Conventional Wisdom: Putting National Party Convention Ratings in Context

This paper places broadcast major party convention ratings in the broader context of the changing media environment from 1976 until 2008 in order to explore the decline in audience for the convention. Broadcast convention ratings are contrasted with convention ratings for cable news networks, ratings for broadcast entertainment programming, and ratings for “event” programming. Relative to audiences for other kinds of programming, convention audiences remain large, suggesting that profit-making criteria may have distorted representations of the convention audience and views of whether airing the convention remains worthwhile.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Reporting through the lens of the past: from Challenger to Columbia

Collective memory, the publicly shared meaning of a common past, can structure both news stories and reporters' search for information within the broader context of journalistic practices. It can also provide reporters with an independent perspective, balancing elite-dominated news frames. Following the space shuttle Columbia's crash, journalists turned repeatedly to the ‘lessons' of the accident that claimed the Challenger shuttle 17 years earlier both in formulating questions at NASA briefings and in reporting Columbia's destruction and the subsequent investigation in print. In many instances, journalists' reliance on these memories is entirely implicit in the finished news stories, making Challenger a ghostly presence that led reporters to focus on NASA's inadequacies rather than on the mechanical causes of Columbia's demise.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline