Abstract
In this winter issue, we have 15 research articles featuring studies in six countries: Bangladesh, Serbia, Germany, South Korea, Israel, and the United Kingdom, in addition to the United States. We begin with two articles on advertising. Chang-Dae Ham, Jin Seong Park, and Sejin Park’s study is a large-scale national survey of U.S. adults on their product placement attitudes. They divided consumers’ attitudes toward product placement into five clusters depending on the accessibility of brand recognition and their attitudes toward advertising. Those who have lower brand accessibility and negative toward advertising are unlikely to be supportive of product placement. Joon Soo Lim’s national survey of U.S. women found the strong presence of third-person effect in online cosmetic surgery advertising on social media. Such third-person effect directly influences support for regulation and indirectly affects corrective action by providing counter information.
Measurement of organization–public relationship quality is an important task for public relations practitioners. Hongmei Shen’s study tested her new measure with a survey of student and employee samples and shows validity and reliability of the five-dimensional measure of relationship quality with trust and distrust as two distinct dimensions, in addition to the dimensions of commitment, control mutuality, and satisfaction. Rebecca McEntee, Renita Coleman, and Carolyn Yaschur’s experiment shows that to promote a social cause for public relations, conventional writing without photographs results in higher moral reasoning, vivid writing arouses empathy while photographs raises more moral importance of an issue.
How media organizations set the agenda for one another in the current online environment is intriguing. Using big data analysis, Chris Vargo and Lei Guo analyzed the relationships of the content in traditional media’s websites, partisan media sites, and emerging news media sites and show partisan media sites’ strong role in setting the media agenda online. The agenda-setting role of different media varies by issue with traditional elite media sets agenda on health, while emerging news media were the most powerful in setting the agenda of civil liberties, poverty, and religion. Ashik Shafi’s study of agenda-setting in Bangladesh comparing 10 issues confirms that obtrusiveness of the issue determines the agenda-setting power of news media in a developing country. News media do not enjoy high credibility, so people only use it for issues that they don’t have experience with.
Cornelia Mothes proposed a “biased objectivity model” of information value judgment for journalists and citizens. Her quasi-experiment in Germany shows that both perceived objectivity and the statement’s consistency with the participants’ attitudes toward the issue increase the information value in news report. Information that is discrepant with journalists and citizens is less likely to be covered and disseminated. Daniel Riffe and Jesse Abdenour’s replication of a 1997 study of city hall reporters shows that reporters see lower local stations’ commitment to city government reporting especially among the older reporters. Zvi Reich and Yigal Godler’s recreation of item by item work processes and reasoning behind hundreds of individual news reports produced across Israeli print, television, radio, and online news outlets by Israeli journalists shows how journalists decide when they will do more legwork to cross-check the evidence. The leading motivation for engaging in legwork turned out to be knowledge related, rather than related to medium or type of news event.
We also have a pair of articles discussing representations of minorities in U.S. media. Nicole Maurantonio’s critical analysis of the killing of Walter Scott case and subsequent arrest of the police officer shows the role of the news media in mystifying the deeds of the White mayor and police chief as heroes. News media perpetuate the White savior myth in postracial America and only treat tragedies as isolated incidents. Adina Schneeweis and Katherine A. Foss’s study of the representation of Gypsies in 70 years in reality and fictional television shows no change of the stereotype and that they are still portrayed as thieves and tramps and the group continues to be misunderstood. The Gypsies are depicted as closed-off to non-Gypsies with their traditional costumes.
Haeyeop Song, Jaemin Jung, and Youngju Kim’s experiment proposed a theoretical model of how perceived news overload results in news avoidance which leads to the acceptance of news curation by news aggregators. The news fatigue and analysis paralysis explains the Korean Internet users’ news avoidance behavior.
Ivanka Pjesivac’s national study of Serbians compared the importance of cultural factor and perceived performance of the press in predicting their trust in news media. She found that low trust in Serbian news media is highly attributable to the perceived corruption in news media, not just because of the general low trust level among the Serbian people.
Last but not least, we conclude this issue with a pair of media history articles which have important contemporary implications. Perry Parks’s study of how the New York Times and the Washington Post helped shape Rachel Carson as an environmentalist icon through promoting her book, Silent Spring, in the past 50 years despite the fact that she did not found the environmentalist movement. It helps theorize collective memory by showing that social understandings are solidified not just through considered argumentation but also through the minor, routinized processes of compression and repetition involved in daily news production.
Gabriele Balbi’s historical study explains the British Marconi Company’s decision of resisting and slowing down of the development of one-to-many wireless radio in favor of point-to-point telegraph/telephone in the first 20 years of the 20th century by political, economic, and technical motivations. How a communication technology is constructed affects the future direction of the technology.
Happy Reading!