Ecological momentary assessment (EMA), a method that allows for data collection in real-time, may offer benefits for communication research. We conducted two EMA studies on different topics (i.e., alcohol and sexual content in media and social media use, emotions, and tanning) in 2017 and 2018, respectively, and completed in-depth interviews (N = 19 and N = 16) following each study. Participants were

During the civil unrest emphasizing the Black Lives Matter movement amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Instagram was widely adopted by activists, journalists, and the general audience to disseminate and gather information about critical social issues and protests. Through a survey sampling Black Instagram users (N = 402), this study examined how Black people’s use of Instagram and its specific features—Instagram

This project presents a comprehensive understanding of how social movements use identification strategies across multiple digital platforms to build relationships with their publics. Drawing from a theoretical framework that blends dialogic communication, public relations, and rhetorical message strategies, and digital social advocacy, this study examines the Black Lives Matter and March For Our Lives

Black women are largely invisible in mainstream media’s coverage of police brutality, despite the rise of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. Breonna Taylor’s killing by police in March 2020 gained some media attention after George Floyd’s killing. To engage with BLM, O, The Oprah Magazine and Vanity Fair released special issues in September 2020 featuring Taylor’s portrait on the covers. This study

Mass media messages create, popularize, and reinforce stereotypical narratives of Black people that fuel fear and hatred of the group (Dates & Pease, 1994). Blackface representations overemphasized and ridiculed personality traits, mannerisms, and the vernacular of Black people. Narratives of Black men included images of criminals, dupes, social deviants, and brutes. In the 21st century, U.S. media

This study examines the way news media framed the protests following the death of George Floyd on May 25, 2020. It utilizes 510 tweets from 13 different U.S. media outlets in a mixed-methods content analysis of images tweeted by those media outlets. It looks at how protestors and police are portrayed as well as the role of race in the news images. Civil liberties, as opposed to law and order, are found

This study examines the relationship between personal traits, news use via YouTube algorithmic searches, and engagement with misinformation about U.S. Muslim congresswomen. Based on analyses of survey data, we find that those with lower cognitive ability and frequent algorithmic use were more likely to believe and share misinformation. Republicans and those with higher levels of nationalism and prejudice

Based on interviews with journalists during the 2020 racial justice protests, this study uses field theory and doxa to explore to what extent journalists who cover social justice issues are redrawing the boundary between journalism and activism. I use #BlackoutTuesday and journalists’ discourse about posting black squares on Instagram in support of #BlackLivesMatter to examine social media’s role in

The increasing use of social media like YouTube as a news platform provides new opportunities for the public to react to news reporting. This convergence produces multi-narrative framings of police violence-related evidence that requires further attention, especially given the potential impact on state accountability processes. Using a frame analysis of news outlets and content analysis of comments

This study investigated how visual framing influences discrete emotional responses, empathy, behavioral intentions, and efficacy in reaction to visual solutions journalism. A 2 (story topic: drug addiction, homelessness) × 4 (visual frame condition: no photo, solution-only, problem-only, combination) mixed design experiment revealed that images showing only social problems elicited the lowest levels

A quantitative content analysis of rap lyrics released after the 2020 death of George Floyd (n = 66) was conducted to examine the dominant emotions of artists who use their songs to address police brutality and other forms of racism. A large, negative, and statistically significant correlation between negative emotions toward the police and a desire for retaliation was found. This finding may lend

Black individuals use social media at higher rates than their racial counterparts, and these relationships often promote favorable group-based outcomes. However, quantitative examinations of these relationships are lacking. Using a cross-sectional U.S. Black adult sample (N = 295) and applying social identity gratifications, the present work examines individuals’ social media use, racial adherence

Starting with a public relations pioneer’s maxim to “listen to stakeholders,” many contemporary scholars have emphasized listening as the key to the inclusion of marginalized communities. Based on 25 in-depth interviews including 19 Black residents of Fort Worth, this study amplifies the voices of Black community members after the killing of Atatiana Jefferson in her home by a White police officer

This article focuses on the digital reproduction of hate speech. It investigates the normalization of affective nationalistic discourses via user comments posted on digital news media websites. I analyze digital posts concerning the murder in Turkey of Hrant Dink, a well-known Turkish Armenian journalist, on the websites of the two most popular Turkish newspapers. This examination considers readers’

