Source attribution and perceptual effects.

Following a string of recent controversies involving journalists and their sources, public awareness in the UK of sourcing and sourcing practices has increased. There are, however, only a handful of studies that have considered how source attribution may affect audiences’ evaluation of the quality or objectivity of news. This paper examines the influence of source attribution upon perceptions of news credibility. It reports the initial findings of a media experiment designed to test the effect of attributing information to different institutional sources on two component measures of credibility: participants’ assessment of the believability and accuracy of news. Using a between-subjects design (n=147), participants were presented with one of four versions of the same news story, manipulated to attribute key information to different institutional sources. The data indicates that the effect of source attribution, as a subtle or nuanced variation in content, is limited and that attitudinal characteristics are more significant determinants of audiences’ perceptions of news credibility. Specifically, the findings show significant relationships between trust in the media, concern over the issue reported and participants’ assessment of the believability and accuracy of news

AN EVALUATION OF ETHNICITY AND LINGUISTIC BACKGROUNDS AS WIC FOOD SELECTION DETERMINANTS

The federally funded Women, Infants, and Children (WIC) program issues redeemable food instruments (or vouchers) to low-income mothers and their small children who demonstrate nutritional need. Not all such food instruments are actually redeemed. Both ethnicity and home language preferences were found to be significantly correlated with individualsÂ’' WIC food instrument redemption likelihood. However, these correlations provided little indication that any food type (except cheese for Asians) is more or less culturally acceptable to any particular ethnic or language group. Regardless of ethnicity, persons who show English as their family language preference tend to have lower food instrument redemption rates than do those who prefer to speak any other language, at least among family members. This redemption rate disparity indicates that, to induce participants to follow dietary guidelines consistent with general public health goals, even a food assistance program, such as WIC, needs to employ some marketing techniques. Use of the English language should be a major consideration in segmenting WIC markets.Food Security and Poverty,

AN ILLUSTRATION OF THE NEED FOR AN INTERNATIONAL MARKETING PROFILE DATABASE: THE CASE OF EXPORTED U.S. APPLES

International Relations/Trade, Marketing,

The role of a local newspaper after disaster: an intrinsic case study of Ishinomaki, Japan.

The city of Ishinomaki in Miyagi prefecture was devastated by the tsunami that struck Japan’s North East Coast on March 11, 2011. Drawing on fieldwork conducted in Ishinomaki, which included interviews with senior journalists from the city’s two local newspapers, the Ishinomaki Hibi Shimbun and the Ishinomaki Kahoku, this paper presents an intrinsic case study of the role a local newspaper in Ishinomaki after the Great East Japan Disaster. The evidence reveals that in the immediate aftermath of the tsunami journalists recognised how their newspaper could serve the immediate information needs of the local community by providing essential lifeline information, describing a duty to report, despite the operational difficulties that their newspapers faced. In the longer-term recovery phase, interviewees acknowledged how their newspapers have attempted to communicate a message of hope to the city and provide an alternative perspective to the national media, which sometimes gave a false impression of the state of Ishinomaki’s recovery. This paper offers some insights into journalistic role conceptions, illustrating how journalists from the two newspapers embraced the role of information-disseminator (Weaver & Wilhoit, 1991) after the disaster, and also identifies avenues for further research

“Cultural exceptionalism” in the global exchange of (mis)information around Japan’s responses to Covid-19

Despite reporting early cases, Japan’s infection rates of Covid-19 have remained low. This commentary considers how a discourse of cultural exceptionalism dispersed across the networked global public sphere as an explanation for Japan’s low case count. It also discusses the consequences for wider public understanding of evidence-based public-health interventions to reduce the transmission of the coronavirus