Context clues: News audiences and their higher valuation of contextualist journalistic roles
Paper accepted to the Journalism Studies division of the International Communication Association 2020 conference, Gold Coast..
Abstract: This study explores the news audiences’ perceptions of journalistic roles, in particular the contextualist role, through a U.S. nationally-representative survey. As members of the public lose trust and interest in the media, some outlets are turning to forms of reporting like constructive/solutions journalism to provide a greater context to news consumers. Our survey shows that the American public values such reporting, and even places its functions above many of the others traditionally assigned to journalism.
Cementing Their Heroes: Historical Newspaper Coverage of Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Confederate Monuments
Little, Alexia (Grady M.A.) (Forthcoming). Cementing Their Heroes: Historical Newspaper Coverage of Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Century Confederate Monuments. Journalism History. Abstract: Following continued conflicts about Confederate monuments in American society, this study explores Civil War memory encapsulated in newspaper coverage of the initial construction and dedication of four Confederate monument. Discourse and narrative analyses of […]
The power of political journalists as deception detectors and how politicians reactivate voters’ truth-default
Abstract: Journalists serve as deception detectors for voters. Sometimes politicians refute journalists’ assertions. How do voters discern whom to believe? Based on cognitive sequences posited by truth-default theory (TDT), experiments tested voters’ reactions to alleged deceptiveness in a political news interview. In Study 1 (N = 209) perceptions of a politician being truthfully or falsely […]
