Qualitative Studies 1997 Abstracts
Qualitative Studies Division
Scratching the Surface: The New York Times Coverage of the Mothers of Plaza De Mayo, 1977-1997 • Carolina Acosta-Alzuru, University of Georgia • Scholars have looked at the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo from a historical, political, feminist and rhetorical perspective. But how have the media presented the Mothers? Through textual analysis, this paper examines The New York Times coverage of the Mothers of Plaza de Mayo from 1977 until today exploring how the Mothers have been constructed in this major U.S. newspaper. This construction is consistent with previous research in the area of news coverage of women. It is superficial and tends to simplify and trivialize the Mothers and the issues involved, presenting them as either victims or demons while demeaning their importance as interlocutors of reality.
Al-Amiriya, February 13,1991 Ñ Broadcasting Standards of Violence in a Time of War • Geri M. Alumit, Michigan • British television news stations used graphic video during its coverage of the Al-Amiriya bombings in Baghdad, Iraq on February 13, 1991. This study uses oral histories, video archive footage and document research to recreate the news coverage on that day and to analyze why the level of violence depicted on TV did not insult Britain’s viewing audience.
Undercover Reporting, Hidden Cameras and the Ethical Decision-Making Process: A Refinement • James L. Aucoin, University of South Alabama • The controversy over the ABC-Food Lion undercover reporting case among media practitioners and the public emphasizes that the issue of whether such reporting is ethical remains unresolved. This paper argues that the ethical decision-making model suggested by many media ethicists and used by many journalists is flawed in that it is based on the assumption that undercover reporting and hidden cameras are primarily information gathering tools, when in fact they are better positioned as story-telling techniques. Once undercover reporting is repositioned in this way, the Principle of Generic Consistency as outlined by moral philosopher Alan Gewirth is adapted to offer a higher standard for deciding when to use hidden cameras and other deceptive reporting techniques. Gewirth’s principle offers a rational justification for arguing that in certain instances Ñ when public freedom and/or well-being is in danger Ñ deceptive reporting techniques are not unethical if reporters have gathered enough evidence that the target of the investigation has indeed violated a moral law.
The Construction of Social Space in an Alternative Radio Text: Resistant Praxis and Hegemonic Rhetoric at KUNM-FM, Albuquerque • Warren Bareiss, Shorter College • This paper is part of a larger ethnographic study that I have conducted on KUNM FM, a noncommercial radio station in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The fundamental issue of the overall study is how an imagined community is constructed through discourse occurring at the station. This paper examines a specific KUNM program to illustrate how discursive patterns not only construct New Mexican communal space, but also privilege an a priori social hierarchy which is contradictory to organizational principles of KUNM and other alternative media.
Between Critical Layers: Lessons From Theories Within Histories of Communication Study • Ralph J. Beliveau, University of Iowa • Histories of the communication study as it evolved since the 1950s often explain the field through biographies and flow charts of influence, but they rarely justify such an explanation. This critique of three other histories examines them for their justifications, and uses them to critically reflect on the field’s communication about itself, particularly on the uses of theory, the (dis)unity of an intellectual ground, and the relationship between communication and learning.
Polity and Identity: Scotland’s Struggle for Cultural Independence and the Lesson of Quebec • Douglas Bicket, University of Washington • This paper comparatively examines the positions of the arts and mass media in Scotland and Quebec. It argues that, in spite of marginally increased funding for domestic cultural industries in recent years, Scotland’s separate cultural identity remains under threat in the absence of an independent, or at least substantially autonomous, Scottish polity. The example of Quebec shows that strong political and cultural institutions are needed to preserve small cultures under threat from hegemonizing external forces.
American Myth, Literary Journalism and The Last Cowboy’s Henry Blanton • Susan Blue, University of St. Thomas • Commentary on American Western myth emerges from Jane Kramer’s The Last Cowboy. This paper traces landscape and language in this piece of literary journalism, examining the myth’s roots in early American rhetoric. This cultural exploration also reveals pertinent gender tensions. In revisiting the cowboy myth and its formation, it is possible to isolate the changes in Western myth that Kramer shows, and to explore the myth’s contemporary ramifications.
