Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly

It is well documented that news media’s coverage of social unrest is sensationalized; however, our knowledge is limited in understanding how the intersection of race with depictions of social unrest influences emotional responses to this content. By applying assumptions from the protest paradigm and intergroup emotions theory, the current set of studies experimentally examines this relationship. Results indicate that racialized news images of dramatized social unrest provoke heightened, complex group-based affective responses that vary based on aspects of psychological group identification among audiences. These outcomes suggest that journalistic practices, whether or not intentionally, may exacerbate race relations regarding social change.

This study provides a clearer understanding of how audience members’ race influences their media choices. It finds that in today’s overwhelmingly negative media environment, people prefer reading negative stories about persons in their own racial group over stories about racial out-group members. This suggests social movements seeking to change the attitudes of people of different races using media (e.g., Black Lives Matter) might not be as successful as those in the past (e.g., Civil Rights Movement). Today, people tend to ignore such news when there is other bad news that affects people in their own racial group.

This research examines the distinctiveness of two components of identification with media characters: cognitive and affective. It also explores how these components are differentially affected by the viewing environment. In an experiment, Jewish and Arab Israelis watched a clip depicting the Israeli–Palestinian conflict with either one or two Jewish or Arab co-viewers. As hypothesized, these components of identification loaded on different factors and showed different relationships when referring to in-group and out-group characters. Moreover, the Jewish participants showed more affective identification with the Jewish protagonist when watching with two Arabs, which, in turn, affected their attitudes about the in-group.

Is announcing a commitment to diversity enough to activate attitudes toward diversity initiatives? And what are the spillover effects of these programs? To address these questions, we conduct an experiment imbedded in a nationally representative survey of non-Hispanic White Americans (n = 1,519). We inform respondents that the White actor who plays Captain America will be replaced, while varying whether there is a reference to a diversity initiative and whether the replacement is White or Black. We find that reference to diversity initiatives on its own has no effect but the action of displaying diversity affects marketplace preferences and attitudes toward diversity initiatives.

Scholars have previously conceptualized the Black press as print publications that are owned and managed by African Americans, targeting a Black audience and advocating for the Black community. This study investigates how online producers of Black news are troubling previous definitions of the Black press. Websites that target African American readers but are owned by White media companies and Black-targeted websites that primarily produce entertainment news create ambiguity. I conclude that African American ownership and advocacy are no longer requirements for the Black press and that entertainment content is often a relevant and important component of the digital Black press.

One of the most potent ways to communicate stigma is associating a group with peril. In this study, we examine how different forms of peril representations influence specific patterns of interpersonal inclinations. We explore how key social perceptions of group warmth and competence may serve as explanatory mediating mechanisms. Although African Americans and Arab-Muslims similarly share close mediated associations with threat, an empirical examination of how interaction intentions toward both groups differ under congruent conditions is warranted. Results demonstrate support for expectations pertaining to Arab-Muslims, though not African Americans, revealing the complicated nature of threat-influenced antipathy toward these groups.

This study examined political advertisements placed by the Russian-based Internet Research Agency on Facebook and Instagram. Advertisements were computationally analyzed for four rhetorical techniques presumed to elicit anger and fear: negative identity-based language, inflammatory language, obscene language, and threatening language. Congruent with extant research on arousing emotional responses, advertising clickthrough rates were positively associated with inflammatory, obscene, and threatening language. Surprisingly, however, a negative relationship between clickthrough rate and the use of negative identity-based language was observed. Additional analyses showed that the advertisements were engaged with at rates that exceed industry benchmarks, and that clickthrough rates increased over time.

Scandal severity may affect public perceptions of both scandalous political actors and news sources reporting political misconduct. Yet, research that has empirically tested these assumptions is lacking. Drawing from theory on anchoring effects, the results of two experimental studies conducted using mediation analyses revealed that severe scandals hurt politicians (candidate evaluation) and weaken voting intentions. Although non-severe scandals have no such effects, they increased news consumers’ exaggerated scandalization perceptions and indirectly degraded news source evaluations. Severe scandals had no effect on the news source. Implications for the coverage of political scandals are discussed.

This article proposes comparing nonprofit news organizations that prioritize social welfare goals with the hybrid organizational form that mixes the institutional logics of charities and business enterprises: the Social Enterprise. The institutional logic comprises organizing templates, patterns of actions and values. These Social News Enterprises (SNEs) are analyzed as hybrids mixing the institutional logics of commercial, public, and alternative news media. Financed by donations and the revenue from services, SNEs engage in public, investigative, and explanatory journalism. Normative behavioral principles of SNEs are used to compare the impact-based model of ProPublica with the growth-focused model of The Texas Tribune.

Crowdcoding, a method that outsources “coding” tasks to numerous people on the internet, has emerged as a popular approach for annotating texts and visuals. However, the performance of this approach for analyzing social media data in the context of journalism and mass communication research has not been systematically assessed. This study evaluated the validity and efficiency of crowdcoding based on the analysis of 4,000 tweets about the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The results show that compared with the traditional quantitative content analysis, crowdcoding yielded comparably valid results and was superior in efficiency, but was more expensive under most circumstances.