Deciding What's News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time

THE PRESS AND FOREIGN POLICY' IT IS a defect of some of the studies of the diplomatic background of the Great War that they tend to ignore the influence on pre-war diplomacy of public opinion in general and of the press in particular. Based primarily on official documents such studies unconsciously tend to overemphasize the parts played by the leaders with whose activities the documents are so largely concerned and to neglect some of the less obvious forces that affected the course of events. The influence of the press, it is true, can never be measured accurately. \"No diviniiig rod can locate it,\" says Miss Salmon, \"no plummet sound its depth, no instrument of precision measure it, no astronomer compute its orbit.\"2 And yet that influence in pre-war Europe was very real and very considerable. Professor Fay goes so far as to list \"the poisoning of public opinion by the newspaper press in all the great countries\"3 as one of the chief underlying causes of the war. If the influence of the press cannot be exactly determined, however, it can at least be roughly estimated; and even where no attempt is made to estimate influence, a kniowledge of newspaper views on questions of foreign policy is of assistance in clarifying the atmosphere out of which the Great WYar came.

The Press and Foreign Policy

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom by Evgeny Morozov New York: Public Affairs, 2011 409 pages $16.99 [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] In January 2010, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave a highly touted speech on Internet freedom in which she stated, "The freedom to connect is like the freedom of assembly, only in cyberspace. It allows individuals to get online, come together, and hopefully cooperate. Once you're on the Internet, you don't need to be a tycoon or a rock star to have a huge impact on society." Evgeny Morozov, in his book The Net Delusion, takes great issue with the implication, however, that the so-called "Arab Spring" and "Twitter Revolution" were caused by unfettered access to the Internet. Instead, Morozov, a research academic, provides a cautionary tale about what he argues is any attempt to establish a monocausal relationship to meaningful political change (especially when that single focus is information technology). The book opens with a discussion of cyber-utopianism and Internet-centrism--mind-sets that focus on the positive "emancipatory" aspects of Internet communication while ignoring the downsides. The argument throughout centers on nation-state policy, or lack thereof, that attacks the "wicked" problem of authoritarianism by, as a colleague of mine has dubbed it, "wiring the world." Morozov, expectantly, but importantly, cites the hedonistic world portrayed by Huxley and the "Big Brother" world of Orwell to consider both the proactive and reactive approaches to Internet freedom by authoritarian regimes. Interestingly, he notes that there is often a mix of both. Such regimes certainly use the anonymity and openness of the Internet to spy on their people and shutdown undesirable sites. But there is also a subtle approach that belies the jackboot on the keyboard methodology. While China may be known more for suppressing the Internet and for employing the masses to counter antiregime rhetoric, Russia imposes no formal Internet censorship. It relies on entertainment (porn is specifically cited) to soothe the masses, assuming that given options for political discourse and anything else, most opt for "anything else." Hitler would understand. And in nations where freedom is not widely understood from a western perspective, any bit of additional mindless diversion may be viewed as liberty by the populace. Perhaps most importantly, Morozov rails against social media determinism as driving the end of authoritarianism, labeling it "an intellectually impoverished, lazy way to study the past, understand the present, and predict the future." He does not dismiss the value of Facebook and Twitter to quickly mobilize like-minded individuals. He notes as well that the development of that very like-mindedness is complex and potentially can be manipulated by authoritarian governments using the same Internet freedom. …

The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom

Deciding What's News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek and Time, Herbert Gans. Vintage Books, New York (1980), 393 pp., $5.95

insistent quest for the meaning of things. The question is one that faces "everyman" from the child's first awareness of the mystery of life to the adult's apprehension of the mystery of death. As one existential writer put it, "I know only two things?one, that I will be dead someday, two, that I am not dead now. The only question is what shall I do be tween those two points." Does nihilistic literature and philosophy have the answer?wallowing in nothingness? Are the Madison Avenue thought controllers right in their claim that the time for the individual has passed and that we should conform to collectivities because there is safety in numbers? Shall we follow the "beat generation" and the "angry young men" who say we should conform to non-conformity in the name of pure rebelliousness and non-constructive creativity? Or should we just capitu late with the "positive thinkers" who say that all this concern about what things mean is too nerve-wracking, and that the problems of life can best be met by taking existential tranquilizers in the form of sugar coated mottos? The way in which contemporary man is clutching at straws in his search for meaning is symptomatic both of the depth of his concern and of the inadequacy of the answers which are emerging. In the material which follows, I will develop this theme primarily by elaboration of relevant material on the problems of reality and value, and the psy chology of perception and personality. Since the search for meaning ultimately implies an effort to arrive at something irreducible, it seems reasonable to open the inquiry with the question of knowledge and reality.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/27827428.pdf

The search for meaning.

