Wayne A. Danielson

Eisenhower's February Decision: A Study of News Impact

A before-and-after interview panel study made at the time of President Eisenhowers February 29 decision to run for reelection records changes in “effects” on voters. The article also describes how the news of Eisenhowers decision reached the panel members, and their images of the candidates.

Sampling Ethnic Media Use: The Case of Hispanics:

Catchisions One cannot judge the joumalism of the put by the standards of today. These findings indicate that editors of newspapers published in Texu during the revdutionaiy period printed material that took different positions on the issues covered in the papers studied here. Some issues received more balanced treatment than others, and some newspapers may have been more balanced than others, but Texu joumalism during the period did provide a measure of diversity.

Journalists and Novelists: A Study of Diverging Styles

Readability of news stories sampled for each year for more than a century, from 1885 to 1989, from the New York Times and Los Angeles Times reveals a gradual drop in readability, mainly due to journalistic use of longer words but not to the use of longer sentences. A matched sample of sentences from novels published in the same years show an increase in readability, mainly because novelists used even shorter sentences and continued to use simple words.

The AEJ Presidential Address

*My topic today concerns the next generation of American journalists-the students we have in our classes today. They are an interesting group. They m difterent in many ways from the students of earlier years. They are bringing changes to journalism education and, I am convinced, they will bring changes to the journalistic profession in the years ahead. Since they are students and hence are more or less susceptible to our influence as teachers, an analysis of their characteristics also tells us something about some of the major themes in journalism education today-what we as teachers believe in and are contributing to the journalism of the future. Thus, our students are more than students; they are a kind of glass through which we can see darkly the journalistic world of the future. What are the characteristics of these students? What are some of their strong and their weak points? What are we aa teachers emphasizing in their journalistic education? My first observation concerns the disturbing candor of thin generation of students. Some have called them flip, &respectful, obnoxious. The adjectives are not entirely inappropriate, but I prefer the term candid, which the dictionary says came from a Latin term meaning “white,” hence “pure” or “clear.” A second meaning, more common, is “frank, straightforward, patently sincere.” This generation i s uncommonly candid. It wants its facts straight. It feels that it has been deceived too often in the past and intends to be deceived no longer. “Tell it like it is” might well be the slogan these young people carry nearest their hearts. They are massively disinterested in conventional explanations which tell why we do things the way we do when we should do them some other way. They are passionately interested in the plain fact, the unvarnished and unembellished opinion, the telling phrase. It is probably this frankness, more than anything else which gets students into trouble with four-letter words in their publications. There is some desire to shock, it is true, but the deeper motivation is, I think, the desire to be straightout, frank, simple and true. If a word tells it l i e it is, it has a good chance of showing up in the student newspaper to the dismay of older and wiser heads. What does this mean for the future? What will these candid reporters be l i i when they come to work for American publications? I think we can see their influences at work already. Today we see words such as “homosexual” and %yphilis” in our papers. Today more and more people are dying of cancer or cirrhosis of the liver instead of “lingering illness.” Today more automobile makes are appearing in stories of accidents. The names and addresses of polluting industries also are appearing in the public prints. These are precursors of things to come as an increasingly candid generation of American journalists emerges on the national scene. + A second observation about these young people is related, I think, to the first. They are a courageous lot. They are willing to put their actions, their money-and it isn’t always a lot-and their futures on the line for their beliefs. The peace marches, the civil rights protests, the many campus disruptions of the Sixties proved, if nothing else, the individual commitment of the marchers, protesters and disrupters to their causes. They were willing to be identified by their friends, their professors and the police. They were willing to b gassed. They were willing to go to jail. They were willing, in some instances, to be shot at. I don’t think earlier generations -mine for instance-would have done it. We would have considered how the folks back home would have felt about it. We