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The professional backstaging of diversity in journalism Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2024-03-15 Ashley W Carter, Patrick Ferrucci
This study examines how diverse US-based journalists—both Black, Indigenous, and people of color and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer [or sometimes questioning] and others—perform their diversity within newsrooms. Applying Goffman’s theory of dramaturgy, the study illustrates the nuanced differences in terms of how journalists perform their diverse identities differently on both the frontstage
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Empowering social media users: nudge toward self-engaged verification for improved truth and sharing discernment Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2024-03-10 Fangjing Tu
How can we empower social media users to better discern the veracity of news and share less false news? This survey experiment (N = 636) assessed the effectiveness of two interventions—signing a Pro-Truth Pledge and utilizing a Fact-Checking Guide. Results showed that utilizing the Fact-Checking Guide increased skepticism of news posts, likelihood to verify news posts, verification engagement, and
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Publish and perish: mental health among communication and media scholars Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2024-03-05 Thomas Hanitzsch, Antonia Markiewitz, Henrik Bødker
Studies point to a significantly higher prevalence of mental health issues among academics compared to most other working populations. However, we know relatively little about the situation within the field of media and communication studies. Based on an international survey of 1028 researchers within this field, we found mental health issues to be widespread. Early career researchers, women, and those
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How shared ties and journalistic cultures shape global news coverage of disruptive media events: the case of the 9/11 terror attacks Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2024-02-12 Marc Jungblut, Scott Althaus, Joseph Bajjalieh, Chung-hong Chan, Kasper Welbers, Wouter van Atteveldt, Hartmut Wessler
In recent decades, disruptive media events, such as major terrorist attacks, have gained increasing relevance in news coverage around the world. Despite the growing importance of such globally broadcast media events, little research to date has examined cross-national variation in event coverage or the predictors of this variation. This study examines news coverage about the 9/11 terror attacks in
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In-person, video conference, or audio conference? Examining individual and dyadic information processing as a function of communication system Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2024-02-11 Jingjing Han, Lucía Cores-Sarría, Han Zhou
The wide use of virtual communication has raised a need to understand its effect on communication effectiveness and the ways its different forms influence users’ information processing. To that end, this study proposes the Dynamical Interpersonal Communication Systems Model and posits that the amount of information directly perceived affects individual and dyadic information processing. This proposition
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How dual-message nature documentaries that portray nature as amazing and threatened affect entertainment experiences and pro-environmental intentions Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2024-01-25 Anna Freytag, Daniel Possler
Nature documentaries are an entertaining and informative genre that appears well-suited to environmental communication. However, producers of nature documentaries face a dilemma: Although they aim to inspire their audiences to act pro-environmentally, they fear ruining viewers’ entertainment experience if they address environmental destruction. Hence, conventional nature documentaries solely portray
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Theory of communicative (dis)enfranchisement: introduction, explication, and application Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2024-01-25 Elizabeth A Hintz, Kristina M Scharp
In this essay, we set forth the theory of communicative (dis)enfranchisement (TCD). The TCD is useful for exploring the ramifications of the hegemonic ideologies which constrain and afford our everyday lives, and which are constructed and reflected in disenfranchising talk (DT). The TCD also asks what communication mechanisms work to reify and resist these hegemonic ideologies. We first introduce the
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Meta-theorizing framing in communication research (1992–2022): toward academic silos or professionalized specialization? Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2024-01-05 Dror Walter, Yotam Ophir
Framing, a prominent communication theory, is often lamented as a fractured paradigm, leading some to offer radical changes to its conceptualization, operationalization, and application. Using a meta-theoretical and computational approach, we analyze three decades of framing research to examine academic silos, specializations, the canon’s formation, gender inequalities, authors’ origins, countries
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The journalistic preference for extreme exemplars: educational socialization, psychological biases, or editorial policy? Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2023-12-09 Lene Aarøe, Kim Andersen, Morten Skovsgaard, Flemming Svith, Rasmus Schmøkel
