Sean Aday

Embedding the Truth: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Objectivity and Television Coverage of the Iraq War

This article reports on a cross-cultural analysis of television coverage of the 2003 Iraq War that seeks to assess and understand the dimensions of objectivity in the news during wartime. A total of 1,820 stories on five American networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News Channel [FNC]) and on the Arab satellite channel Al Jazeera were included in the study. The study assessed bias on two levels:tone of individual stories and the macro-level portrait of the war offered by each network. Results showed that at the story level, the overwhelming number of stories broadcast by Al Jazeera and the American networks other than FNC were balanced. Yet the data also revealed a strong bias in support of the American-led war effort at FNC and important differences in how the various networks covered the war. Also, broadcasters showed a war devoid of blood, dissent, and diplomacy, focusing instead on a sanitized version of combat. Overall, the study found evidence that the news norm of objectivity is defined in large part by culture and ideology more than events, as the norm would imply. The study also explored in detail the coverage of embedded reporters to assess their objectivity and compare their coverage to other types of reporters, especially “unilaterals” with whom they shared the battlefield.

Style over Substance: Newspaper Coverage of Elizabeth Dole's Presidential Bid

This analysis compares newspaper coverage of Elizabeth Doles presidential campaign with that of former Texas Governor George W. Bush, Arizona Senator John McCain, and publisher Steve Forbes. The authors examined three months of coverage in the Des Moines Register, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and the Washington Post. Dole received less coverage than did Bush, but more than McCain and Forbes. However, the authors found qualitative differences in coverage that they attributed to Doles gender. Compared to her male opponents, Dole received less coverage on her positions on the issues but more coverage on her personal traits. The authors conclude that these differences were due to stories written by male reporters covering the 2000 presidential campaign. The authors also found that Dole was quoted in different ways when compared to her male opponents: she was directly quoted at a lower rate, while her speech was paraphrased at a higher rate.

The Framesetting Effects of News: An Experimental Test of Advocacy versus Objectivist Frames

This study merges framing and agenda-setting research by focusing on the relative power of certain news frames to limit audience cognition and influence attitudes. It proposes a cognitive-based model for understanding when news stories are likely to have the dual effect of transferring both object and frame salience to audiences, an effect here called “frame-setting,” that is more likely to occur when the press employs advocacy frames using consensus cues as opposed to objectivist frames based on the journalistic norm of two-sidedness. Data from a controlled experimental test show that advocacy frames had a stronger framesetting effect than objectivist framed crime stories, transferring both object and frame salience to audiences and limiting audience cognition.

A Panel Study of Media Effects on Political and Social Trust after September 11, 2001

The authors examine the relationship between media consumption and political trust, social trust, and confidence in governmental institutions in the year following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. This period provides a unique opportunity to explore the effects of media use on trust, given that political and social trust surged in the immediate aftermath only to decline in the months that followed. Using data from a panel survey, the authors find that television news use was associated with higher levels of trust in government and confidence in institutions during the surge that followed the terrorist attacks. Individual-level change in trust and confidence over the year that followed was not, however, attributable to media use or changes in media use. In the case of social trust, the results suggest that television news and newspaper use were not associated with social trust in the immediate aftermath but were associated with individual-level change in social trust over the course of the following year. Specifically, those who watched television news exhibited declines in social trust and those who read newspapers exhibited increased social trust between fall 2001 and late summer 2002. The authors conclude by discussing how coverage in fall 2001 and changes in coverage over the following year may help to explain these results.

Watching From Afar: Media Consumption Patterns Around the Arab Spring

Uses of new media in the context of the Arab Spring have attracted scholarly attention from a wide array of disciplines. Amid the anecdotes and speculation, most of the available empirical research in this area has examined how new media have enabled participants and spectators to produce and circulate protest-related content. In contrast, the current study investigates patterns of consumption of Arab Spring- related content using a unique data set constructed by combining archived Twitter content with metadata drawn from the URL shortening service Bit.ly. This data set allows us to explore two critical research questions: First, were links posted to Twitter (among other platforms) followed primarily by individuals inside the affected country, within the broader Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region or by those outside the region and country? And second, who attracted more attention online: protesters and other nonelite citizens or traditional news organizations? Our findings suggest that the vast majority of attention to Arab Spring content came from outside of the MENA region and, furthermore, that mass media, rather than citizen media, overwhelmingly held the worlds attention during the protests. We thus conclude that Twitter was broadly useful as an information channel for non-MENA onlookers but less so for protesters on the ground.Uses of new media in the context of the Arab Spring have attracted scholarly attention from a wide array of disciplines. Amid the anecdotes and speculation, most of the available empirical research in this area has examined how new media have enabled participants and spectators to produce and circulate protest-related content. In contrast, the current study investigates patterns of consumption of Arab Spring–related content using a unique data set constructed by combining archived Twitter content with metadata drawn from the URL shortening service Bit.ly. This data set allows us to explore two critical research questions: First, were links posted to Twitter (among other platforms) followed primarily by individuals inside the affected country, within the broader Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region or by those outside the region and country? And second, who attracted more attention online: protesters and other nonelite citizens or traditional news organizations? Our findings suggest that the vast majority of attention to Arab Spring content came from outside of the MENA region and, furthermore, that mass media, rather than citizen media, overwhelmingly held the world’s attention during the protests. We thus conclude that Twitter was broadly useful as an information channel for non-MENA onlookers but less so for protesters on the ground.

