? Should news organizations apologize for racist coverage? What should such an apology look like? This study looks at three case studies of publications that apologized publicly for their contributions to slavery, racism and racially motivated violence. It reviews the elements of an effective apology and then evaluates each publication's statement on those parameters. It compares and contrasts these efforts and discusses potential best practices for publications considering apologies in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stuart Hall made multiple and significant methodological and theoretical contributions during the years he directed the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. This essay highlights, critiques, and shows the continuing value and relevance of two works. Hall's (1975)Introduction to Paper Voices: The Popular Press and Social Change 1935-1965is an excellent example of an early methodological intervention by Hall. It remains a highly useful manual for discourse analysis. Hall's pioneering 4-part model of encoding and decoding is used to illustrate a major theoretical intervention. Hall wrote “Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse” in 1973 for students at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. The 1980 version is shorter and its politics somewhat tamed but even so it justifiably inspired considerable work on the articulation of producer and audience work. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study uses content analysis to examine Pravda's coverage of the Chernobyl nuclear accident against the background of both Western and Soviet scholarship on the Soviet press in order to understand better the role of Pravda in the early days of glasnost. To provide a basis for comparison of the paper's coverage of Chernobyl, the study also examines Pravda's coverage of the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, and The New York Times coverage of both Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. The study found that for four days, despite glasnost, no news of the nuclear accident in Chernobyl was published by Pravda. However, there was also a four-day delay in the paper's coverage of Three Mile Island. furthermore, the study found that The New York Times gave earlier and greater coverage to the nuclear accidents at both Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to analyze how an identity of white womanhood was constructed in nineteenth-century women's foreign missionary publications, particularly in relationship to women of other countries. Using a framework of postcolonial feminism, the paper seeks to uncover the discourses of colonialism and to place women at the forefront of this questioning by analyzing how Western white women's writings and communication practices were implicated in the colonial project. The content of three nineteenth-century women's missionary publications is studied with respect to constructions of white womanhood and how this discourse intersects with religion and U.S. colonialism. While content does exhibit colonial structures of discourse and the supremacy of whiteness, it also points to ambivalence and to relationships of affinity among U.S. women and women in other countries. Ultimately, such discourse, while representing the durability of colonial discourse, may also suggest the presence of transnational relationships built against common concerns, such as the valued role of women and the constraints of patriarchy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is an attempt to provide a satisfying theoretical framework for how stereotypical representations in media texts can link social-level racial myths with individual-level cognition. Barthes' theories about semiotic signs and myths are examined and linked with models from cognitive psychology concerning human memory and processing of categorical information. Using language as a medium, Livingstone's interpretive framework is proposed as the link that connects mythical social understandings with real cognitive processing phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This case study deconstructs the media frame of the racial divide used by the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Defender to define the public reaction to the October 3, 1995, Simpson criminal verdict This frame analysis identifies differences and similarities between 2 newspapers, J mainstream and 1 Black, as they define, interpret, and evaluate the public reaction to Simpson's acquittal. The common frame of the racial divide advances specific common-sense beliefs about the role race plays in U.S. social relations. Despite the different histories of the 2 newspapers with regard to race, both papers articulate strikingly similar common sense assumptions about the role of race in U.S. social relations that compel readers to make sense of the world within the narrow confines of the Black-White dialectic. This dialectic of racial reasoning obscures alternative pathways of making sense of social conflict in U.S. society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditional agenda-setting studies have usually focused on the influence of the media on the public agenda. However, little or no research attention has been paid to agenda-setting as process. The authors contend that the persuasive power of the news media is embedded in the structure of news definition and presentation, with sources exploiting such institutionalized aspects of news coverage to influence the determination of news. As such, it will not be proper to ascribe agenda-setting power to the media alone, but it will be appropriate to examine the process of this influence in a new analysis of the role of the media in agenda-setting. This paper is an attempt to stake out a new conceptual approach to media agenda-setting effects, emphasizing the process rat bet than the effects of this influence. it calls for a shift from the "effect-centric" focus of present agenda-setting research to a process-effect oriented approach. It argues that for the actual agenda-setting effects to be determined, it is necessary to find the focus of this influence-i.e., the actual agenda-setters. In essence, the paper asks the question, who sets the agenda of the media? To answer this question, the paper proposes a paradigm that would identify crucial and contingent conditions, and would explain their roles and sequential effects in the agenda-setting process. The proposed paradigm identifies three distinct stages in the agenda- setting process: Issue Creation, issue Expansion and Issue Consumption, and three involved constituencies; Interest Groups (politicians and bureaucrats, etc.), Media and Audience The paper points out that the three constituencies play active roles at the three stages. It argues, however, that some constituencies are more active than others at some stages. The paradigm, the authors suggest. could be operationalized in two different ways: (1) a combinatorial method, or (2) a quasi-experimental method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to the journal is presented wherein the editor discusses various reports published within the issue on topics including the impact of advertising character portrayals on viewers' self-esteem, whether the race and ethnicity of viewers can affect their attitudes toward advertisements, and whether positive media portrayals of African Americans may influence young African American viewers.

In March 1968, following a year of violent urban rebellions, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders concluded that the United States was "moving toward two societies, one Black, one White—separate and unequal." With a team of researchers, the 11-member Kerner Commission, named for its chairman Governor Otto Kerner of Illinois, had spent a year studying the causes of the "1967 riots" in 23 cities. Segregation and discrimination had long been part of American life, and the resulting poverty had created urban ghettos completely unknown to most Americans, the Kerner Report said. Though the commission's work had been comprehensive in examining causes, it would lay blame for national ignorance at the feet of the news media for their unbalanced coverage and hiring practices. This article focuses on media reactions to the report's publication, as well as media attention related to the present day 50th anniversary of the its release to assess its historical impact as well as its relevance today and tomorrow in light of political, social and other shifts. Among the issues that arose in the original reporting was the stance that President Lyndon B. Johnson took toward the findings by the commission he had appointed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes cross-cultural adjustment as a communication process. It presents a brief critical review of the various ways that communication researchers have conceptualized the major variables and factors associated with the cultural reprogramming process, known as adjustment The paper argues that, for better conceptualization and theory construction, more attention should be paid to such macroscopic motivating and contextual factors as the institutional environment, as well as to the variety of sojourning purposes. Suggestions made for reorienting cross-cultural adjustment or adaptation research include: (a) placing more emphasis on macroscopic sociocultural factors, and (b) placing more emphasis on primary and secondary communication and socialization institutions (e.g., the mass media). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our study examined the relationship between media portrayals of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement in hard and fake news in varying media modalities (print versus video) and participant attitudes toward African Americans. We also examined sociodemographic factors that may be related to susceptibility of fake news. Participants were primed with either hard or fake news (print or video) prior to completing the online questionnaire. Participants included 385 college students from a large southeastern public university. The findings revealed a direct effect of fake news on attitudes toward African Americans but only if the news was from a printed media modality. Hard news also had a positive impact on participant attitudes if from a printed media modality. These findings may help explain why information learned via fake news is persistent over time. Biological sex and political affiliation were associated with the impact of media priming on participants, with male and Republican participants being more susceptible to the effects of fake news. The results of this study should be helpful to those involved in policy making regarding social media and fake news and are timely considering that the BLM movement is growing stronger and the increase in fake news is ongoing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study assesses how the "not a monolith" narrative in U.S. journalism after the 2020 presidential election serves to further shape the Latina/o/x electorate into a politically marketable category. This study employs a qualitative content analysis of 159 media texts produced in the first two weeks after Election Day. We find that the contradictions inherent in the construction of Latina/o/x voters—such as class, racial, and regional differences—are reconciled through revising old media narratives, like the "sleeping giant" metaphor, and the inclusion of Latina/o/x voters into other metaphors, like the "blue wall." In addition, a host of rationales drawn from racialized aspects of Latina/o/x history and culture, like religion, machismo, and anti-socialism, are used to explain voting behavior. Finally, new narratives emerged around Latina/o/x voters not being owned by the Democratic Party, which we view as disciplining. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This content analysis uses media framing theory to explore and compare the rate at which NFL beat writers discussed race in their coverage of the 2020 and 2021 NFL head coach hiring cycles, a perennial process that has historically maintained the statistical overrepresentation of white men among the league's head coaches. The study of the articles (N = 374) found significant year over year increases in 2021 in both the percentage of all sampled articles overall that mentioned race and in the percentage of stories that mentioned race after a team's head coach was hired. This study's findings suggest that, while NFL beat writers are unsurprisingly likely to avoid using race to frame their coaching search stories, their willingness to include race in their reporting may be increasing. Given increased calls for the NFL to address its lack of Black head coaches, sportswriters' (un)willingness to include race in their reporting of coaching searches has become increasingly relevant. Given this study's results, we therefore call for further qualitative and longitudinal quantitative studies to more definitively investigate these results as a sustained (and sustainable) phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