Framing research has predominantly revealed detrimental effects of episodic news frames, including individualist blame attributions and political cynicism. However, such frames may also discourage group biases and impede motivated reasoning regarding identity politics. In two experiments (N = 815; N = 1,019), we test the effect of episodic frames on group-consonant attitudes through identity-motivated

This article examines differences in news coverage of female candidates using a media sociology framework that examines the interplay between organizational, routine, and individual levels of influence. The analyses find that national and local newspapers are more likely to write about the political qualifications of female candidates relative to male candidates, and female journalists at local newspapers

This study examined how the organizations’ use of mediated and interpersonal channels during change affects employees’ change-related outcomes. Specifically, the study proposed and tested a conceptual model that links organizations’ frequency of use of communication channels to perceived organizational communication transparency during change, employees’ feeling of uncertainty toward change, and employee

As a recent New York Times piece reminds us, it has become increasingly harder to detect disinformation campaigns and to recognize purposeful attempts to mislead the public, especially online (Kang, 2022). The spread of COVID-19 disinformation during the past 2 years and the current Ukraine–Russia war have shown the critical importance of information literacy in today’s day and age. Being able to discern

The article enriches the understanding of trust in news at a time when mass and interpersonal communication have merged in the digital sphere. We propose disentangling individual-level patterns of trust allocation (i.e., trust figurations) across journalistic media, social media, and peers to reflect the multiplicity among modern news audiences. A latent class analysis of a representative survey among

The term cult has been variously applied to contemporary groups and organizations, marking them as unusual or frightening. Scholarly literature has yet to settle on a concrete conceptualization of cults and reveals little about the communicative processes by which the stigmatizing name becomes attached to certain groups. This study utilizes a constant comparison method to assess qualities associated

Authors of the knowledge gap hypothesis predicted television’s potential to narrow the gaps in some circumstances. This online experiment aimed to bound the conditions that facilitate the leveling role of audiovisual news for a foreign-born audience (N = 137) residing in the United States. Results showed that audiovisual news narrowed the gaps by improving learning for those who scored low on language

Restorative narratives describe a new form of journalism that attempts to overcome the detrimental effects of the more prevalent negative and destructive tone of news coverage. This study investigates the potentials and risks of restorative narratives in the coverage of crises with a 2 (restorative/negative) × 2 (COVID-19/climate crisis) experimental online study (n = 829) for emotional, cognitive

Using a national online survey in South Korea, this study examines the underlying psychological mechanisms of online keyword activism in supporting a politician. Findings show that when perceived like-minded opinion is extremely negative toward the politician, the like-minded opinion perception mitigates the effects of perceived majority opinion on crisis blame attribution and pro-politician activism

This article utilizes theoretical concepts of sensemaking and affective events theory to analyze and interpret what type of harassment events journalists experience from readers, viewers, and strangers, and their subsequent emotional responses. Findings indicated journalists experience three forms of harassment at work from those external to the newsroom, and that women not only receive more sexual

With a survey of 600 U.S. employees, this study investigated the effect of transparent leadership communication on employee engagement, from the interpretivist approach, in the context of CEO activism. This study examined employees’ perceived psychological needs (i.e., autonomy, competence, and relatedness) as mediators. Results showed that transparent leadership communication is positively associated

Public relations professionals engineer acceptability for policy, such as child immigrant detention, through key messages. Agenda building, engineered frames, and rules theories guide study of spokesperson attributions from 221 articles from January 2017 to October 2019. Findings show attributions to U.S. government spokespersons appeared most in stories. Journalist inquiries were declined at times

This study investigated how exposure to negative and misleading online comments about the COVID-19 vaccination persuasive messages and the ensuing corrective rebuttals of these comments affected people’s attitudes and intentions regarding vaccination. An online experiment was performed with 344 adults in the United States. The results showed that rebuttals by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention

Previous research showed that political trust declines when politicians debate in uncivil ways. This article extends this research by analyzing how the news media’s tendency to focus on and even overstate incivility in post-debate coverage affects political trust and the news media’s own credibility. The results of two preregistered survey experiments show that politicians’ use of incivility decreases

Through a lens of boundary work and role conception, this study seeks to understand how political journalists discursively construct the role of the newspaper editorial endorsement. Researchers conducted long-form interviews with political journalists in the United States (n = 64) to understand how journalists conducted boundary work relative to endorsements. Journalists argued that the 2016 election

Given the ongoing scramble to restrict cross-border flows and proclivity to look inwards, it is encouraging to find a book that asks us to think about the global and that offers resources for doing so. Not only does this volume remind us of the value of researching communication at the global level, it also sets out to address the timely problem of accounting for technological change, promising that

