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The online environment offers nearly unlimited sources and information, giving people unprecedented agency over selection. This article offers a test of three factors predicting selective exposure to opinionated news online—prior political attitudes, source credibility, and individual social identity based on race (Study 1) and gender (Study 2)—testing their independent and interactive effects. Two original selection studies on samples of adult Americans offered articles that were (1) pro- or counter-attitudinal with regard to individual attitudes on two political issues, (2) from high- versus low-credibility sources conceptualized in two different ways, and (3) featuring participants' social in-group or out-group. Unobtrusively logged behavioral selection data suggest that prior political attitudes, and their strength and importance in Study 1, more strongly predict pro-attitudinal exposure than both source credibility and the demographically based social identity. Both studies additionally reveal nuanced interactions between the tested factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines whether and how market competition affected the political bias of government-owned newspapers in China from 1981 to 2011. We measure media bias based on coverage of government mouthpiece content (propaganda) relative to commercial content. We first find that a reform that forced newspaper exits (reduced competition) affected media bias by increasing product specialization, with some papers focusing on propaganda and others on commercial content. Second, lower-level governments produce less-biased content and launch commercial newspapers earlier, eroding higher-level governments’ political goals. Third, bottom-up competition intensifies the politico-economic trade-off, leading to product proliferation and less audience exposure to propaganda. (JEL D72, L31, L82, O14, O17, P26, P31) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We measure the persuasive effects of slanted news and tastes for like-minded news, exploiting cable channel positions as exogenous shifters of cable news viewership. Channel positions do not correlate with demographics that predict viewership and voting, nor with local satellite viewership. We estimate that Fox News increases Republican vote shares by 0.3 points among viewers induced into watching 2.5 additional minutes per week by variation in position. We then estimate a model of voters who select into watching slanted news, and whose ideologies evolve as a result. We use the model to assess the growth over time of Fox News influence, to quantitatively assess media-driven polarization, and to simulate alternative ideological slanting of news channels. (JEL D72, L82) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parties try to shape media coverage in ways that are favorable to them, but what determines whether media outlets pick up and report on party messages? Based on content analyses of 1,496 party press releases and 6,512 media reports from the 2013 Austrian parliamentary election campaign, we show that media coverage of individual party messages is influenced not just by news factors, but also by partisan bias. The media are therefore more likely to report on messages from parties their readers favor. Importantly, this effect is greater rather than weaker when these messages have high news value. These findings have important implications for understanding the media’s role in elections and representative democracies in general. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The clear financial benefits accrued to owners of television stations as a result of the Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission(FEC) decision opens the door to an important question: Did the degree to which media corporations benefited from the changes in campaign finance law influence their news outlets’ coverage of the Citizens United decision? In other words, is it possible to identify variation in how media outlets covered the Supreme Court decision that correlates with the degree to which those outlets’ parent companies profited from the resulting increase in campaign spending? Answering this question will provide an important and much-too-uncommon opportunity to systematically test for bias in news coverage. Replicating the method used by Gilens and Hertzman (2000) in their own test of coverage of the 1996 Telecommunications Act, this analysis reveals that newspapers belonging to media corporations that own more television stations covered the Citizens United ruling systematically differently—and more favorably—than those with few or no television stations. This has important implications for the degree to which the news produced by increasingly conglomerated and corporatized media companies may eschew neutral or balanced coverage in favor of news frames that promote their own financial interests. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent work has explored how individual and institutional factors affect the gap in perceptions of political legitimacy between electoral winners and electoral losers, but has ignored the role that the political information environment, in general, and ideologically biased media, in particular, plays in exacerbating or diminishing this gap. By combining individual-level public opinion data in 28 countries, an expert survey on media systems, and a variety of country-level indicators, I find that higher levels of political parallelism in a country are associated with a larger winner-loser gap in institutional trust and satisfaction with democracy. The relationship is contingent on whether or not people are actually exposed to said media. This research, which links the study of political communication with the study of comparative political behavior, indicates that the increasing availability of partisan news around the world is a cause for concern. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The United States has a historical legacy of oppression and subjugation spanning an array of social locations, including class, gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation and others. Contemporary research has documented a growth in themes of prejudice and racism present in popular media, such as the Internet. This study fills a gap in the literature by exploring Internet manifestations of a social group that has been historically organized around an ideology of intolerance, prejudice, and hatred: The Ku Klux Klan. Findings from an intersectional content analysis of KKK Web sites reveal that prejudice exists on multiple axes of hate. Major themes include emphases on white solidarity, the cult of Aryan Christianity, Aryan Klan masculinity and heteronormative nuclear family values. These dimensions intersect to create a complex picture of the Klan’s self-proclaimed social supremacy. Implications regarding the use of the Internet as a vehicle of hate are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Partisans are poor judges of news content, rating neutral content as biased against their views (the hostile media perception) and forgiving biased content when it favors their side. This study tests whether a short news media literacy public service announcement (PSA) appearing before political programming can influence credibility and hostility ratings of the program and program host. Our findings suggest that a media literacy PSA can be effective, but its impact depends on the position of the news program and on the political ideology of the viewers. In this case, the media literacy PSA only influenced conservatives’ evaluations of the political program, improving perceptions of a neutral or congruent (conservative) host while further depressing ratings of an incongruent (liberal) host. Liberals’ evaluations of the program were unaffected by the PSA. Implications for media literacy messaging and information processing are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Most Muslims lay the blame for the perpetuation of societal prejudice against Islam and Muslims at the feet of the media. Media scholars regularly confirm that negative stereotypes prevail in contemporary western media. Yet there are differences between media representation and the effects on actual people's attitudes. Empirical research is needed to find out if negative media stereotypes of Muslims, Arabs and Islam are actually linked to widespread societal Islamophobia. This article traces audience reactions to a 1960s U.S. sitcom, I Dream of Jeannie, a show replete with 'orientalist' representations of Arabs and genies linked to the collection of traditional stories called The Arabian Nights: Tales from a Thousand and One Nights. The main research finding is that while a variety of responses were uncovered, a consistent difference between non-Muslim and Muslim reactions became apparent: only Muslims noticed orientalist stereotyping the show. I conclude that if North American society is to move beyond Islamophobia and forward to building bridges and integrating Muslims without discrimination into wider society, this cannot be done where non-Muslims do not see negative media stereotypes about Muslims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study employs information obtained from media content analyses, as well as economic and political data, to investigate negativity in unemployment news between 2001 and 2010 in Germany. The data indicate a substantial bias in terms of the amounts of negative and positive reports, compared with the actual development of unemployment. Moreover, the media tend to place negative unemployment reports more prominently than positive ones. The estimates suggest that the bias is not the consequence of journalists asymmetrically interpreting the official unemployment numbers. Instead, it is associated with the exploitation of often non-economic information and structural influences in the process of news production. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The newspapers of the Basque Country had not yet made fully aware of the importance of media in the fight against terrorism until 1996. From that year ETA began a sustained campaign of attacks to politicians and the media shows a serious change in their press coverage. The Basque press starts a new media strategy which is consolidated in 1997 and finally implemented during 1998. In these two years the media tried to "humanize" the information published about the attacks of ETA. Although the newspapers began to react journalistically to the killings in the 1996-1998 period, we can observe that the information coverage was very different depending on who the victims were. This text is based on a research funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Reference CSO2010-19855). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rise of computer technology, the Internet, rapid news dissemina-tion, multi-tasking, and social networking have wrought changes in human psychology that alter how we process news media. More specifically, news coverage of high-profile trials necessarily focuses on emotionally-overwrought, attention-grabbing information disseminated to a public hav-ing little ability to process that information critically. The public's capacity for empathy is likewise reduced, making it harder for trial processes to overcome the unfair prejudice created by the high-profile trial. Market forces magnify these changes. Free speech concerns limit the ability of the law to alter media coverage directly, and the tools available to trial judges to minimize harm to trial fairness are toothless. The usual solution has been lawyers' ethics rules designed to channel their communications with the press, particularly rules focusing on prosecutors. This piece addresses these concerns, using a recent proposed revision to the American Bar Association Criminal Justice Standards for the Prose-cution Function as a jumping off point for the discussion. Those Standards, like most state ethics rules, prohibit prosecutors from making "public statements that the prosecutor reasonably should know will have a substan-tial likelihood of materially prejudicing a criminal proceeding." Drawing on cognitive science, behavioral economics, rumor-transmission studies, and jury research, this article argues that a substantial likelihood of mate-rial prejudice to criminal proceedings from prosecutor statements to the press will always be present in high profile cases. Accordingly, the rules generally governing prosecutor dealings with the press, including the latest version of those rules embodied in the proposed Standards, are unrealistic. Better rules are theoretically possible. Nevertheless, this article concludes, such rules are probably not politically realistic. Accordingly, this piece recommends modest changes to the proposed standards' commentary to alert prosecutors to the true nature of the risks arising from their contact with the media and recommending prosecutor training and internal and ex-ternal accountability mechanisms to improve prosecutor performance in this area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the causes of individuals’ perceived news bias in an authoritarian press system—Singapore. We proposed two explanations for individuals’ perception of news article slant: the judgment-heuristic explanation and the attitude-influenced explanation. The judgment-heuristic explanation suggests that people's perception of media characteristics, rather than the actual news content, would affect their judgment of news bias. The attitude-influenced explanation, on the other hand, suggests that people's issue involvement and attitudes towards the issue may influence how they process news information and ultimately affect their evaluation of news article slant. Both explanations received support in this study. We also found that media source, audiences’ personal opinion, and their issue involvement would interact and produce joint effects on audiences’ judgment of news article slant. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examined the individual and combined effects of exposure to positive Latino exemplars and prototypes in the media on White audience members' attitudes about and judgments regarding Latinos in society. Although it was expected that exposure to these favorable models would promote positive evaluations of Latinos among White consumers, the extent to which one mode of presentation could be privileged in the production of more beneficial outcomes was uncertain based on existing research. These results cautiously indicate that while prototypes may offer some advantages in terms of reducing stereotyping, both exemplar- and prototype-based characterizations of positive race-related media content (alone and in combination) can positively influence consumers' perceptions of target racial/ethnic groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This literature review analyses current academic literature examining the reporting of the Rwandan genocide of the Tutsi in 1994 in the American and European media. It shows how the genocide was mischaracterised as a ‘tribal war’ and an act of spontaneous violence and primordial hatred, rather than being accurately reported as a meticulously planned and implemented political project of ethnic extermination. It examines the range of reasons for this failure to report the news accurately presented in the current literature, finding a combination of factors: racism, lack of media interest in reporting on Rwanda and Africa, a shortage of images of the genocide, an uncritical approach to government statements downplaying genocide, and the drive to report stories that gratify Western viewers' perception of the West as being morally idealistic, just, and civilised. When the truth contradicted these imperatives and prejudices academic literature shows that the media sacrificed the truth for the economic bottom line to produce media that sells. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses the proposed standard 3-1.7 in the new American Bar Association (ABA) Criminal Justice Standards for the Prosecution Function that talks about how prosecutors should communicate with the media. The author relates that under the proposal, prosecutors were prohibited to make statement that would prejudice a criminal proceeding. He considers such proposal as unrealistic, citing that media coverage heightens the audience emotion creating a substantial risk to the case.

The article explores U.S. mass media representations of Italy in the police investigation, criminal trial and conviction of U.S. student Amanda Knox for the murder of British student Meredith Kercher. The author reflects on allegations of judicial corruption and anti-Americanism by U.S. journalists, politicians, and web sites. Emphasis is given to an analysis of media sources to examine the neutrality of journalism on the case. Topics discussed include featuring experts of law or forensic side that are biased, allegations of police abuse, and historical relations between Italy and the U.S.

The article discusses the parallel between ancient Rome and the modern U.S. in the resurgence of American print journalism, political commentary, and current affairs literature in the first decade of the twenty-first century. It explores the distortion of American prejudices on Roman Republics and Empires and the modern American consciousness of Rome caricatured image which originates in Hollywood films. It also discusses the image of Rome in modern American culture.

The study aims at investigating as how Afghanistan is being represented and portrayed in two leading US magazines - Newsweek and Time. Prefatory pages of the paper shed some light on the growth of economy and media in Afghanistan followed by a brief overview of relations between the US and Afghanistan during the last decade. The contents of twenty leading articles of Newsweek and Time were analyzed which clearly depicts that the proportion of negative coverage (57.08%) was greater than the positive coverage (6.08%). Newsweek and Time mainly represented Afghanistan as an abode of Taliban and extremism, penitentiary for women, a narcotics den, a centre for Islamization, and a safe haven for Al-Qaida and Usama Bin Laden, to include a few. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The revolutionized media of today has casted its deep imprints upon the human life. The impact is wholesome on governance, politics, socio-economic operations, education and even religion that erstwhile remained a non-attraction prior to 9/11 scenario. The contemporary media, through its round-the-clock transmission/telecasts, has become powerful enough to manipulate the public opinion and behavior. Pakistan has not been an exception too, and, after induction of the private T.V. Channels free of total government control, a phenomenal transformation is in sight resulting in a powerful media impact on the public opinion. This paper focuses on in-depth analysis of this new media--public relationship and its castings on the state, political, socio-economic, cross-cultural, and religious fabric of the country. However, paucity is felt in the coverage of social and health issues. As well, personal biases of the media personnel need to be rectified with objectivity and respect for the opinion expressed by their invitees to the talk-shows and other programs. The paper concludes that the independence of contemporary media journalistic responsibility that should ensure a sustained credibility, free of traditional flag holder of religion based nationalism, as it was done during the regimes of military dictators, amongst the masses and other stake-holders, if it has to play a progressive role on modernized grounds in the nation-building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study which highlights the attempt of the Liberal-National Coalition to marginalise Australian Broadcasting Corp. (ABC) through interfering with the journalistic integrity and independence of the company. It states that a series of interviews was conducted with employees of ABC to support the mass media analysis, online archives of the company, and literature review of the author. It mentions the budget axe enforcing annual budget reduction aims to control its function.