News organizations have a long history of covering civil rights protests in delegitimizing ways, and scholars have found that this coverage negatively affects public opinion. However, most media effects work has minimized the perspectives of Black people, and little is known about how racial identity might affect how protest coverage is perceived. We both survey (n = 1,052) and interview (n = 27) Black Americans to provide a rich understanding and interpretation of how they see and experience media coverage and how that influences them. We contribute to the literature by showing that Black Americans are dissatisfied with how news media cover their communities and covers protests, and they feel this coverage reifies harmful stereotypes and perpetuates invisibility politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the role of the press in Alabama during the "massive resistance" to the Supreme Court's Brown v. Board of Education ruling of 1954 on school integration, and the extent to which newspaper editorials relied on social and legal rationales for segregation based on the High Court's earlier Plessy v. Ferguson decision of 1896. All three of Plessy's rationales for institutionalizing segregation—states' rights, a dual system of "social rights" based on race, and the doctrine of "separate but equal"—were widely adopted by the press. This contrasted with the approach of "natural law" preservationists who relied on "pure racial ideology" in fighting integration. A content analysis of Birmingham News editorials from 1960 to 1964 found support for our thesis that "mainstream" segregationist newspapers were more likely to use "pragmatic" rationales based on "constitutional" arguments rather than "natural law" arguments to defend segregation. This approach was seen as more effective in persuading the public outside the South on the merits of the "southern way of life." Thus, Birmingham News editors consistently supported "political equality" of races to the dismay of staunch segregationist leaders in Alabama such as Governors John Patterson and George Wallace. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes newspaper diversity from the viewpoint of journalists identified with communities of color. In interviews at 4 large-circulation newspapers serving communities of color, the authors found a pattern of recurring critical issues facing the journalists in their efforts to diversify the news. The journalists interviewed here suggest that diversity (a) cannot be achieved until racist traditions and patterns in their newspapers' coverage are addressed, (b) must be seen as being a critical and important news value, (c) is only truly achieved when persons of color occupy critical positions of power at the newspaper, and (d) is also a function of the journalists of color ability to represent their communities to the newspapers and to represent their newspapers to the communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has suggested that the present media merger frenzy will result in one-dimensional content due to a reduced number of media outlets and pervasive cross-ownership. This research content analyzed 1,180 articles about environmental pollution over 29 years from 4 different groups of newspapers, each with different ownership, socioeconomic readership, geographic location, and circulation. Results revealed that content was overwhelmingly directed to upper-socioeconomic groups across all four categories of newspapers regardless of specific issue or time. Heavily weighted coverage that could not have been found through random chance alone indicated an abandonment of a newspapers' social responsibility function. This abdication was attributed to the industry-wide, pervasive journalistic norms and the importance of advertising revenue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two main theoretical concepts to interrogate news content were adopted in this study. The Frankfurt School concepts of ideology (and in particular Althusser's concept ideological state apparatus) and the British Cultural Studies concept, moral panic, help document how 2 examples of print media covered a local encounter between young Black men and the police in one community. By reconceptualizing the press as an ideological state apparatus and using the concept moral panic, the authors include dimensions that may more forcefully illustrate links between media content and lived experience. The news concerning the death of Black Panther leader, Fred Hampton, challenged the existing status quo by bringing race and class issues to the forefront. The Black press (Chicago Daily Defender) provided an alternative understanding to the one offered by the general press (Chicago Tribune). Evidence is offered for how and under what circumstances the discourse of journalism professional values and norms suppress or obscure minority voices. Incorporating the concept moral panic provides a tool for explaining the distinctive narratives offered by the 2 Chicago newspapers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many Indigenous tribes in the United States count on gaming revenue to provide basic services to their people, but gaming was a critical resource that was lost during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through a qualitative contextual analysis, this research explores the news coverage about economic resource loss in both Indigenous and non-Indigenous news media coverage of COVID-19, particularly where the virus and gaming intersected. It illustrates how coverage from news outlets with an Indigenous focus and/or representation differs from outlets without connections to Indigenous people. Using Indigenous standpoint theory, the analysis revealed the ways non-Indigenous media used