Exemplars are central in news reporting. However, extreme negative exemplars can bias citizens’ factual perceptions and attributions of political responsibility. Nonetheless, our knowledge of the factors shaping journalistic preferences for including exemplars in news stories is limited. We investigate the extent to which educational socialization, psychological biases, and editorial policy shape journalistic
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Is communication a dependent or involuted discipline? A citation analysis of communication publications from 2010 to 2020 Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2023-11-08 Jiaying Hu, Jeffry Oktavianus, Jonathan J H Zhu
Communication research has been one of the fastest-growing disciplines across the social sciences over the last two decades in terms of the numbers of Social Science Citation Indexed journals and articles. However, whether Communication is an independent discipline remains debated. Of various criticisms, one extreme considers Communication too dependent on other disciplines, whereas the other regards
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Contextualizing communication for digital innovation and the future of work Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2023-10-06 Jiawei Sophia Fu, Joshua B Barbour
Digital innovation is the future of work. The ongoing and interlinked transformation of digital technologies, work, communication, and organizing raises important theoretical questions. Integrating recombination-based innovation theory and institutional theory of communication, this article contributes a novel framework that specifies the theoretical linkages between macro-level institutions and digital
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Why we fight: investigating the moral appeals in terrorist propaganda, their predictors, and their association with attack severity Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2023-09-17 Lindsay Hahn, Katherine Schibler, Tahleen A Lattimer, Zena Toh, Alexandra Vuich, Raphaela Velho, Kevin Kryston, John O’Leary, Sihan Chen
How do terrorists persuade otherwise decent citizens to join their violent causes? Guided by early mass communication research investigating propaganda’s efficacy and the model of intuitive morality and exemplars, we investigated the persuasive moral appeals employed by terrorist organizations known to be successful at recruiting others to their causes. We compiled a database of N = 873 propaganda
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Phenomenology of the Turing test: a Levinasian perspective Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2023-08-15 Matthew S Lindia
This article considers the Turing test as a problem of communication, particularly by asking how the language of artificial intelligence (AI) appears to human experience in comparison to the language of the Other. This question is approached through Levinas’ philosophy, by considering the possibility of AI as an absolute alterity, rather than reducing its alterity to the Same. This perspective diverges
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Two faces of message repetition: audience favorability as a determinant of the explanatory capacities of processing fluency and message fatigue Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2023-08-15 Jiyeon So, Hyunjin Song
This study offers a critical test of two competing theoretical accounts of message repetition effects—processing fluency and message fatigue—which have yet to be examined together under a coherent framework. Furthermore, integrating research on metacognition and motivated processing, we propose audience favorability toward message advocacy as a crucial moderator in this dynamic. A repeated-exposure
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Race and gender intertwined: why intersecting identities matter for perceptions of incivility and content moderation on social media Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2023-08-12 Ian Hawkins, Jessica Roden, Miriam Attal, Haleemah Aqel
Social media users often push back against harmful rhetoric with satirical and aggressive counterspeech. How do the interconnected race and gender identities of the person posting counterspeech and the person viewing it impact evaluations of the comment? Across two online experiments, we manipulate the race (Black or White) and gender (man or woman) of an individual whose tweet opposes ignorance about
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Is artificial intelligence more persuasive than humans? A meta-analysis Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2023-08-10 Guanxiong Huang, Sai Wang
The rapid deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) technology has enabled AI agents to take on various roles as communicators, such as virtual assistants, robot journalists, and AI doctors. This study meta-analyzed 121 randomized experimental studies (N = 53,977) that compared the effects of AI and human agency on persuasion outcomes, including perceptions, attitudes, intentions, and behaviors. The
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Too close for comfort: leveraging identity-based relevance through targeted health information backfires for Black Americans Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2023-07-28 Veronica Derricks, Allison Earl
Communicators frequently make adjustments to accommodate receivers’ characteristics. One strategy for accommodation is to enhance the relevance of communication for receivers. The current work uses information targeting—a communication strategy where information is disseminated to audiences believed to experience heightened risk for a health condition—to test whether and why targeting health information
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Curbing the decline of local news by building relationships with the audience Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2023-07-19 Natalie Jomini Stroud, Emily Van Duyn