The present study seeks to systematically describe how humanitarian aid organizations use visuals in their natural disaster-related social media messages and to analyze their effects on social media engagement. Using Rodriguez and Dimitrova’s (2011) four levels of visual framing, we performed a content analysis of 810 tweets from 38 aid organizations. The results showed that, overall, the organizations’

While the persisting issue of women’s underrepresentation in political news partly arises from biases in the social reality, journalism plays a crucial role in mediating these biases. This study proposes a multilayered framework of gendered influences in journalistic news production to understand how journalistic factors exacerbate or mitigate women’s media representation. Drawing from a mixed-methods

Social media provides minority groups with more control over their portrayals than stereotypical misrepresentations of Hollywood. To understand how Asian Americans are negotiating their own ethnic, racial, and national identities on social media, constant comparative analysis was employed to examine patterns in visual and textual communication of Asian American influencers’ Instagram posts. Their cultural

Who could have imagined 2 years ago that we would still be in a global pandemic? COVID-19 has undoubtedly changed how we as journalism educators and scholars do our job: from teaching remote classes and participating in online faculty meetings to attending virtual conferences and limiting research travel and face-to-face data collection. The pandemic has shown us the importance of staying connected

Networked framing focuses on how the public becomes gatekeepers on social media. To unpack the dynamics of networked framing, we conducted an automated frame analysis to identify the shift of frame structures of government media (N = 12,090) and the public (N = 1.49 million) on Weibo during the COVID-19 pandemic. We found a moderate level of frame alignment between government media and the public,

The fake news crisis has generated a veritable cottage industry of books and academic articles over the past few years. And yet, so much more needs to be said. Two new books take the conversation forward with varying degrees of success. Justin P. McBrayer’s monograph offers a thought-provoking exposition of not just the supply of but also the demand for fake news, especially in the United States. Shashi

This study examined the sexual double standard in the portrayal of sexual consequences on television. A content analysis of television programs nominated for Teen Choice Awards from 2012 to 2015 revealed that female characters received more negative sexual consequences than male characters, but there was no gender difference in who received positive sexual consequences. The gendered distribution of

The current study examines the influence of press releases about scientific studies in terms of their impact on news coverage. Using an innovative approach that allowed for analysis of a large corpus of text and calculation of similarity scores, we were able to trace the uptake of press release materials into news media articles. In some cases, up to 65% of sentences in science news articles reflected

The present research examines two aspects of newspaper coverage of devolution during a 4-year period between March 27, 2013, and May 28, 2017: first, through the lens of attribution of responsibility, who the news media most blamed for problems facing devolution; second, whether reliance on official sources in reporting of devolution mirrors the indexing hypothesis. Findings show that the most-blamed

Drawing on the theory of gradual institutional change, this study analyzed the post-Civil War college reform efforts in North Carolina, integrating power with public relations history. Reformers worked under harsh institutional circumstances where resident elites held high veto power, while reformers had a low level of discretion for interpreting college education. Notwithstanding, reformers adopted

Compiled by: Lisa Romero, Associate Professor and Head, Communications Library, University of Illinois

Through in-depth interviews, this study explored the voices of Asian American journalists who faced unprecedented stresses due to the racist discourse of Asian Americans as carriers of disease during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic. Socialized to de-emphasize their vulnerabilities in their professional work, Asian American reporters generally claimed they did not experience racist

This meta-analysis integrates 47 empirical studies, comprising 89,826 participants from 21 countries, to examine the cumulative effects and potential moderators of exposure to COVID-19 news and information on attendant emotions, appraisals, and behaviors. Overall media exposure indicated only small positive effect sizes on adverse psychological reactions, though it was moderately and positively associated

The debut of Ethnic Journalism in the Global South is timely. The book capitalizes on the DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) electricity currently sweeping through all aspects of our being, academic scholarship included. It delves into ethnic journalism—defined as “the practice of journalism by, for and about ethnic communities” (p. 10)—examined concomitantly with ethnic media. Matthew Matsaganis

Through a comparative analysis of Spanish newspaper coverage of the 1918 flu and COVID-19 pandemics, this article explores the parallels between them, their roles in reflecting and facilitating public perceptions of infectious diseases, the national dialogues they incite, and the search for solutions in a global health crisis. I use qualitative analysis to interpret media themes of contagion as they