parachute reporting to create a one-sided view of the pandemic's impacts when it came to the industries necessary to fund indispensable tribal functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Latin American players comprise of a large portion of Major League Baseball (MLB). As of Opening Day 2019, 26.5 percent of MLB was from a Latin American country. Since the Latino influence is large, the purpose of this textual analysis is to determine how mainstream media frame the English-proficiency of Latin American MLB players. For a player to be eligible for this study, they must have debuted during or before the 2018 season and speak enough English to hold an interview. Once those players were determined, a Google and NewsBank search was conducted with the name of the player and a search term regarding their English ability. From that, 39 players had at least one article written about them that references their English-proficiency. Three central themes emerged: speaking English is central to success in MLB, language helps players to acculturate to American life, and the players are self-motivated to become bilingual. These findings are significant because they do not align with traditional Latino stereotypes of being uneducated, lazy, and lacking a willingness to learn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

African Media Studies which is marginalized in the Global North academy lacks not only representation from African students/scholars but is also under-theorized. Employing a decolonial approach, this article presents a critical analysis of African Media Studies from the perspective of a recent PhD graduate and early career scholar. Using what I call an African feminist autoethnography framework, I draw on my experiences as an African graduate student in the Global North to demonstrate the erasure of African Media Studies in curricula and highlight the challenges faced by African students and scholars within this field. I argue that to understand the challenges mitigating the growth of African Studies scholarship produced by Africans, it is imperative to understand the lived experience of Africans in the academy and pay attention to how these experiences can guide us toward a path of decolonizing African Media Studies. The article also highlights the importance of drawing on indigenous African knowledge systems to build theories that best suit our research on African media. It also draws attention to the importance of transdisciplinarity to the growth of the field and provides alternative ways to rethink the position and growth of African Media Studies in the global academy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The role of entertainment television in development communication has recently attracted the attention of a number of communication scholars and policy planners. Historically this subject has received little attention; most research on the use of television for development focuses on the effects of educational programs designed to disseminate knowledge and information. Audience exposure to entertainment television programs worldwide is rapidly increasing, and several nations are infusing prosocial messages within the content of entertainment television programs to promote development. The present article provides a succinct history of the prosocial uses of entertainment television programs and discusses eight important implications regarding the use of entertainment television programs for development in the Third World. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Content analyses have shown that African Americans are dissatisfied with predominantly white-controlled press coverage. However, because content analyses do not provide an adequate measure of the depth of such discontent, the authors administered a series of questionnaires to elicit broader and deeper responses. The questionnaires were mailed to black elected officials (BEOs) nationwide. These included school board members, mayors, and state legislators in order to permit a wide range for comparison and contrast. It was found that BEOs ‘have no use’ for the white press's coverage of the African American community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The analysis compares Ecuador's Punto de Vista and Bolivia's Aqui as counter-hegemonic, cultural forces within their respective settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on the communication-acculturation perspective, this study assumed active roles of mass media during the acculturation process among foreign immigrants. Employing major postulates and methodologies used in the "cultivation" hypothesis, surveys among two Korean communities in the U.S. found little substantial support for the cultivation hypothesis in general, nor (or the "resonance effect" in particular. While the inter- cultural testing of the hypothesis failed to find evidence for television's perceptual influence, the study generally supported previous findings showing positive associations of various media orientations with antecedent factors such as perceived language proficiency, length of stay, educational background and gratifications sought from media exposure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study analyzed how depictions of White and Black recruits by ESPN network employees differs depending on athletic successes, failures, personality, and physicality. A total of 42 hr of ESPN college football National Signing Day (NSD) coverage (2015–2018) was analyzed with results indicating sportscasters who covered NSD largely did not differ in their depictions of athletes, with the majority of comments referring to recruits' physicality or their upbringing, regardless of race. In all, 98% of