In the struggle to find sustainable business models, many local news sites have turned to engaged journalism, which draws from social exchange theory and aims to build relationships with audiences. The causal impact of these initiatives is unclear, but important given that local news sites are critical information sources and face dire economic situations. In this study, 20 news sites were randomly
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Modulating moderation: a history of objectionability in Twitter moderation practices Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2023-06-30 Emillie de Keulenaar, João C Magalhães, Bharath Ganesh
With their power to shape public discourse under unprecedented scrutiny, social media platforms have revamped their speech control practices in recent years by building complex systems of content moderation. The contours of this tectonic shift are relatively clear. Yet, little work has systematically documented, examined, and theorized this process. This article uses digital methods and web history
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Computationally modeling mood management theory: a drift-diffusion model of people’s preferential choice for valence and arousal in media Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2023-06-13 Xuanjun Gong, Richard Huskey, Allison Eden, Ezgi Ulusoy
Mood management theory (MMT) hypothesizes that people select entertainment content to maintain affective homeostasis. However, this hypothesis lacks a formal quantification of each affective attributes’ separate impact on an individual’s media content selection, as well as an integrated cognitive mechanism explaining media selection. Here we present a computational decision-making model that mathematically
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Introduction to the special issue of social media: the good, the bad, and the ugly Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2023-06-09 Jennifer Stromer-Galley, Magdalena Wojcieszak, Nicholas John, Adrienne L Massanari
As social media scholarship pervades the communication discipline, it is time to reflect on the good, bad, and ugly of social media. The theme for this special issue is inspired in part by the 1966 film, “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.” Like its portrayal of the American Civil War, we again face deep divisions. The question is what role is social media helping us to heal those divides versus fragmenting
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Media stereotypes, prejudice, and preference-based reinforcement: toward the dynamic of self-reinforcing effects by integrating audience selectivity Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2023-06-08 Florian Arendt
The media portray various social groups stereotypically, and studying the effects of these portrayals on prejudice is paramount. Yet, audience selectivity—inherent within today’s high-choice media environments—has largely been disregarded. Relatedly, the predominance of forced-exposure designs is a source of concern. This article proposes the integration of audience selectivity into media stereotype
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Motivations underlying Latino Americans’ group-based social media engagement Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2023-05-25 Muniba Saleem, Dana Mastro, Meagan Docherty
Guided by the Social Identity Model of Collective Action, the current research utilizes a three-wave longitudinal study collected pre and post the 2020 U.S. Presidential election to examine the motivations underlying Latino Americans’ group-based social media engagement (N = 1,050). Results revealed that Time 1 group (Latino) identity increased Time 2 perceptions of social media as efficacious in improving
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Metrics in action: how social media metrics shape news production on Facebook Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2023-04-23 Subhayan Mukerjee, Tian Yang, Yilang Peng
Social media metrics allow media outlets to get a granular, real-time understanding of audience preferences, and may therefore be used to decide what content to prioritize in the future. We test this mechanism in the context of Facebook, by using topic modeling and longitudinal data analysis on a large dataset comprising all posts published by major media outlets used by American citizens (N≈2.23M
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Misperceptions in sociopolitical context: belief sensitivity’s relationship with battleground state status and partisan segregation Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2023-04-19 Qin Li, Robert M Bond, R Kelly Garrett
Numerous studies have shown that individuals’ belief sensitivity—their ability to discriminate between true and false political statements—varies according to psychological and demographic characteristics. We argue that sensitivity also varies with the political and social communication contexts in which they live. Both battleground state status of the state in which individuals live and the level
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Tweeting the Holocaust: social media discourse between reverence, exploitation, and simulacra Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2023-04-17 Motti Neiger, Oren Meyers, Anat Ben-David
This article explores the uses and abuses of traumatic memory within the context of the multifaceted discursive representation of the Holocaust on social media. Combining computational, quantitative, and qualitative methodologies, the article offers a comprehensive mapping of the mnemonic spectrum extending beyond memory work conducted during official commemorative occasions. To do so, we examined
