FINDING THEIR PLACE IN JOURNALISM Newspaper Sports Journalists' Professional “Problems”

This study examined sports journalists' beliefs about the problems in their field. It used a combination of a standardized survey and in-depth follow-up interviews. The sports journalists saw their concerns as distinctly different from those of journalists in other news departments. Still, there were areas of shared concern, including professionalism and economic and job-related issues. Open-ended interviews with a representative sample of the sports editors highlighted the interrelatedness of various problems. There were, for example, close relations between problems connected to content and reporting. Competition also appeared to be associated with other concerns including professionalism, economic troubles, and job-related problems. The open-ended interviews also revealed how some problems (e.g., competition, diversity), although not at the top of the list of most important problems, were intertwined with many other problems. The sports journalists expressed considerable hostility toward broadcast sports journalists for diminishing their status

The Third-Person Effect Perceptions of the Media's Influence and Immoral Consequences

A nationwide telephone survey of 721 adults examined the impact of the third-person effect on individuals' perceptions of the media's general influence and immorality effects with three issues. The third-person effect perceptual hypothesis predicts that individuals will perceive media messages to have greater effects on other people than on themselves. A behavioral hypothesis predicts that third-person perception (i.e., seeing others as more influenced) will lead to support for restrictions on media messages. The findings reaffirmed robust support for the perceptual hypothesis. Regarding the behavioral hypothesis, effect perceptions were found to be issue dependent. For television violence, the issue with the clearest moral dimension, perceived immorality effects predicted support for restrictions. In contrast, perception of the media's general influence was a key predictor of support for restrictions on televised trials and negative political advertising. The failure of past research to distinguish dimensions of perceived effects may account for the less than robust findings regarding the behavioral hypothesis

Third_Person Perception of Television Violence: The Role of Self_Perceived Knowledge

This study investigated the proposition that self-perceived knowledge or self-expertise is a primary theoretical construct in understanding third-person perception of television violence effects. Consistent with most past research, the findings confirm people's third-person tendencies to attribute greater media effects of television violence on other people than on themselves. As hypothesized, self-perceived knowledge was a stronger predictor of third-person perception than sociodemographic variables (demographics, ideology, and media use). The study also found that self-perceived knowledge was more likely to moderate than mediate the relationship between sociodemographic variables and third-person perception. Whereas a moderator affects the strength of the relationship between an independent variable and a dependent variable, a mediator explains the relationship between the two variables. In sum, the findings indicate that respondents' judgments of their superior self-perceived knowledge of television violence might be of theoretical significance in third-person effect research

News of Y2K and Experiencing Y2K: Exploring the Relationship Between the Third-Person Effect and Optimistic Bias

This study gauged Americans' beliefs about predicted Y2K problems during the weeks before New Year 2000. It examined the alleged relationship between the third-person effect and the social psychological theory of optimistic bias. The third-person effect predicts that people judge themselves less influenced than others by media messages. To explain the effect, some media researchers have drawn on optimistic bias, which posits that people judge themselves less likely than others to experience negative life events. Few researchers, however, have directly tested the empirical relationship between the two perceptual approaches. As hypothesized, respondents judged themselves less influenced than others by news reports about Y2K (third-person perception) and less likely than others to experience Y2K problems (optimistic bias). But the study did not find the hypothesized relationship between the approaches. Furthermore, third-person perception and optimistic bias were functions of mirror opposite blocks of predictors. The findings indicate that third-person perception is not merely a media case study of optimistic bias. We suggested that people use different criteria to estimate experiencing events and believing media messages about the events

Communication Technology Adoption and Ethnicity

A national telephone survey was conducted to examine differences in communication technology adoption across Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics and identify adoption predictors based on demographics, media use, and perceptions of new technologies for each ethnic group. Results revealed few ethnic variations in individual communication technologies penetration. Even after controlling for socioeconomic variables, ethnicity remained a significant source of influence on communication technology adoption. Although income was the only common predictor in the adoption regressions within each ethnic group, perceived relative advantage of new technologies and household size were also important determinants for White and Black respondents

Self-Perceived Knowledge of the O.J. Simpson Trial: Third-Person Perception and Perceptions of Guilt

This study tested the “third-person effect” during the O.J. Simpson double-murder trial. The perceptual component of the third-person effect predicts that people judge themselves to be less susceptible to media influence than other people. Findings from a nationwide telephone survey indicated that respondents' self-perceived knowledge about the legal issues involved in the Simpson trial was correlated with third-person perception of a perceived “neutral” media message. Self-perceived knowledge was not correlated with third-person perceptual bias of a perceived “biased” message. It was suggested that the biased message primed respondents' perceptions of Simpson's guilt or innocence. The relative contributions of various predictors of third-person perception were assessed using regression analysis. </jats:p

Press freedom and social and economic progress in the far East

노트 : Sin.; Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (71st, Portland, OR, July 2-5, 1988)