the comments about NSD were spoken by White sportscasters, and 86.4% of the comments were spoken about a Black athlete. The relatively meager differences could be framed in a fairly positive light, whereas the lack of non-White commentators within coverage indicates hiring practices are still problematic. Cultivation theory logics related to stereotype-formation-through-media are then applied to determine implications for the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) produce 80% of African American media professionals with college degrees (Crawford, 2013). Howard University, in particular, has been a leading source of Black journalists and other communicators for a half-century. Little research has been conducted to examine the role of Howard University and other HBCUs in diversifying the media and assisting in the expansion of career opportunities for Black journalists, particularly in the aftermath of the release of the 1968 Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders. Popularly called the Kerner Report, it harshly critiqued mainstream journalism's role in perpetuating the unrest of the 1960s and the inequalities experienced by African Americans. Specifically, the report faulted the news media in failing to hire African Americans who could provide a more accurate depiction of the challenges faced by African Americans in their communities. Released amid the civil disorders of the 1960s, the Kerner Report became the impetus for as many as six HBCUs to later establish substantial journalism and mass communications programs to train Black journalists to enter mainstream newsrooms as the demands grew to diversify the profession. This article would add to the literature by highlighting the role of HBCUs in desegregating the media and by documenting the efforts of Howard University's School of Communications, as well as programs at other HBCUs, to expand opportunities for Black journalists and media executives, as well as to offer a counternarrative to the mainstream media's deficit-based approach in reporting on the lives of Black people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using critical rhetorical analysis (McKerrow, 1989) as a method of analysis and critique, and informed by critical whiteness studies (Nakayama & Krizek, 1995) and Black feminist thought (Collins, 1991), this project argues that NFL North Carolina Panthers' quarterback Cam Newton and NBA Oklahoma City Thunder's point guard Russell Westbrook rhetorically perform an alternative Black masculinity that symbolically contests whiteness's surveillance of male bodies who occupy Black positionality in the NFL and NBA via their performance of cool pose (Majors & Billson, 1992). Focusing on news and sports media coverage in the 2015–2016 season, this project also interrogates whiteness's strategies to reconstitute Newton and Westbrook's expressions of cool pose by inscribing Black masculinity with belittling and dehumanizing controlling images that favor whiteness and White masculinity. This manuscript closes with a discussion of the harmful repercussions of whiteness's strategies in pro sports as well as the possibilities that athletes like Newton and Westbrook bring forth for social justice initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Forces of globalization pose challenges and opportunities for understanding the impact of global media, especially discourses of superheroes at the intersection of the global and the local. Using the lens of Structuration Theory, the authors examine how Chinese sojourners make sense of media constructions of superheroes. A focus group interview method and thematic analysis of the interview texts were conducted. Findings in this study revealed both culturally universal constructions of prototypical superheroes and culturally specific, localized Chinese (super)heroes. Besides confirming the dominance of Western-centric superhero structures as gendered male and raced White, the results also suggest an emerging hybrid (super)hero archetype that is both real and imagined and embodies both Eastern and Western cultural values and orientations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A survey of 499 Black, Asian, and White American college students assessed their endorsement of “mainstream” American values, uncovering a 6-factor values structure, with some notable significant differences between the races. As expected, White respondents' own personal value orientations most closely matched their assessments of mainstream American values, and stronger racial identity (from a social identity perspective) corresponded to an even closer match. A variety of media consumption measures correlated with personal/mainstream American values congruence, with greater media exposure predicting greater endorsement of mainstream values, but most relationships were eclipsed when controlling for demographics, race, and racial identity. Predictors that maintained under controls included music TV and sports programming exposure, pointing to the potential importance of such particular media forms in the process of value-based cultural assimilation and reinforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In early 2012, sports columnists and opinion writers explicitly discussed the racial significance of “Linsanity,” when Jeremy Lin, an undrafted Taiwanese-American point guard, became an overnight sensation in the overwhelmingly Black National Basketball Association. This textual analysis found that commentary used four frames to describe Lin in the context of Black America: (a) an oddity and underdog; (b) a reminder of racism; (c) a pioneer and agent of change; and (d) an antidote to Blackness. The race of the commentator was a factor in frame use and counter-framing. Overall, though, the frames highlighted the differences between Asian Americans and Blacks, not their shared struggle as underrepresented groups. In doing so, the frames illustrate hegemony's grip over Asian Americans and Blacks in their struggle for cultural acceptance —on and off the sports field. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examines representations of African Americans, Latinos, and Asians in YouTube videos, exploring whether YouTube serves as a type of alternative media where the status quo is contested. Results show that most videos analyzed perpetuated racial stereotypes. Further, videos that included stereotypes, most of which contained user-produced content, were more popular. The authors argue citizens to a large extent use YouTube to perpetuate the same stereotypes found in the mainstream media, rather than use it as an alternative counter-public sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article focuses on the ways media texts produced in Israel constitute a vital part in the lives and identities of Jewish Israeli migrants in the United States. In this qualitative study, Israelis residing in the United States were interviewed about their media consumption patterns and their perceptions about the Israeli media's impact on their lives in the United States. Analyses reveal that homeland media constitute indispensable identity prosthesis; that is, homeland media not only help combat homesickness but are used as devices in sustaining and empowering native identity. Israeli media bolster these migrants' sense as if they never left home: They are wholly Israeli notwithstanding the geographic distance. Living in the diaspora is masked by an illusion maintained via consumption of homeland media. Paradoxically, diasporic life can be indefinitely extended because these media afford this illusion. The importation of culture and news from the homeland soothes the migrants' uneasiness of being away from native soil and consequently they prolong their sojourn abroad. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study experimentally tested stereotypes and credibility of messages associated with athletes. Participants were asked to rate photos of Black and White baseball players based on stereotypes identified in previous literature. They were then given an anonymous paragraph from a newspaper that featured either a stereotype consistent or inconsistent message and asked to rate the author's credibility. Black players were rated significantly higher in physical strength and natural ability, which is consistent with previous literature. However, inconsistent with previous literature, White players were not rated significantly higher in intelligence and leadership. Despite these results, when measuring credibility, this study found White-consistent stereotypes to be credible, whereas Black-consistent ones were not. These results are interpreted in light of Devine's model of stereotype processing and in-group, out-group bias. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rural, non-White survey respondents face the greatest objective environmental risks in North Carolina, evidence that environmental injustice persists in rural parts of the state. Residents' perceived risks, however, are not significantly associated with their objective risks or demographic characteristics, contrary to what the Risk Information Seeking and Processing Model predicts. Rather, survey respondents' perceived risks, as well as their confidence to cope with local environmental problems, are shaped primarily by respondents' media use: watching local TV news increased perceived risks, whereas national TV news use and newspaper reading increased individuals' environmental self-efficacy. Exposure to environmental health risks, perceived risks, and environmental self-efficacy, however, did predict individuals' information seeking, a “gateway” to more substantive behaviors that may help residents cope with environmental problems where they live. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This analysis compares how the press covered the campaigns of then-senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to determine if—when not compared to a White male candidate—the press still focused on a Black candidate's skin color, a female candidate's gender and appearance, and if it continued to portray both candidates unfavorably. As the first national election with an African American male and White female frontrunners, this is perhaps the first study that directly examines the effect the novelty of race and gender have on press coverage. It found the press still made gender a salient aspect of Clinton's campaign. Also, despite his reticence to focus on race, the press still more frequently portrayed Obama as the “Black” candidate. However, in contrast to previous studies, neither candidate received more coverage for their appearance (i.e., attractiveness, attire, or smile), nor did either receive more favorable coverage than the other. These findings suggest that to some extent, these atypical candidates may have led to atypical coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

One hundred twenty-nine African American women completed a survey that investigated the relationship among media use, media literacy, and food consumption. The data indicated that the frequency of news viewing was positively associated with healthy food choices and negatively associated with unhealthy ones. Moreover, media literacy was positively related to healthy food consumption and negatively related to unhealthy food consumption including visits to fast-food restaurants. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

