Laura Roselle

Strategic narrative: A new means to understand soft power:

Soft power in its current, widely understood form has become a straitjacket for those trying to understand power and communication in international affairs. Analyses of soft power overwhelmingly focus on soft power ‘assets’ or capabilities and how to wield them, not how influence does or does not take place. It has become a catch-all term that has lost explanatory power, just as hard power once did. The authors argue that the concept of strategic narrative gives us intellectual purchase on the complexities of international politics today, especially in regard to how influence works in a new media environment. They believe that the study of media and war would benefit from more attention being paid to strategic narratives.

Polarizing patriots: divergent responses to patriotic imagery in news coverage of terrorism

We demonstrate that the use of patriotic imagery in news reporting may increase rather than decrease public polarization regarding foreign policy issues. Specifically, we examine the impact of patriotic imagery in the context of an online news story about terrorism on individuals’ attitudes toward civil liberties in the “war on terror” and spillover effects on support for the war in Afghanistan. We expect that images of the American flag will be associated with differing clusters of values depending on the level of right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) that an individual’s personality exhibits. Specifically, we expect that flag imagery will decrease support for civil liberties and increase support for the war in Afghanistan among individuals who are high in RWA. But we expect flag exposure to have the opposite effect among those who are low in RWA. Finally, we expect patriotic imagery cues will influence only individuals who are not a part of the terrorism “issue public.” We test these hypotheses with an experiment that presents participants with a single news story on the Times Square bomber. The experiment frames the news story as coming from Fox News, CNN, or MSNBC and varies the presence or absence of patriotic flag imagery in the pictures accompanying the news story. The results provide strong support for our expectations regarding the contingent impact of patriotic imagery as well as our expectations regarding the spillover effects of news coverage on terrorism on attitudes toward Afghanistan.

Local Coverage of the 2000 Election in North Carolina Does Civic Journalism Make a Difference

This article analyzes television broadcasts to determine whether an intent to engage in projects designed to increase issue coverage and citizen involvement leads to a difference in coverage. The findings show that differences in coverage between two CBS affiliates in central North Carolina (WRAL, Raleigh, and WFMY, Greensboro) can be attributed less to WRAL’s participation in the civic journalism project Your Voice Your Vote than to the acceptance of the 5/30 standard to allocate 5 minutes per day to candidate-centered discourse for 30 days before the election. This case study of CBS affiliates in neighboring markets highlights many of the issues that are central to understanding the debate about improving local television election coverage.

In Search of Greatness: Russia's Communications with Africa and the World. By Festus Eribo. Westport, CT: Ablex, 2001. 256p.

In this book, Festus Eribo gives a broad historical view of Russian–African relations and the role of newspapers in communicating Russian and Soviet perceptions of Africa and its people. Not surprisingly, Eribo argues that ideology drove the content of coverage as the Soviet Union attempted to shape opinion according to Marxist–Leninist principles. In taking on the very broad topic of communication, Eribo notes the presence of multiple audiences but describes the content of Russian domestic newspapers in much greater detail than the story of how Russia communicated with African people. While the topic is important, because this book is descriptive and not theoretical, it leaves the reader with more questions than answers about the role of the media in communicating images of Africa.