Search

The Minorities and Communication Division of the proceedings contains the following 7 papers: "The Race Card and Ethical Reasoning: The Importance of Race to Journalistic Decision Making" (Renita Coleman); "Jesse Owens, A Black Pearl Amidst an Ocean of Fury: A Case Study of Press Coverage on The 1936 Berlin Olympic Games" (Pamela C. Laucella); "A Fall from Grace: The Framing of Imam Fawaz Damra by 'The Cleveland Plain Dealer'" (Yolanda D. Campbell); "Silencing the Voice of the Minority" (Minjeong Kim); "The Black Press and the Integration of Baseball: A Content Analysis of Changes in Coverage" (Brian Carroll); "Media Effect on Race and Immigration: Testing the Link" (Cleo Joffrion Allen); and "Color Blindsided in the Booth: An Examination of the Descriptions of College Athletes During Televised Games" (James A. Rada and K. Tim Wulfemeyer). (RS)

What impact did a nontraditional work experience have on subsequent life decisions in older women's lives, and what can be learned from these experiences that could have an impact on the educational and career decisions of girls and young women? This paper presents data from a collaborative research project with a group of eight older adult women who shared a unique, nontraditional work experience during their late adolescence and young adulthood as members of the All American Girls Professional Baseball League (AAGPBL) between 1943 and 1954. The study was conducted within the traditions of feminist oral history, as described by Reinharz (1992), and of personal narrative or storytelling as described by Heilbrun (1988). The data reveal that this nontraditional experience had a pivotal impact for many of the young women on subsequent life decisions, especially about education and career. Potential implications of these results are explored as related to educational and vocational choices of today's girls and young women. Contains 40 references. (Author/BT)

The Cultural and Critical Studies Division section of the proceedings contains the following 11 papers: "'Grimm' News Indeed--'Madstones,' Clever Toads, and Killer Tarantulas: Fairy-Tale Briefs in Wild West Newspapers" (Paulette Kilmer); "The First Amendment and the Doctrine of Corporate Personhood: Collapsing the Press-Corporation Distinction" (David S. Allen); "This Mythical Place, 'El Pais de Las Mujeres': Representing Women in a Venezuelan Telenovela" (Carolina Acosta-Alzuru); "Politics, the Emergence of Entertainment Journalism, and the Battle for Headlines: President Clinton and the 1994-1995 Baseball Strike" (Robert Trumpbour); "Polysemy, Resistance, and Hegemony: An Audience Research of a Korean Prime-Time Drama" (Oh-Hyeon Lee); "Cyberspace: The New Disney Universe" (Jeffrey Layne Blevins); "Examining the Problematic of 'Auteur' Theory: The Case of David E. Kelley and 'Picket Fences'" (Karen E. Kline); "The 'Forgotten' 1918 Influenza Epidemic and Press Portrayal of Public Anxiety" (Janice Hume); "Myth of the Southern Box Office: Lining Domestic Coffers with Global Prejudices" (Elaine Walls Reed); "Ideology and Race in California: The 'New York Times' Coverage of Proposition 187" (Christopher Williams); and "Capote's Legacy: The Challenge of Creativity and Credibility in Literary Journalism" (Mark H. Masse). (RS)

The Newspaper, Part 2 section of the Proceedings contains the following 10 papers: "Newsroom Teams: A Baseline Study of Prevalence, Organization and Effectiveness" (Fred F. Endres, Ann B. Schierhorn, and Carl Schierhorn); "Hispanics & the Media: A Case Study of Coverage in 'The Dallas Morning News'" (Camille R. Kraeplin and Federico Subervi); "Getting It Right: Newsmaker Perceptions of Accuracy and Credibility" (Scott R. Maier); "Baseball Box Scores in the Newspaper: Helpful Statistics or Sports Hieroglyphics?" (C. A. Tuggle and Don Sneed); "Diversity Efforts in the Newsroom: Doin' the Right Thing or Just a Case of Show Me the Money?" (Richard Gross, Patricia A. Curtin, and Glen T. Cameron); "Improving Newspaper Delivery: A Factor Analysis of Route Demographic Variables and Reliability Measures" (Marc Seamon); "The Shrinking Sphere of Privacy: Candidate Coverage in Presidential Politics, 1980 to 1996" (Elizabeth A. Skewes); "Are Young People Reading the Newspaper? A 25-Year Cohort Analysis" (Nancy Cheever and Tony Rimmer); "Job Satisfaction, Dissatisfaction of Texas Newspaper Reporters" (Li-jing Arthur Chang and George Sylvie); and "Local Views on Local News" (Patricia M. Kennedy). (RS)

The Newspaper, Part 1 section of the Proceedings contains the following 10 papers: "Local News Coverage Strategies in a Three-Way Daily Newspaper Competitive Market" (Patsy G. Watkins); "Enterprise and Investigative Reporting at Ohio Metropolitan Newspapers in 1980 and in 1995" (Joseph Bernt and Marilyn Greenwald); "The Great Home Run Race of 1998 in Black and White" (G. M. Bush); "Journalists' Perceptions of Online Information-Gathering Problems" (Bruce Garrison); "Analytical Journalism: Credibility of Computer-Assisted Reporting" (Justin Mayo and Glenn Leshner); "Journalists and Gender: An Analysis of 'The New York Times' Coverage of the 1996 U.S. Presidential Election" (Kimmerly S. Piper-Aiken); "The Quest for Credibility through the Public Dialogue in Correction Boxes, Letters to the Editor and Columns Written by Newspaper Ombudsmen" (Neil Nemeth and Craig Sanders); "The Metro Wide Web: How Newspapers' Gatekeeping Role Is Changing Online" (Jane B. Singer); "'You Had To Be There' (And They Weren't): The Problem with Reporter Reconstructions" (Russell Frank); and "'The New York Times' and 'The London Times' Cover War in Bosnia and Croatia, 1991 to 1995: Press Nationalism and U.S.-British Hegemony Over Bosnian Policy" (Lawrence A. [Luther] Di Giovanni). (RS)

The Minorities and Communication section of these Proceedings contains the following 10 papers: "L'affaire Jake Powell: The Minority Press Goes to Bat against Segregated Baseball" (Chris Lamb); "Strategies for Surveying Small, Urban Publications on Patterns of Writing Staff Racial Diversity" (Yvonne Laurenty); "Sensing, Valuation, and the Portrayal of African American TV Newsmakers" (Camilla Gant and John Dimmick); "The Influence of Television Use and Parental Communication on Educational Aspirations of Hispanic Children" (Alexis Tan and others); "Hire and Higher: An Analysis of the Relationship between Numbers of Asian-American Editors and Coverage of Local Chinese by 'The Oregonian' in Portland, Oregon" (Herman B. Chiu); "Tuskegee Airmen, Censorship, and the Black Press in World War II" (Michael S. Sweeney); "Policy and Press Coverage: Changing Coverage of Native Americans and Native American Issues in the Press, 1963-1983" (Jennifer Bowie); "The Invisible 'Model Minority': Images of Koreans on American TV" (Hoon Shim); "A Bumpy Carpet Ride: Disney and Cultural Controversy" (Keri Helene Bartok); and "More Sex Than Consequence: The Sexual Health Content of Latino Magazines" (Melissa A. Johnson). (CR)

This study investigates the relationship between sexual harassment and participation in "manly" sports (i.e., football, baseball, basketball, soccer, and wrestling) at the high school level. Manly sports are defined as those sports that celebrate values of dominance, aggression, male solidarity, and female exclusion. Participants were 353 11th- and 12th-grade boys in a suburban school district. A survey was developed to measure students' sex-role stereotyping and adversarial attitudes, sexually harassing behaviors, sports participation, and perceptions of sports affiliation of peer sexual harassers. Results revealed a positive correlation between the attitude and behavior factors. Boys who expressed sexist attitudes were also the ones who reported more frequent engagement in sexually harassing behavior toward girls. Analysis indicates that all boys believed that a sexual harasser was more than likely to be a member of a manly sports team than to be a nonathlete or a member of any of the other available high school sports teams. However, no meaningful relationship was found between either attitude or behavior and sports participation. (Contains 43 references.) (RJM)

The history of sports is closely tied to the larger history of the society in which they are played. Baseball in the United States in the 1920's and l930's assumed a major role in spreading the ideals of fair play, sportsmanship, and democracy to the Far East, with tours by amateur athletes and professionals such as Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth. Even after the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924, it was felt that Baseball Diplomacy should continue in order to lessen Japanese resentment at American racial prejudice. The ideals of the early thirties, both in sports and diplomacy, were slowly dispelled by activities in the European sphere, where nations were preparing for war. The major baseball-related news from Japan, after successful tours in 1934, 1935, and 1936, came in 1940, when radio broadcasting of professional games ceased, and English playing terms and team names were replaced by Japanese words. In August of 1940, baseball was abolished in Japan, and on December seventh, Pearl Harbor was attacked. The sports world tried to explain the deed as a weakness in the Japanese national character, rather than as a failure of the civilizing role of baseball, and threw itself fully into the war effort. A period of idealism and naivete was coming to an end, and sports slowly came to recognize the fact, just as did the rest of society. (MB)

During its century and a half history, baseball has been given continued impetus by the development of new technologies in communication--the telegraph, the sports page, the radio and television. Perhaps the most important in the initial spread of baseball throughout America was the railroad. The completion of the Union Pacific Railroad in 1869 made possible a western tour by the Cincinnati Red Stockings, during which games were played in St. Louis, San Francisco, Sacramento, and Omaha. The impact of the tour is debatable--it did create a heightened fervor for the sport in the short run, but the overwhelming superiority of the Red Stockings may have slowed the development of baseball competition on the west coast, where sailing, horseracing, billiards, footracing, velocipede riding, and cricket claimed much larger followings. The tour's most prolonged impact may have been in Carson City and Virginia City, Nevada. A baseball rivalry had already grown between these two mining communities and was intensified by the impending arrival of the Red Stockings, invited to play by the Carson City team. However, the Red Stockings traveled straight through to Omaha, and the Carson City team, frustrated but with enthusiasm undampened, was left to continue its local rivalry with Virginia City. (MB)

Sports and physical recreation activities have been part of American life since the days of the early settlers. Although the settlers were faced with problems of survival, accounts of life in the colonies in the 1600's carry mention of bowling in the streets, play with bows and arrows, and ice skating. Other activities to gain popularity before 1800 include snowball throwing, baseball, dancing, golf, cricket, sailing, wrestling, bathing (but not swimming), angling, and horseracing. (MM)

This presentation provides an historical sketch of the All-American Girls' Baseball League (AAGBBL). The League was created in 1942 as the All-American Girls' Softball League, by Philip K. Wrigley. He initiated the League as a non-profit organization governed by a board of three trustees. Mr. Wrigley's basic motivation for creating the AAGSBL was to organize substitute entertainment for men's professional baseball. In 1943, Mr. Wrigley began de-emphasizing the League's identity with softball and emphasizing its identity with baseball. The League was renamed the All-American Girls' Professional Ball League, but unofficially it was referred to as the AAGBBL. The League grew from its four original teams in 1943 to a maximum of ten teams in 1948. By 1954, it had dwindled down to five teams. The organizational structure of the League underwent three basic changes, all due to changes in administration. There were also both real and imagined problems with male managers and female players. To solve this, chaperones were hired. The League administrators maintained strict conduct rules for the players. The demise of the AAGBBL came after the 1954 season. Post-World War II social changes combined with intra-league changes to contribute to the League's demise. Many instructive lessons can be ascertained from the League's experience, however, for current and future application to women's professional sport. An appendix is attached which contains charts and tables on structure, salaries, and participants. (RC)

Results are reported of a research effort designed to provide a comprehensive profile of the characteristics of members of the Canadian National Baseball Team. The subjects of the study were candidates for the team. The control group consisted of top level amateur baseball players from Windsor. Four examinations were made: 1) physiological tests for maximum oxygen uptake and skinfold measures; 2) biomechanical laboratory tests for static strength and field test on time, distance, and velocity factors; 3) psychological tests; and 4) the organization and administration of the team. The ultimate goal of this research is to develop a conceptual and mathematical model involving the most relevant tests in the selection and development of elite national baseball players. (JD)

Sports articles appearing in three New York City newspapers in Jackie Robinson's first season as a major league baseball player were examined to determine if there was biased reporting based on racial prejudice. The sports pages of the New York "Times," the "Herald Tribune," and the "Daily News" for 44 days in 1947 were studied. The following items were tabulated for each story: (1) the number of times Robinson was identified as black and whether the identifying word was used as a noun or an adjective, (2) the number of incidents reported that had racial connotations, and (3) the number of racial stereotypical words used in reference to Robinson (such as "boy"). Figures were also noted of the number of game stories in which Robinson's name did not appear, even though he had played in the games, and what his batting average was in those games. Photographs were also examined to see how many times he appeared in pictures showing Brooklyn Dodger players. The findings revealed that while there were numerous instances of subtle bias in all three newspapers, the sports writers generally provided fair coverage of Jackie Robinson in his first major league season. (FL)