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DOCUMENT RESUME ED 423 568 CS 509 912 TITLE Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (81st, Baltimore, Maryland, August 5-8, 1998). Mass Communication and Society. INSTITUTION Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. PUB DATE 1998-08-00 NOTE 545p.; For other sections of these Proceedings, see CS 509 905-922. PUB TYPE Collected Works Proceedings (021) Reports Research (143) EDRS PRICE MF02/PC22 Plus Postage. DESCRIPTORS Agenda Setting; Athletics; Case Studies; College Students; Computer Mediated Communication; Higher Education; *Internet; *Journalism; Mass Media Effects; *Mass Media Role; *Mass Media Use; Media Research; *Newspapers; Periodicals; Presidential Campaigns (United States); *Television IDENTIFIERS Opinion Polls; Religious Movements; Talk Shows; Television News ABSTRACT The Mass Communication and Society section of the Proceedings contains the following 19 papers: "Talk Radio as Forum and Companion: Listener Attitudes and Uses and Gratifications in Austin, Texas" (John Beatty); "'Willingness to Censor': Developing a Quantitative Measurement across Speech Categories and Types of Media" (Jennifer L. Lambe); "Can Social Comparison Theory Explain Fascination with TV Talk Shows?" (Cynthia M. Frisby); "Answering the Critics: Are News Councils Out to Get the Media" (Jennifer L. Lambe, Genelle I. Belmas, and William A. Babcock); "Journalistic and Humanist Approaches: Movie Reviews in 'The New Yorker' and 'Entertainment Weekly'" (James Kendrick); "An Alternative to the Impasse: The Grassroots Approach to Cope with Media Violence Issues" (Hoaming Denis Wu and Lois A. Boynton); "The Agenda-Setting Process of a Daily Newspaper: A Case Study" (Elizabeth Evenson Williams); "The Use and Abuse of Media-Sponsored Opinion Polls in Two Presidential Campaigns: A Critical Analysis of Network TV News and Six Prestige Print Media" (Dennis T. Lowry and Josephine Nio); "Participation in Community Organizations and Consumption of TV and Newspaper News" (Esther Thorson and Glenn Leshner); "Print Mass Media Coverage of the Promise Keepers: The First Five Years" (Dane Claussen); "Daily Newspaper Editors' Audience Construction Routines: A Case Study" (Randall S. Sumpter); "The Value of the Journalistic Identity on the World Wide Web" (Ekaterina Ognianova); "Social Reality Effects of the Mass Media in Japan: Media Coverage in the 'Aum Shinrikyo' Case" (Shinichi Saito and Miki Kawabata); "In the Olympic Tradition: Sportscasters' Language and Female Athleticism" (Lisa M. Weidman); "Surviving the FCC: The Legacy of UHFs" (Kathryn B. Campbell); "Agenda-Setting and Spanish Cable News" (Salma I. Ghanem and Wayne Wanta); "Do Social Norms and Media Coverage Influence Illicit Drug Trade among College Students? Implications for Media Practitioners and Drug Educators" (Alyse R. Gotthoffer); "Perceptions of Traditional American Journalists toward the Internet as a News Source: A Critical Approach" (Thomas E. +++++ ED423568 Has Multi-page SFR---Level=1 +++++ Ruggiero); and "Auto Elite and Agenda-Setting: How the Auto Elite Set the Auto Trade Policy Agenda?" (Kuang-Kuo Chang). (CR) ******************************************************************************** * Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made * * from the original document. * ******************************************************************************** PROCEEDINGS OF THE ANNUAL MEETING OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR EDUCATION IN JOURNALISM AND MASS COMMUNICATION _(81st, Baltimore, MD, August 5-8, 1998).MASS COMMUNICATION AND SOCIETY. U.S. DEPARTMENT OF EDUCATION Office ot Educational Research and Improvement PERMISSION TO REPRODUCE AND EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES INFORMATION DISSEMINATE THIS MATERIAL HAS CENTER (ERIC) BEEN GRANTED BY document has been reproduced as "hisreceived from the person or organization onginating it. 0 Minor changes have been made toimprove reproduction Quality. this docu- Points of view or opinions stated in TO THE EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES ment do not necessarily representofficial OEM position or policy. INFORMATION CENTER (ERIC) 1 BEST COPYAVAILABLE TALK RADIO AS FORUM AND COMPANION: LISTENER ATTITUDES AND USES AND GRATIFICATIONS IN AUSTIN, TEXAS John Beatty Assistant Professor Department of Mass Communications University of North Carolina at Pembroke Old Main 232 PO Box 1510, Pembroke, NC 28372-1510 (910) 521-6598 [email protected] Paper presented to the Mass Communication and Society Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication annual conference, Baltimore, Md., August, 1998. 