After the Second Wave: Toward an Interpretation of the American Feminist Antipornography Movement • Carolyn, Bronstein, University of Wisconsin-Madison • This paper analyzes how the first American feminist antipornography organization, Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media (WAVPM), constructed a discourse about pornography in the mid-1970s. I trace historical links between antipornography and nineteenth century social purity campaigns, and try to show how these campaigns reflected the political, social and cultural circumstances of their organizers. In the case of antipornography, I argue that the movement’s basic ideas about sex and sexuality grew out of the second wave critique of male sexual violence, disillusionment with the «sexual revolution» and the emergence of political lesbianism. I offer a thematic analysis of the WAVPM newsletter, NewsPage, published monthly from 1977 to 1983, and conclude that the organization’s campaign against pornography ultimately mirrored social purity by restricting the definition of acceptable female sexual behavior.
Newsrooms Under Siege: Crime Coverage, Public Policy and the Louisiana Pizza Kitchen Murders • Christopher P. Campbell • This paper is a textual analysis of coverage by The Times-Picayune and WWL-TV (New Orleans’ CBS affiliate) that followed the murder of three employees of a French Quarter restaurant. It views the coverage as a microcosm of a news process that provides shallow interpretations of events and leads to ineffective public policy. It argues that the news media’s interpretation of events routinely strips them of significant historical, social, cultural and political implications.
Reflections on the Project of (American) Cultural Studies • James W. Carey, Columbia University • This essay reviews and evaluates cultural studies as program of qualitative research in communications. It provides one rendition of cultural studies from an American perspective and explores the relationship between this work and its philosophical presuppositions and the parallel work in England, particularly at the Center for the Study of Contemporary Culture. It also examines some of the tensions between cultural studies and political economy and tries to provide an ethical/political justification for one particular outlook within this broad arena of scholarship.
Context and the Developed World: Newspaper Coverage of Crisis in Scotland and Belgium • Christian Christensen, University of Texas • This study is a qualitative analysis of 34 New York Times articles on massacres in both Scotland and Belgium in 1996. The study examines coverage of these developed countries within the context of previous academic works on the inadequacies of coverage from developing (Third World) nations. The results of the study, examined with issues of proximity in mind, indicate that the NYT provided contextualized and highly developed stories from the two nations.
Ready, Aiming, and Firing Blanks: The Office of Civilian Defense Targets African-Americans During World War II • Caryl Cooper, University of Alabama • By the time the United States entered World War II, public relations was well on its way to becoming an integral part of government relations with the public. This case study examines how the Office of Civilian Defense executed those elements deemed necessary for a successful campaign. This study also examines how race, discrimination and public opinion impacted the government’s attempts to communicate with a special public during a time of national crisis.
Organizational Rhetoric as Performance Art: A Dramatistic Study of Corporate Communication, Public Relations and Fund Raising • Margaret Duffy, Austin Peay State University • In a case study of the public relations, fund-raising, and organizational communication of a not-for-profit organization, this article uses symbolic convergence theory, an approach rarely deployed in examining these activities. The study examines internal and external communication processes as social constructions of reality and argues that the dramas and stories through which organizational members make sense of their organizational world are manifested in the communicative products and processes of the collectivity.
On the Relevance of Standpoint Epistemology to the Practice of Journalism: The Case for Strong Objectivity • Meenaksi Gigi Durham, University of Texas at Austin • This paper interrogates traditional notions of «objectivity» and its interpretation in conventional news reporting. I argue here that the underlying principles of objectivity devolve in practice to an epistemic relativism that fails to consider the validity of various truth claims. I propose an alternative of «strong objectivity» grounded in standpoint theory. I trace the arguments against scientific objectivity that parallel critiques of journalistic objectivity, then propose an alternative conception of praxis that could fulfill the liberatory goals of journalism.
Heroes, Villains and Twice-Told Tales: The Normative Effect of Journalism’s Worklore • Frank E. Fee Jr. University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill • Organizational communication theory, rhetorical theory, and popular culture theory provide a new framework for examining occupational lore’s power to create and maintain work cultures in news organizations. Folk heroes and antiheroes model behaviors salient to journalists’ views of their work processes and operating assumptions. The professional culture of journalists, reflected in heroes and villains, and the local newsroom culture, where the stories are told, in turn reveal tensions and problems in the practice.
Decontextualization of Hirohito: Historical Memory Loss in Docudrama Hiroshima • Koji Fuse, University of Texas at Austin • This paper is a discourse analysis of Showtime miniseries «Hiroshima,» aired in August 1995, to explore how Hirohito was depicted to suit the dominant ideology in line with the traditional conservative historical account of him as a robotic pacifist in contrast with aggressive Japanese military. The revisionist view of Hirohito, however, presents a very different picture of his prewar political power, aggressiveness, and disrespect of non-Japanese Asians, which were totally ignored in «Hiroshima.»
He Never Had a Chance: The U.S. Media’s Portrayal of Ross Perot’s Exclusion from the 1996 Debates • Eileen Gilligan, University of Wisconsin-Madison • This paper examines how Ross Perot, his party, and his campaign were portrayed in the U.S. media, especially during his fight to gain entry to the 1996 presidential candidates debate. Using a sample of approximately 120 media news stories and qualitative analysis, this paper explores the media’s use of routine practices, marginalizing devices, and their focus on individuals as hegemonic methods for supporting the two-party electoral system or the status quo.
Public Journalism and the Search for Democratic Ideals • Theodore L. Glasser, Stephanie Craft, Stanford University • Public journalism’s commitment to promoting and improving the quality of public life raises interesting and important questions about what this arguably new role for the press entails and what view of democracy it implies. This paper focuses on three areas where public journalism’s conception of the press and the press’s interest in self-governance appear to be most problematic. It concludes with a brief assessment of the prospects for a public purpose for a private press.
Anti-Drinking and Driving PSAs: Do They Have Any Meaning to Underage College Students? • Alyse R. Gotthoffer, University of Florida • This study qualitatively examines underage college students’ drinking behaviors and what meanings, if any, anti-drinking and driving public service announcements (PSAs) have to them. Results suggest many implications for PSA designers, including localization of PSAs, and the use of consequences more relevant to college students, such as being charged with a DUI.
Money Talks: The Television Promotional Text as Ideological Expression • Joseph Harry, Michigan State University • A rhetorical and political-economic analysis of 34 television promotional spots representing 18 different Fall primetime programs on the three major commercial broadcast networks shows how each promo is framed to project a certain storyline pertaining, to varying degrees, either to the nature of the upcoming program or to the nature of the network itself. The promo rhetoric reflects the political-economic interests of the network, thus each promo can be read as a form of ideological expression.
When the Numbers Don’t Add Up: The Framing of Proposition 187 Coverage in the Los Angeles Times • Peter Hart, Rutgers University • This paper examines coverage of California’s Proposition 187 ( 1994) in the Los Angeles Times by means of both the administrative and the critical research paradigms. In the end, the critical research methodology appears to be more thorough and intellectually satisfying, as it both offers and answers substantial questions concerning the Times coverage. The paper addresses the competing research methodologies in regard to both Proposition 187 and in a more general context.
Narrative Literary Journalism’s Historic and Gratuitous Resistance to Critical Closure • John Hartsock, Marist College • This paper examines how rhetorical concrete detail assures that narrative literary journalism will resist coming to critical closure. Even in the instance when they serve symbolic purposes their phenomenalist status will resist wholesale reification. Such tropes could be characterized as «subversively gratuitous.» But in particular, it is «flagrantly gratuitous» details that most forcefully resist critical closure, begging instead with unfulfilled meaning. The writings of Ernest Hemingway, Tom Wolfe, Edmund Wilson, and Erskine Caldwell are examined.
Oprah’s Book Club Radical Reading and Talk Show Literature • Ann Haugland, Middle Tennessee State University • Oprah Winfrey’s on-air book club has been a phenomenal success. Using transcripts, news articles about the club and theories of popular culture the paper identifies the ways that the book club challenges some established assumptions about books and reading in contemporary culture. The success of the club provides further evidence that the high/popular distinctions based on class or status of the consumers of culture or on the characteristics of the work are inadequate and seriously limit our understanding of the possibilities for books and reading. Oprah’s book club is remarkable because it suggests an alternative discourse about serious books and alternative uses for them.
Analysis of Physician Assisted Suicide in the New York Times From 1991-1996 • Robert K. Kalwinsky, University of Iowa • This research paper represents a first step toward contextualizing the study of Physician Assisted Suicide (PAS) within the framework of mass communications. An impassioned topic among certain groups, the incidence of PAS is apparently more prevalent than one would suspect. Save for accounts of Jack Kevorkian’s activities and a few contested cases, the media were initially silent in this regard. After defining terms and detailing relevant background material, a research proposal is set forth that utilizes textual analysis to trace the threads of developing accounts. Specifically, coverage of PAS in the New York Times over the past six years is analyzed to glean organizing principles that create cultural meanings for the practice.