The Real War Will Never Get on Television

Process for the production of p-bromofluorobenzene by the bromination of fluorobenzene, characterized in that the bromination is carried out with liquid bromine at temperatures below 0 DEG C.

A Cross-cultural Test of the Spiral of Silence Theory in Singapore and the United States1

This study examines the influence of individual-level characteristics on the spiral of silence effect in two countries, Singapore and the United States, making it the first cross-cultural test of the theory and thereby addressing a gap in the literature highlighted by Schefule and Moy (International Journal of Public Opinion Research, 12, 2000, 3–28). In two identical, representative telephone polls of 668 adults conducted in Singapore and 412 adults in Washington, DC, respondents were asked to indicate how likely they would be to discuss publicly two controversial issues: interracial marriage and equal rights for homosexuals. The proposed model for predicting outspokenness adds a variety of new predictors, such as culturally influenced self-concepts, fear of isolation, and communication apprehension, along with other more traditional predictors of outspokenness, such as a persons perception of the opinion climate, media exposure, issue salience, and demographics. The findings provide partial support for the spiral of silence hypothesis in Singapore, but not in the United States. Respondents’ perception of the future opinion climate in Singapore interacted with issue salience to influence their level of outspokenness; American respondents did not exhibit such an interaction effect. In both countries, however, outspokenness was associated with respondents’ perceived importance of the issue and their communication apprehension. Media exposure was not associated with outspokenness in either country.

Taking the state out of state—media relations theory: how transnational advocacy networks are changing the press—state dynamic

Much of the political communication scholarship concerning state—media relations concludes that the media are highly dependent on and even subservient to the state. This is particular true during wartime. Partial and conditionally based exceptions to this general conclusion include event-driven news and the cascade model. We argue that another important exception to standard conclusions regarding state—media relations involves transnational advocacy organizations and epistemic communities.

Online Fragmentation in Wartime A Longitudinal Analysis of Tweets about Syria, 2011–2013

Theorists have long predicted that like-minded individuals will tend to use social media to self-segregate into enclaves and that this tendency toward homophily will increase over time. Many studies have found moment-in-time evidence of network homophily, but very few have been able to directly measure longitudinal changes in the diversity of social media users’ habits. This is due in part to a lack of appropriate tools and methods for such investigations. This study takes a step toward developing those methods. Drawing on the complete historical record of public retweets posted between January 2011 and August 2013, we propose and justify a partial method of measuring increases or decreases in network homophily. We demonstrate that Twitter network communities that focused on Syria are in general highly fragmented and homophilous; however, only one of the nine detected network communities that persisted over time exhibited a clear increase in homophily.

Syria in the Arab Spring: The integration of Syria’s conflict with the Arab uprisings, 2011–2013

How did Syria’s conflict interact with the broader wave of regional protest known as the Arab Spring? This article uses a unique, complete Twitter dataset of tweets including the word “Syria” in English or Arabic to empirically test how Syria’s conflict was discussed online. The analysis shows a high level of interaction between Syria and other Arab countries through 2011. Other Arab countries experiencing popular protests (“Arab Spring countries”) were referenced far more often in 2011 than were Syria’s immediate neighbors, while keyword analysis shows the framing of the conflict in terms of Syria’s “regime” aligned the conflict with other Arab uprisings. In 2012–2013 this changed sharply, with significantly fewer mentions of other Arab countries, particularly Arab Spring countries, more fundraising and political appeals across the Gulf, and growing Islamization. These findings offer one of the first empirical demonstrations of the integration and disintegration of a unified Arab discourse from 2011 to 2013, with significant implications for theories of the diffusion of protest and ideas.