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Broadcast information diffusion processes on social media networks: exogenous events lead to more integrated public discourse Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2023-04-12 Xuanjun Gong, Richard Huskey, Haoning Xue, Cuihua Shen, Seth Frey
Understanding information diffusion is vital to explaining the good, bad, and ugly impacts of social media. Two types of processes govern information diffusion: broadcasting and viral spread. Viral spreading is when a message is diffused by peer-to-peer social connections, whereas broadcasting is characterized by influences that can come from outside of the peer-to-peer social network. How these processes
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Resilience as a predictor for why some marital relationships flourished and others struggled during the initial months of COVID-19 Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2023-04-03 Abdullah S Salehuddin, Jesse King, Tamara D Afifi, Walid A Afifi
Using the theory of resilience and relational load, this study examined how married individuals’ baseline communal orientation (CO) and relational load (RL) at the beginning of the pandemic predicted their stress, conflict, mental health, and flourishing during quarantine. Using a Qualtrics Panel, married individuals (N = 3,601) completed four online surveys from April to June 2020. Results revealed
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“I love this photo, I can feel their hearts!” How users across the world evaluate social media portraiture Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2023-03-15 Tommaso Trillò, Blake Hallinan, Avishai Green, Bumsoo Kim, Saki Mizoroki, Rebecca Scharlach, Pyung Hwa Park, Paul Frosh, Limor Shifman
Portraits on social media are value-laden constructs. Whether documenting graduation or flexing in the gym, users express what they care about and present it for others to evaluate. Since “global” portrait genres are produced and consumed in different locales, their interpretation and evaluation may vary. We thus ask: What values do people identify in different types of social media portraits? Which
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Why we stopped listening to the other side: how partisan cues in news coverage undermine the deliberative foundations of democracy Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2023-03-15 Florian Arendt, Temple Northup, Michaela Forrai, Dietram Scheufele
Recent theorizing on deliberative democracy has put political listening at the core of meaningful democratic deliberation. In the present experiment (N = 827), we investigated whether news media can improve diverse political listening in the United States via a reduction in party cue salience. Although Republican (Democratic) participants showed a strong preference for listening to speeches given by
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Visual misinformation on Facebook Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2023-03-01 Yunkang Yang, Trevor Davis, Matthew Hindman
We conduct the first large-scale study of image-based political misinformation on Facebook. We collect 13,723,654 posts from 14,532 pages and 11,454 public groups from August through October 2020, posts that together account for nearly all engagement of U.S. public political content on Facebook. We use perceptual hashing to identify duplicate images and computer vision to identify political figures
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A comprehensive experimental test of the affective disposition theory of drama Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2023-02-27 Matthew Grizzard, C Joseph Francemone, Rebecca Frazer, Kaitlin Fitzgerald, Charles K Monge, Christina Henry
Using a three-act written narrative, a preregistered 2 (Act 1 Moral/Immoral Character Behavior) × 2 (Act 3 Moral/Immoral Character Behavior) × 2 (Positive/Negative Narrative Outcome) study provides a comprehensive test of affective disposition theory (ADT) that simultaneously manipulates disposition formation and outcome evaluation processes. We convert ADT’s conceptual hypotheses into testable path
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A longitudinal analysis of involuntary job loss and communication resilience processes during the COVID-19 pandemic Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2023-02-22 Kai Kuang, Steven R Wilson, Timothy Betts, Josephine K Boumis, Elizabeth A Hintz, Dennis DeBeck, Patrice M Buzzanell
This longitudinal study explored associations between communication resilience processes, job-search self-efficacy, and well-being for a sample of US adults who involuntarily lost their jobs during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on the communication theory of resilience (CTR), we tested four possible models regarding how the enactment of resilience processes would be associated with
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Inequities of race, place, and gender among the communication citation elite, 2000–2019 Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2023-02-17 Deen Freelon, Meredith L Pruden, Kirsten A Eddy, Rachel Kuo
A recent wave of studies has focused on the identities of communication scholars, quantifying the degree to which Whites, men, and Americans dominate the discipline.This study analyzes the communication citation elite (CCE)—a group of 1,675 highly cited scholars in communication research—in terms of race, gender, and country of employment over 20 years. Applying computational methods and content analysis
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Communication-based strategies to curb the overuse of low-value cancer screening Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2023-02-16 Soela Kim, Jennifer L Monahan, Young Kyung Do
