Abstract
This issue features a forum on Authorship Transparency in an Era of Accountability. Please read the editorial essay on that topic under the forum.
To wrap up the year of 2018, we start with a pair of studies on U.S. news media’s coverage of international news from a longitudinal perspective. Rowling, Sheets, Pettit, and Gilmore’s article on U.S. broadcast TV, newspaper, and news magazine’s 5-year coverage of U.S. drone warfare deviates from the propaganda and ethnocentric paradigm in studying international news coverage. It shows the conflicting views between journalists abroad with U.S. government officials.
Riffe, Kim, and Sobel’s 50-year tracking of the New York Times’ international news coverage reveals a trend of increasing news borrowing, that is, using secondary local media sources in countries with less press freedom, despite increase in the use of its own news correspondents. There is also an increase in the use of social media as news sources in those countries.
Then, we have three articles that examine the effects of grammar, picture, and text use on news perception and an article that studies the effects of eliminating photojournalists on pictures used in newspapers. Appelman and Schmierbach’s experiment found that grammatical errors are not as important in affecting perception of news article quality as people commonly thought. Only when the article has many grammatical errors will their perception about the story’s quality be lowered. Lee and Ho’s experiment with eye-tracking shows that photographic textual frames elicit more attention and have partial amplification effect only in the context of nuclear energy, where public support was lowest, but not in nanotechnology. McIntyre, Lough, and Manzanares compared the use of pictures that are congruent with the text and not with the text in solutions journalism stories and found solution-oriented story with a congruent photo made readers feel the most positive, but surprisingly readers were most interested in the story and reported the strongest behavioral intentions when the story was paired with a neutral photo. Mortensen and Gade’s case study of photojournalism and news presentation of the Middletown (NY) Times Herald-Record before and after the newspaper laid off its entire photography staff shows that following the layoff, the paper published fewer images and presented them less prominently.
This issue also features a pair of health communication articles using different perspectives and methodologies. Sung-Un Yang’s article on the Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) outbreak in South Korea underscores the political implication of public health crisis and discusses the effect of government dialogic competency from a public relations perspective. Fan Yang, Bu Zhong, Akhil Kumar, Sy-Miin Chow, Ann Ouyang’s longitudinal social network analysis of an online health forum of irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) patients from 2008 to 2012 shows that patients were less likely to offer further social support when they kept reciprocating support only with certain individuals on the forum. Self-disclosing one’s emotions during support-seeking serves as a significant predictor for the amount of social support the support-seeker could obtain.
Journalists’ roles change when they are in different capacities and markets. Abdenour’s article combining content analysis of TV news and a survey of investigative journalists found that stations in competitive markets and owned by publicly traded corporations produced more investigative journalism. Sui, Paul, Shah, Spurlock, Chastant, and Dunaway paired local news coverage of 3,400 state legislative candidates with news data from 663 news outlets on race-related campaign coverage. They found that minority journalists only played a role in markets that have large numbers of minority audiences, media outlets, and resulted in more coverage of race-related issues.
Park and Kaye’s survey of 650 South Korean adults shows that curatorial news use on social media has a significantly positive association with political knowledge, internal political efficacy, and offline and online political participation. Curatorial news use involves evaluating the existing news, adding new values by reconstructing it, and then sharing it with other social media users.
Poroli and Huang explored the spillover effects of one university’s crisis to students from another institution in Hong Kong, applying the situational theory of problem solving.
The mental associations between the two institutions around a critical issue may be mitigated or augmented by individuals’ memories of prior similar events affecting other organizations, recollection of how past issues were handled by their organization, and trust toward their institution.
To conclude this issue is an important revelation of scientists as news sources on climate change. Based on hostile media perception and presumed media effects, Post and Ramirez’s study of German scientists show that some of them tend to overstate their scientific findings when they perceive that the news media downplay anthropogenic global warming.
Happy Reading!