This study evaluates the use of hyperlinks in audience discussions on the Facebook Pages of two partisan cable news organizations: the liberal-leaning Rachel Maddow Show and the conservative O'Reilly Factor, to investigate to what extent linking might intensify partisan political discussion or infuse a variety of perspectives into online communication. The results suggest that these Facebook audiences show a preference for a small group of information resources; furthermore, the two audiences shared an even smaller number of information resources in common. The findings support previous research that suggests a relatively small number of information resources receive most of the news audience traffic, and provide some support for other studies that indicate that partisan political discussions on social media are segregated by political orientation.

Open media or echo chamber: the use of links in audience discussions on the Facebook Pages of partisan news organizations

Since The New York Times published Snow Fall in 2012, media organizations have produced a growing body of similar work characterized by the purposeful integration of multimedia into long-form journalism. In this article, we argue that just as the literary journalists of the 1960s attempted to write the nonfiction equivalent of the great American novel, journalists of the 2010s are using digital tools to animate literary journalism techniques. To evaluate whether this emerging genre represents a new era of literary journalism and to what extent it incorporates new techniques of journalistic storytelling, we analyze 50 long-form multimedia journalism packages published online from August 2012 to December 2013. We argue that this new wave of literary journalism is characterized by executing literary techniques through multiple media and represents a gateway to linear storytelling in the hypertextual environment of the Web.

/pdf/the-digital-animation-of-literary-journalism-2ngstxxap4.pdf

The digital animation of literary journalism

Manovich (2001) describes the changes that result from translating an established cultural product into a new technology as ‘transcoding’. This study investigates the form that the journalism of The New York Times takes when transcoded to the Web by evaluating multimedia news packages published on nytimes.com from 2000–2008. The number and sophistication of the multimedia packages grew over time to include new interfaces that incorporated elements native to digital environments such as hypertextual links, interactivity, elements borrowed from digital games and social media tools. Most packages were produced as sidebars to stories published in the newspaper, suggesting that multimedia was used as an extension of the written word, not as a primary storytelling format.

/pdf/transcoding-the-news-an-investigation-into-multimedia-327nw04123.pdf

Transcoding the news: An investigation into multimedia journalism published on nytimes.com 2000–2008:

Social media have been theorized as being able to break the press' monopoly on agenda-setting, giving the public greater influence over which stories are covered in the news. This study uses a cross-lagged panel analysis to determine to what extent audience conversations on The Rachel Maddow Show's Facebook Page may have influenced the selection of issues covered in the TV broadcast. Results show a positive correlation between stories discussed on Facebook and the subsequent airing of similar stories on TV. The evidence also suggests that social media may enable many factors that influence both the media and the public agendas.

Does Audience Participation on Facebook Influence the News Agenda? A Case Study of The Rachel Maddow Show

Conventional wisdom dictates that the future of newspaper journalism is online. But what does this new form of journalism look like? Using the Web site of the New York Times as an exploratory case study, the author conducted a content analysis on 45 multimedia news packages published between 2000 and 2007, coding for narrative qualities, news values, and media format in an effort to begin to understand the emerging characteristics of multimedia Web journalism. The packages in this exploratory study demonstrated little of the hypertextual structures defined by theorists of the Web, perhaps reflecting the transitional nature of the period. First-person narrative, by both journalists and nonjournalists, was the most common point of view. More than one fourth of the multimedia packages consisted of first-person accounts by nonjournalists accompanied by traditional stories written by reporters published in the print edition of the New York Times, presenting an interesting model for professional–citizen collabo...

Susan Jacobson

Papers

Open media or echo chamber: the use of links in audience discussions on the Facebook Pages of partisan news organizations

The digital animation of literary journalism

Transcoding the news: An investigation into multimedia journalism published on nytimes.com 2000–2008:

Does Audience Participation on Facebook Influence the News Agenda? A Case Study of The Rachel Maddow Show

Emerging Models of Multimedia Journalism: A Content Analysis of Multimedia Packages Published on nytimes.com