Drawing upon the theory of reasoned action, the protection motivation theory, and theories of regret, this study proposes and examines three communication strategies to curb the overuse of low-value cancer screening: (a) highlighting negative affective consequences of screening; (b) providing information about diagnostic uncertainty, and (c) using a noncancer disease label. An online survey-based experiment
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Conversational dynamics of joint attention and shared emotion predict outcomes in interpersonal influence situations: an interaction ritual perspective Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2023-02-13 Wang Liao, Yoo Jung Oh, Jingwen Zhang, Bo Feng
This article addresses conversational dynamics in interpersonal influence situations. Drawing on interaction ritual theories and the research of interaction processes and patterns, we argue that sequential transition patterns of task and social–emotional acts can capture essences of conversational interaction ritual.A successful ritual then generates emergent solidarity and induces desired outcomes
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The communicative constitution of atomization: online prepper communities and the crisis of collective action Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2023-02-13 Emil Husted, Sine N Just, Erik Mygind du Plessis, Sara Dahlman
As environmental and societal crises increase in numbers, severity, and urgency, online forums for so-called “doomsday preppers” have seen a concomitant surge in membership. Beginning from the perspective of communicative constitution of organization, we explore the sociotechnical communities that emerge on such forums. Methodologically, we use netnographic observations to show that online prepper
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Watching Turkish television dramas in Argentina: entangled proximities and resigned agency in global media flows Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2023-02-06 María Celeste Wagner, Marwan M Kraidy
For decades, the theory of cultural proximity, which states that audiences prefer culturally proximal content (Straubhaar, 1991), has remained a major framework to explain audience preferences. We show how transnational media flows have challenged its contemporary applicability. To probe this, we focus on a recent, intriguing, and still understudied development: the success of Turkish television dramas
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Mutual socialization during shared media moments: U.S. LGBTQ teens and their parents negotiate identity support Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2023-01-20 Marie-Louise Mares, Yuchi Anthony Chen, Bradley J Bond
Social relational theory proposes that children and parents socialize each other, particularly when knowledge, beliefs, and identities diverge. For families with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer (LGBTQ) teens, identity-relevant media depictions may spark moments of mutual socialization, including attempts to mediate each other’s viewing and discussions of the teen’s identity. U.S. data from
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Exploring how cultural and structural elements relate to communal coping for separated Latina/o/x immigrant families Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2023-01-18 Roselia Mendez Murillo, Jennifer A Kam
Family immigration-related separation is incredibly stressful; however, Latina/o/x separated families might engage in communal coping to help mitigate those stressors. Utilizing the extended theoretical model of communal coping, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 20 family triads (i.e., separated parent, separated child, primary caregiver) who were experiencing or had recently experienced
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The development and validation of a measure of moral intuition salience for children and adolescents: The Moral Intuitions and Development Scale Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2023-01-14 Drew P Cingel, Marina Krcmar, Catherine Marple, Allyson L Snyder
In this article, we create and validate a measure of moral intuition salience developmentally appropriate for use among children and adolescents. This measure allows researchers to apply moral foundations theory and the model of intuitive morality and exemplars to child and adolescent moral development and media use, an important addition to the literature, as to date, this theory and its measurement
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Gendered times: how gendered contexts shape campaign messages of female candidates Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2023-01-10 Nichole M Bauer, Martina Santia
We develop and test a theory of gendered political times, which argues that the gendered political climate during an election shapes the extent to which female candidates emphasize feminine or masculine traits in campaign messages. We measure gendered electoral contexts through rigorous analyses of public opinion data and news media content of the top issues during an election, and we complement these
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Silenced on social media: the gatekeeping functions of shadowbans in the American Twitterverse Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2023-01-02 Kokil Jaidka, Subhayan Mukerjee, Yphtach Lelkes
Algorithms play a critical role in steering online attention on social media. Many have alleged that algorithms can perpetuate bias. This study audited shadowbanning, where a user or their content is temporarily hidden on Twitter. We repeatedly tested whether a stratified random sample of American Twitter accounts (n ≈ 25,000) had been subject to various forms of shadowbans. We then identified the
