William R. Davie

Identifying the Goals of Weather Instruction: Toward a Model Approach for Broadcast Meteorology

For more than forty years, researchers have understood the importance of broadcast meteorology to audiences. Viewers typically list weather among their top reasons for watching the news on television. Despite weathers significance, there is little empirical evidence regarding how college journalism and mass communication programs approach the subject. This study compares how media professionals regard its importance in college education with the views of journalism and mass communication faculty. Broadcasters believe more than faculty do that additional emphasis should be given to weather principles and presentation. An integrated model combining atmospheric science with mass communication courses is recommended.

Missing White Woman Syndrome: How Media Framing Affects Viewers' Emotions

In this experiment, the study of missing white woman syndrome is extended to video coverage to determine whether visual framing and race have an effect on the emotions of viewers. Missing white woman syndrome relates to the idea that stories about attractive, young, white females who go missing are more prevalent in the news to the exclusion of similar stories about other demographics. This study examined the relationship between race and framing effects through a factorial design experiment and posttest questionnaire. Experimental conditions compared television news stories about women of different demographics who are portrayed differently in both visual and nonvisual frames. Results showed that visual framing did affect the emotions of viewers, but the race of the missing person did not.

Starkey, G. and Crisell, A. (2009). Radio journalism

The clear devotion of these two British professors to radio news, and by extension the BBC, is felt throughout the 173 pages of Radio Journalism, which encompasses the diverse perspectives of the practitioner, the policymaker, the teacher, and the theoretician. Four of Starkey and Crisell’s eight chapters draw wholly from the BBC tradition and the rest are informed by it. The book begins with a short history of radio journalism’s invention that solely focuses on the contributions of Italian Gugielmo Marconi and Canadian Reginald Fessenden, whom is credited with the first radio broadcast from Brant Rock, Massachusetts on Christmas Eve, 1906. Curiously, the book avoids any mention of Americans involved in radio’s birth, but it does confirm David Sarnoff’s famous ‘‘music box memo’’ prediction without identifying him in describing Great Britain’s response to the radio pirates of the 1970s. Those contraband stations led to the creation of commercial radio in England that began broadcasting pop music of that era. As a result, ‘‘independent radio’’ began to target audiences for British advertisers in the 1980s by programming contemporary hits on FM and ‘‘golden oldies’’ on AM radio. In its approach to the profession—not the art or craft—of radio journalism this book is decidedly old school. That is to say, the coauthors prefer the analysis and documentary style of reporting that is part of the ‘‘Beeb’s’’ tradition, which Starkey and Crisell find superior to the ‘‘televisual’’ spectacles of ‘‘news actuality’’ that can distract the audience from a story’s deeper meaning and context. The second chapter describes how radio journalists should be trained to give a balance of views and an authoritative command of the facts that will be fair without partisan opinion so common to the British press. The third chapter offers an insider’s glance at recent regulatory events in England with an emphasis on the controversial Gilligan affair of 2003, where one BBC correspondent’s allegations of ‘‘sexed up’’ reports on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction created a firestorm of policy review and revision. The fourth chapter is devoted to contemporary practices in radio journalism, which includes a section on ‘‘how stealing isn’t always theft,’’ which describes how rewriting someone else’s copy is a dubious but common practice in Great Britain. ‘‘Ethically, claiming someone else’s ‘exclusive’ as one’s own is problematic—however much it may be a common practice in the press—and there is always the risk that such false claims will attract wider attention and lead to embarrassment’’ (p. 73). The coauthors observe that competition requires a station not allow its rivals to gain the reputation of always being first with the news, which presumably explains how this discredited practice of recycling another station’s recordings