Journal of Communication Inquiry

At the turn of the century, data from the 2000 U.S. Census announced an emergent population of 35 million Latina/os, and focused the attention of journalists, media producers, politicians, and marketing demographers on Latina/o individuals and Latinidad as a coherent structure of feeling that might unite a disparate group who share a common ancestry. Since then, Latina/os have garnered an extraordinary amount of attention from cultural producers and audiences alike. This essay conducts a dual analysis of the textual and extratextual features of Americanos: Latino Life in the United States/La Vida Latina en Los Estados Unidos, a coproduction of Olmos Productions, Time Warner, and the Smithsonian Institution, that presents a generous vision of both Latina/os and America. While Americanos does indeed display affirmative representations of Latina/o life, the conditions of its production yield a text that adheres to the dominant ideologies of multiculturalism and the American Dream. By articulating Latinidad without oppositional politics, Americanos cannot fully address the relations of power that define both lived experience of Latinidad and minority representation in the United States.

This article is an attempt to explore the issues of online representations of orphans in China and India in the intersection of power, voice, and placement. Textual and visual representations of orphans at www.homeofhopeindia.org and www.homeofhope.org are analyzed using the theoretical frameworks of voicings, Whiteness, and the colonial (technological) gaze. We examine how online networks are spaces for discursive reproduction of existing offline hegemonies. We pay particular attention to the reproduction and representation of the so-called voiceless Other in online settings.

In the 1940s, the advertising agency, N.W. Ayer, created for then-client, DeBeers Consolidated Mines, a campaign that wedded the values of patriotism, American citizenship, and luxury consumerism through advertising copy. The text and accompanying images touted what they termed “Fighting Diamonds.” While most American military and labor propaganda of World War II encouraged civilians to sacrifice, ration, and save, “Fighting Diamonds” ads assured would-be buyers that their wartime gemstone diamond and jewelry splurges supported the Allied Forces. This article examines the connections between American military recruitment history and DeBeers’ “Fighting Diamond” advertisements via a series of archival materials from the N.W. Ayer and Son Advertising Agency Records at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History Archives Center. I argue that “Fighting Diamonds” were part of a growing trend within advertisement propaganda that positioned American political participation and civic duties increasingly as consumer decisions.

This article examines the news behaviors and attitudes of teenagers, an understudied demographic in the research on youth and news media. Based on interviews with 61 racially diverse high school students, it discusses how adolescents become informed about current events and why they prefer certain news formats to others. The results reveal changing ways news information is being accessed, new attitudes about what it means to be informed, and a youth preference for opinionated rather than objective news. This does not indicate that young people disregard the basic ideals of professional journalism but, rather, that they desire more authentic renderings of them.