3 Talk Radio as Forum and Companion: Listener attitudes and uses and gratifications in Austin, Texas A survey of talk radio listeners found little support for a companion function. Seeking companionship was wealdy related to liking the host, and to parasocial interaction but it did predict a positive attitude to government. Forum gratifications acted with liking the host in what might be called "community information"-seeking. Those seeking such information see talk radio as a town meetring and do not see talk as mean-spirited despite preferring to hear others' points of view. 4 Talk radio as forum and companion Talk Radio as Forum and Companion: Listener attitudes and uses and gratifications in Austin, Texas There are those who say talk radio is dangerous, and I am probably the sort of listener they have in mind. I am addicted. I only consume the good stuff, mind you, and there isn't that much of it around; but when I fmd it my days are rearranged, my friendships, work and study put aside, and for weeks I binge on tirade and debate (Margolis, 1990; pp. 6-7). I have recently talked with lots of talk radio buffs, and it seems to me that people are getting tired of listening to angry middle-aged white guys ranting about the latest headlines and shouting down similarly disgruntled callers (Herndon, 1994; p. Onward 17). America is awash in talk. Loud talk. Angry talk. Conspirational talk. Raunchy talk, smug talk, self-serving talk, funny talk, rumor-mongering talk. A cacophony of chat fills the airwaves from coast to coast, from dawn to dusk and beyond, all talk all the time (Kurtz, 1996; p.3). Love it or hate it, talk radio came of age in the 1990s and some say it may already be on the decline (Paige et al., 1998) as analysts rushed to understand the phenomenon. The number of news/talk stations rose from 308 in 1989 to more than 1,330 at the end of 1997 (Paige et al., 1998). It has been the subject of recent books by a critical theorist (Munson, 1993), a television critic (Kurtz, 1996) and at least two talk show hosts (Scott, 1996; Laufer, 1995). It has been analyzed in several national surveys (Kohut et al., 1993; Benchmark Company, 1994; Adams Research, 1995; Cappella et al., 1996) and in numerous research papers. Cappella et al. (1996) found that 18 percent of the adult population reports listening to at least one call-in political talk radio show at least twice a week. In Austin, Texas, two news talk stations have a combined rating of 8.1 percent in the fall 1996 Arbitron survey (Herndon, 1996), with several other popular talk programs on music stations, often in morning drive time. Much of the analysis of talk radio points out the contradictory nature of the medium. It is reviled for its negativity, even described as an unhealthy addiction, yet it also is seen as a powerful political force only recently unleashed. It has been credited with stopping a mass transit tax proposal in Denver (Green, 1997), and, at least temporarily, a proposed Congressional pay raise, and cited as a factor in: Zoe Baird (Page and Tannenbaum, 1996) and 1 Talk radio as forum and companion Kimba Wood's unsuccessful nominations (Kurtz, 1996); the Exxon boycott; the backlash against gays in the military; the cellular phone/cancer controversy; Clinton's health care plan; and the "three strikes and you're out" crime bill provision which was co-authored by a talk- show host (Wright, 1995). Rush Limbaugh rose to become an important figure in Republican politics and in 1993 President Clinton held a briefing on health care for 200 talk show hosts at the White House (Laufer, 1995). Can all this be true of a medium that, for all the urgent attention afforded it, has been around for about 70 years and may be no more than an electronic version of the town crier, the newsboy (Burd, 1988), the lyceum movement and women's magazines (Munson, 1993)? Those who react with alarm are mostly authors and critics who are reacting to reports of on-air interactions and self-promotional claims of talk show programs, rather than examining the shows themselves, or audience members' interpretations. This paper uses the audience in an attempt to evaluate the role of talk radio in society. It is motivated by the suspicion that much of what is claimed about talk radio is overblown, overly emotional and overly selective. Review of the Literature Some histories of talk radio isolate a psycho-social predisposition said to derive from the alienating, monolithic conditions of modernity the talk show as therapist for the lonely, and as creator of social networks (Bronstein, 1983), although Bick (1987) denies that it is anything more than another form of mass communication, claiming that "the very existence of the radio transmitter belies interpreting talk radio formats as interpersonal communication" (p. 109). Talk radio provides a format that argues strongly for the falseness of the mass/interpersonal dichotomy simply on the face of its simultaneous combination of mass media with a one-on-one conversation, to say nothing of the interpersonal uses that audiences make of the format, including the possibility of parasocial interactions (Horton and Wohl, 1956). Clearly, there are elements of interpersonal communication in talk radio programming and listening. The parasocial and interpersonal functions of talk radio are labeled "Companion" 2 6 Talk radio as forum and companion based on the paper "Talk Radio Forum and Companion" (Tramer and Jeffres, 1983). Dependency theory (Ball-Rokeach and De Fleur, 1976) could address the social end of this factor, and parasocial interactions (Horton and Wohl, 1956) the more psychological.