An extensive body of research has already illustrated the myriad ways in which media help form perceptions of various social groups. Theories such as cultivation, stereotype theory, social learning, and social identity theory all discuss how audiences can internalize what they see presented in the media, and project that information onto their beliefs about reality. However, many of these theories pay less attention to both negative and positive stereotypes, as well as how multiple social groups are perceived within the same context. Likewise, research has neglected thoroughly to examine the perceptions of African American media viewers regarding other marginalized social groups. This study examines the underlying dimensions of stereotypes by applying the stereotype content model (SCM) to African Americans’ perceptions of media representations of their own and other marginalized groups. The results of the study provided mixed support for the SCM; however, perceptions of African American characters were favorable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined fairness and balance in the coverage of same-sex marriage by 5 U.S. newspapers, and how source use, newspaper working context, and media frames affect fairness and balance of the coverage. A content analysis of 209 stories found that overall coverage of same-sex marriage was fair and balanced and stories framed as thematic were more likely to be fair and balanced than stories framed as episodic. Source dominance of the stories was associated with balance of the coverage. Hypotheses about the effects of working context on fairness and balance of news coverage and on media frames were not supported. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Israeli media coverage of a well-known event, the 1993 handshake between Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat, provides a glimpse into the nature of competing collective identities held by Israelis. The potential for multiple interpretations (and therefore multiple perspectives) of the largely nonverbal event allows for these identities to be presented and, in many cases, contrasted. To assess competing identities in the mediated discourse, we reviewed 191 articles/transcripts in the Hebrew-language Israeli media that had been translated into English and in the English-language Israeli media. These texts provided an array of what we argue are dialectics or oppositional forces present in the discussions. Most notable of these dialectics were those that characterized the handshake and the accompanying negotiations as inevitable or impossible, as opening or closing opportunities for Israelis, as resulting in feelings of euphoria or betrayal, and as splintering or unifying the relevant parties. The authors argue that these dialectics, sometimes presented as both/and rather than either/or (L. A. Baxter & B. M. Montgomery, 1996), reflect a larger, complex negotiation of collective cultural identity for the Israeli people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For many years, the mass media have been accused of providing negative and potentially-damaging messages to viewers. Some have complained that the media are replete with too much violence while others have lamented on media stereotyping of various groups. In this article, the authors examine the issues of underrepresentation and symbolic annihilation as they apply to one particular medium-namely, animated cartoons-to which people are exposed early in life, typically on a regular basis for many years. Our principal research questions are (a) To what extent do cartoons underrepresent and/or symbolically annihilate social groups that are not considered desirable in society-at-large? (b) Has underrepresentation and/or symbolic annihilation changed over time? and (c) When social “out groups” are shown, how are they depicted vis-a-vis “in groups”? To examine these questions, the authors examine portrayals based on gender, age, race, and sexual orientation. The data revealed that animated cartoons have a long history of underrepresenting and symbolically annihilating socially devalued “out groups” and that little has changed over the course of the past 65+ years. When “out group” members are included in cartoons, however, their portrayals tend not to be dramatically different-not better and not much worse-than those typical of their “in group” counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzed representations of Saudi women in the American press after September 11, 2001. Using feminist criticism, the critique of Orientalism, and postcolonial discourses as theoretical frameworks, it also compared the representations of Saudi women in The Washington Post with those of American women in the Arab News. While The Washington Post overwhelmingly portrayed Saudi women as oppressed victims in need of Western liberation, the Arab News represented most freedoms enjoyed by American women as shallow. Even as the Arab News primarily constructed American women as ethnocentric, superficial, individualistic and immoral, it simultaneously bestowed Saudi women with the responsibility of resisting Westernization and preserving Islamic purity, national dignity and culture. While dominant representations of American women in the Arab News were pejorative in nature, those American women who were perceived as attempting to understand Saudi culture and praised Saudi customs, traditions and lifestyles were positively portrayed. Finally, the rescue discourses in the American press and the nationalist agenda in the Saudi press shared a defining characteristic: both had the same goal of disciplining the female body. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]