Journal of Communication最新文献

Collective action and community ecology theories frame this study of longitudinal interorganizational networks in Croatia during the country's political transition. As time progresses toward political stability, grass-roots organizing activities shift through participation in new networks. Although engaged cross-sector communication was important in early stages of the transformation, homophilous partnering emerged as the system stabilized. System stability left room for organizations to exit the collective action network but with costs associated with centralized organizing. Over time, organizations embodied roles as ideological leaders, collective action network leaders, and within-sector network partners. We offer a unique contribution to community ecology and collective action theories with a communication-centered framework that emphasizes the nature of communication in interorganizational networks over a 4-year period.

Influential research on comparative media systems identifies distinctive models according to which certain countries—particularly advanced democracies—share key features in their journalistic cultures. Revisionist literature has not only emphasized the limitations of such models, but also highlighted the hybridization of journalistic cultures elsewhere. This article tests the hybridization thesis, analyzing the presence of six journalistic roles in print news from 19 countries (N = 34,514). Our findings show patterns of multilayered hybridization in the performance of professional roles across and within advanced, transitional, and nondemocratic countries, with journalistic cultures displaying different types of hybridity that do not resemble either existing ideal media system typologies or conventional assumptions about political or regional clusters. The implications of these findings for future studies are discussed.

Researchers have started to demonstrate that media exposure to outgroups can reduce prejudice. However, in contexts of segregation a bias to select ingroup-rich media might hinder exposure and prevent those positive effects. We conducted a survey study (n = 1,095) in South Africa, a context with a notorious history of racial separation and persisting informal segregation. In accordance with the social identity gratification approach and social cognitive theory, respondents showed group-related selection biases. Respondents who identified more strongly with their ingroup, who perceived more distance towards outgroups, and who had less direct contact showed stronger biases. The findings remind us that those who would potentially benefit the most from outgroup exposure might also be those who are least likely to be exposed.

How human beings think about, talk about, and organize around sexuality is changing. Growing social legitimization for sexual minority relationships and a more fluid social understanding of sexual identities has shifted how we bound “normal” sexuality. In the workplace, these shifting norms affect employees of all sexual identities who must make sense of new policies and complex daily practices. This paper introduces the concept of co-sexuality, the push-and-pull process of communicatively organizing around sexuality. Using this concept, we take a grounded theory approach to exploring how employees of various sexualities and in different occupations understand “normal” sexuality and subsequently organize around it. Ultimately, participants described being silenced or silencing another to maintain sexual “norms” at work.

Media literacy interventions partly aim at preventing undesirable media effects at a later point of time. However, longitudinal research on the interaction between media literacy education and media effects is lacking. In this longitudinal study among 1,947 13–25-year-olds, we started to address this lacuna by examining the potential of porn literacy education at schools to attenuate the longitudinal relationship between exposure to sexually explicit Internet material (SEIM) and views of women as sex objects. A two-way interaction effect emerged: The relationship between SEIM and sexist views became weaker, the more users had learned from porn literacy education. No gender or age differences occurred. This study thus provides some first evidence for the role of media education in reducing undesirable media effects.

This study explores how news messages carrying parts of the populist ideology contribute to a polarization of public opinion about populism. It combines a content analysis of news coverage on two policy areas (N = 7,119 stories) with a two-wave panel survey (N = 2,338) in four European metropolitan regions (Berlin, Paris, London, and Zurich). In three regions, unopposed media messages with a populist stance have a conditional effect on populist attitudes that depends on prior convictions. A higher dose of exposure to populist news coverage enhances both prior agreement and disagreement with populism. Although the observed interaction patterns vary between regions, the general picture suggests that populist messages in the news foster polarization between public support and disapproval of populism.

The growing emphasis on collective action raises new questions for research and practice in communication for development and social change. What actors drive processes of collective action? What are the communication features of their interventions? What type of social change processes do they enhance? What evidence demonstrates the impact of collective action processes? What theoretical frameworks inform our understanding of collective action and social change? What is the role of communication scholarship in this context? In this article, we address these questions, review the contexts of contemporary transformation and key debates in communication for development and social change, and propose a research agenda for an interdisciplinary field of inquiry.

Scholars have long observed that presidential communication about a marginalized group can help shape that group's reality. Yet most analyses of such communication focus on a relatively small number of texts, making it difficult to identify important changes over time and analyze factors that might explain those changes. The present study proposes an analytic framework that specifies 4 measurable parameters of presidential communication about marginalized groups, as well as 4 explanatory factors. We use this framework to analyze the census of presidents' formal communications about the LGBT community. Results highlight presidents' limited communicative engagement with the LGBT community and the roles that political party, rhetorical context, public opinion, and sociocultural touchstones play in explaining presidential communication about this important group.