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Engagement with partisan Russian troll tweets during the 2016 U.S. presidential election: a social identity perspective Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2022-12-30 Stephen A Rains, Jake Harwood, Yotam Shmargad, Kate Kenski, Kevin Coe, Steven Bethard
Operatives working for the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) infiltrated social media with the goal of disrupting the 2016 U.S. presidential election. We investigate how these operatives or “trolls” leveraged partisan political identities in discussing presidential candidates and parties on Twitter. Adopting a social identity lens, we conceptualize retweeting troll content as a form of identity
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Whose media freedom is being defended? Norm contestation in international media freedom campaigns Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2022-12-29 Martin Scott, Mel Bunce, Mary Myers, Maria Carmen Fernandez
This article analyses how international advocacy campaigns approach and define media freedom, and what influences this process. It does this through a two-year case study of the Media Freedom Coalition—an intergovernmental partnership of over 50 countries—that included 55 interviews with key stakeholders, observations, and document analysis. This revelatory case sheds light on how norms of media freedom
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Gender differences and similarities in news media effects on political candidate evaluations: a meta-analysis Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2022-12-28 Tobias Rohrbach, Loes Aaldering, Daphne Joanna Van der Pas
How do different types of media coverage shape—and potentially bias—voter evaluations of women and men politicians? Theoretically reviewing 50 experimental studies and statistically synthesizing 671 evaluation outcomes from more than 23,000 participants, this meta-analytic review shows that gender bias in media-induced voter evaluations is conditional rather than universal. Our findings suggest that
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The political economy of digital profiteering: communication resource mobilization by anti-vaccination actors Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2022-12-24 Aliaksandr Herasimenka, Yung Au, Anna George, Kate Joynes-Burgess, Aleksi Knuutila, Jonathan Bright, Philip N Howard
Contemporary communication requires both a supply of content and a digital information infrastructure. Modern campaigns of misinformation are especially dependent on that back-end infrastructure for tracking and targeting a sympathetic audience and generating revenue that can sustain the campaign financially—if not enable profiteering. However, little is known about the political economy of misinformation
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Modeling news recommender systems’ conditional effects on selective exposure: evidence from two online experiments Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2022-12-23 Erik Knudsen
Under which conditions do news recommender systems (NRSs) amplify or reduce selective exposure? I provide the Recommender Influenced Selective Exposure framework, which aims to enable researchers to model and study the conditional effects of NRSs on selective exposure. I empirically test this framework by studying user behavior on a news site where the choice environment is designed to systematically
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The madness of misperceptions: evaluating the ways anger contributes to misinformed beliefs Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2022-12-08 Dustin Carnahan, Suhwoo Ahn, Monique Mitchell Turner
Drawing from established theoretical traditions in cognitive consistency, motivated reasoning, heuristic–systematic processing, and the anger-activism model, we extend existing work linking anger with misperceptions by specifying three distinct ways anger might contribute to the formation of misperceptions: Increasing reliance on partisan heuristics, influencing political information-seeking behavior
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News for life: improving the quality of journalistic news reporting to prevent suicides Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2022-11-28 Florian Arendt, Antonia Markiewitz, Sebastian Scherr
Despite much theorizing on the quality of journalism, there is limited actual empirical evidence for the effects of improved news quality on societal outcomes. This study provides such evidence for suicide reporting. News quality especially matters in this domain, as low-quality reporting can elicit “copycat” suicides (Werther effect). We developed and disseminated a web-based campaign promoting high-quality
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Social media use in the context of the Personal Social Media Ecosystem Framework Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2022-11-12 Michael C Carter, Drew P Cingel, Jeanette B Ruiz, Ellen Wartella
The rapid proliferation and maturation of social media platforms have led to numerous challenges in understanding the correlates of social media use among users. To advance this research, the present article proposes a new way to think about social media with the Personal Social Media Ecosystem Framework (PSMEF). This perspective defines social media as a user-centric digital environment made up of
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How iconic news images travel: republishing and reframing historic photographs in Israeli newspapers Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2022-10-29 Sandrine Boudana, Akiba A Cohen, Paul Frosh
