Robert O. Wyatt

Effects of Information and Evaluation in Film Criticism.

This study reports results of an experiment in which student subjects read various types of film reviews and then reported interest in attending the film. One review had high information content about the film and no positive or negative opinion about it, while other reviews contained high or low information and either positive or negative evaluation. The study finds that higher amounts of information—regardless of evaluation—leads to more interest in the film. Reviews with high information plus positive evaluation lead to most interest, but high information alone raised interest nearly as much.

How Feeling Free to Talk Affects Ordinary Political Conversation, Purposeful Argumentation, and Civic Participation

Scholars have examined how specific opinion climates affect political discourse, but little attention has been given to how perceived freedom to talk in general is related to congenial political conversation in ordinary spaces or willingness to argue with an opponent—or how each mode of talk affects civic participation. Respondents in a nationwide survey felt free to talk about politics. Freedom to talk, issue-specific news, and newspaper use were most strongly related to ordinary political conversation. With argumentation, issue-specific news, issue-specific talk, and local opinion climate dominated. Ordinary political conversation was significantly related to conventional participation; argumentation was not.

The Suicidal Messenger How Press Reporting Affects Public Confidence in the Press, the Military, and Organized Religion

The General Social Survey shows that American confidence in the press has declined gradually but continuously from 1973 to 2000. Confidence in the military showed a spike of increase following the Persian Gulf War, whereas that for organized religion underwent a dramatic but temporary decline following scandals associated with televangelists Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart. This article shows good predictions of confidence time trends for all three institutions (the press, the military, and organized religion) (R² from 0.61 to 0.82). The InfoTrend computer method was used to score the texts of the stories for coverage explicitly favorable and unfavorable to the three institutions. For the military, additional scores were generated for the Gulf War. For organized religion, the text was also scored for coverage of sex scandals of televangelists and the Roman Catholic clergy. The press content scores were entered into the ideodynamic model to make the successful predictions of the time trends.

A New Typology for Journalism and Mass Communication Writing.

Ask any journalism teacher to delineate quickly the major forms of journalistic writing, and the reply is usually predictable: news, opinion, and features. But the same teacher, attempting to explain the distinctions among the myriad types of contemporary reporting, may describe something far richer and more complex. Before long, a baffling list of forms emerges that sounds like the spiel of an auctioneer. For there is hard news, soft news, hard-hard news, new news, news features, soft features, analyses, talk-show journalism, commentaries, editorials, reviews, columns, consumer features, ambush journalism, advocacy journalism, personal journalism, New Journalism, literary journalism, tabloid journalism, gonzo journalism, docudrama, takeouts, billboards, thumbsuckers, and other colorful and idiosyncratic forms that vary from publication to publication and region to region. Although these sundry labels may convey a more detailed sense of actual journalistic practice, the grand division into the Big Three of news, editorials, and features has become enshrined, either explicitly or implicitly, in most textbooks and in the heads of generations of students. Most practicing journalists and professors, ROBERT 0. WYATT AND DAVID l? BADGER