Iconic photographs are symbolically dense images characterized by broad circulation over time and recognition by large publics. Following this definition, we track the republication and reframing, over nearly 70 years, of 15 news photographs previously identified as most recognized by the Israeli public. Distinguishing between “discrete icons” (singular photographs of particular scenes) and “aggregate
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Populist attitudes and politicians’ disinformation accusations: effects on perceptions of media and politicians Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2022-10-22 Jana Laura Egelhofer, Ming Boyer, Sophie Lecheler, Loes Aaldering
Populist politicians increasingly accuse opposing media of spreading disinformation or “fake news.” However, empirical research on the effects of these accusations is scarce. This survey experiment (N = 1,330) shows that disinformation accusations reduce audience members’ trust in the accused news outlet and perceived accuracy of the news message, while trust in the accusing politician is largely unaffected
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Network activated frames: content sharing and perceived polarization in social media Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2022-10-21 Natalia Arugute, Ernesto Calvo, Tiago Ventura
Our article describes how users’ decisions to share content alter the frequencies of the frame elements observed by social media peers. Changes in the frequency of distinct frame elements shape how individuals interpret, classify and define situations and events. We label this process Network Activated Frames (NAFs). We test the mechanisms behind NAF with an original image-based conjoint design that
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Do people learn about politics on social media? A meta-analysis of 76 studies Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2022-09-28 Eran Amsalem, Alon Zoizner
Citizens turn increasingly to social media to get their political information. However, it is currently unclear whether using these platforms actually makes them more politically knowledgeable. While some researchers claim that social media play a critical role in the learning of political information within the modern media environment, others posit that the great potential for learning about politics
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The effect of social approval on perceptions following social media message sharing applied to fake news Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2022-09-27 Joseph B Walther, Zijian Lew, America L Edwards, Justice Quick
A field experiment examined social approval in the form of Twitter “Likes” on individuals’ perceptions after retweeting a fictitious news story about a politician. The study incorporated research about feedback effects on self-perception online, partisan bias, and negativity principles. Participants read or retweeted a (verifiably false) news story via social media, and researchers appended systematic
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Concentration without cumulative advantage: the distribution of news source attention in online communities Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2022-09-22 Nick Hagar, Aaron Shaw
Many attention markets exhibit stable patterns of concentration, where a few producers attract and sustain a far greater share of the audience than others. This inequality often follows patterns consistent with cumulative advantage, a process in which performance compounds over time. Attention to news sources online possesses these characteristics; however, online audiences also fragment across many
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When “meaningless” means more: biographic resonance and audience appreciation of popular entertainment Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2022-09-15 James Alex Bonus, Judy Watts, C Joseph Francemone
Integrating predictions derived from the self-memory system and biographic resonance theory, the current project investigated the relationship between media-induced reminiscence and appreciation. In two experiments, undergraduates consumed popular entertainment from either their early adolescence or the present day. Study 1 (N = 406) featured music, and Study 2 (N = 405) featured movies. Both studies
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The social factors and functions of media use Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2022-09-13 Sara M Grady, Ron Tamborini, Allison Eden, Brandon Van Der Heide
A heuristic model aims to organize and synthesize the substantial body of work examining the social influences that shape media selection, experiences, and effects. The Social Influences and Media Use (SIMU) model describes three broad social forces (users’ internal social needs, their social environment, and the social affordances of media) and their recursive association with media use. This article
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Emerging hybrid networks of verification, accountability, and institutional resilience: the U.S. Capitol Riot and the work of open-source investigation Journal of Communication (IF 5.75) Pub Date : 2022-09-10 Stephen D Reese, Bin Chen
The violent spectacle of the January 6, 2021, U.S. Capitol riot provides a case study of how online open-source investigation helped identify members of the mob and provide deeper understanding of the day’s events. Considering this form of investigation as an emerging network for the hybrid institution of journalism, an assemblage extending beyond the newsroom, this study takes a mixed-method, networked