Reading Presidential Candidate: A Semiotic Analysis of Televised Political Advertising in Korea • Soobum Lee, University of Oklahoma • This study examines and interprets the combined structure and content of televised political advertisements during the 1992 Presidential election in Korea, using the semiotics method. Semiotics is the study of underlying mechanisms by which signs convey meaning. Such studies can be applied to the case of televised political advertisements. As a result of this analysis, Kim Daejung emphasized change, while Kim Youngsam emphasized gradual reform with ordinary people. Consequently, Kim Youngsam received wide support from the voters, who preferred gradual reform to abrupt change. In conclusion, Kim Youngsam’s advertising represents a more commodificated image of the middle class. This type of advertising thus indicates that a successful presidential campaign depends on good image-marketing.
The Troubled Waters of Communication Research: Scylla and Charybdis in the Postmodern Era • Larry Z. Leslie, University of South Florida • Facing tight budgets and limited resources, many universities are watching their communications programs. A few have been discontinued; some have merged with other disciplines. Some say that the work communication departments do is not central to the mission of a university. Additionally, observers note our research is not high quality, not «scholarly.» This article critically examines some of the problems surrounding communications research; places communication research in a theoretical modernist paradigm; and calls for changes in the way communication scholars do their work, changes suggested by a postmodern culture.
Facts, Stories and the Creation of Worlds: An Analysis of Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s News for Kids • Elizabeth Pauline Lester, Usha Raman, University of Georgia • While recent textual analyses have focused on portrayals of Others in media, little critical research has looked at the socializing role of children’s media. In this paper we analyze the News for Kids section of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, a section that is targeted at children of upper-elementary through middle-school age. Our textual analysis uncovers five discursive strategies that NFK uses to construct images of Us (the preferred readers) and Other (different and marginalized groups, both international and local) in ways that sustain existing global and local socio-economic relationships and hierarchies.
News, Myth and Society: Mother Teresa as Exemplary Model • Jack Lule, Lehigh University • The purpose of this paper is to begin building a model that restores myth to a privileged place in studies of news and society. The paper first reviews the rich tradition that gave rise to comparisons of news and myth in the l950s and earlier. It briefly traces the strains of research that emerged from this tradition, particularly in the 1970s and 1980s. It offers reasons why this research seemingly has faltered in our times. And it proposes a perspective that might recapture and extend the insights provided by links between news and myth. Finally, the paper demonstrates the possibilities of the model by using myth to explore a case of news reporting, New York Times coverage of Mother Teresa.
Olympian Melodrama: The Excess of NBC’s 1996 Olympic Games • Christopher R. Martin, Bettina G. Fabos, University of Northern Iowa • This paper argues that with the decreasing relevance of the traditional geopolitical narratives in television Olympic coverage, Olympian melodrama had to be reinvented. Network storytelling thus turned to individuals and individual conflicts to increase the tension, drama and excitement of the Games. The authors critically analyze the 171.5 hours of NBC’s 1996 Atlanta Games coverage, and explain how the new melodramatic narrative polarized individuals Ñ oftentimes athletes from the same American team Ñ through a record number of «up close and personal» stories. The analysis also covers the pitfalls of NBC’s narrative strategy, and explains why so many watched the Olympics yet hated the coverage.
The Legacy of Popular Culture Movement: A Case of National Cinema in Korea • Eung-Jun Min, Rhode Island College • Korean National Cinema is a theoretical, politicized, and often underground cinematic practice and discourse that speaks out for people and provides a site for creating and experimenting new forms and contents. It has inspired many cinematic possibilities and opens the possibility of creating non-capitalist filmic practice. The whole process of national cinema, whether it is cinematic or non-cinematic practices, gives a new meaning to the viewing of films in general. This article discloses and closely examines the persistent series of binding interrelationships, continuities, and similarities that, alongside the breaks and differences, has made this movement a significant socio-political and cultural force in Korea.
A Show About Nothing?: Social Manners, Seinfeld and the Dense Web of American Civility • David P. Pierson, Pennsylvania State University • This paper examines how the popular TV series, Seinfeld reveals a deeply-held cultural ambivalence towards the changing social codes and manners of contemporary American society. Drawing on the works of Bourdieu, Bakhtin, and Elias, the paper argues that all societies have placed a great emphasis on social manners and customs. This paper also illustrates the benefits of analyzing popular cultural forms as interpretive sites for charting the evolving social manners that comprise American civility.
Paradoxes of the Information Age: Recasting the Book-Versus-Computer Debate • Judy Polumbaum, University of Iowa • This paper suggests that bipolar categorization Ñ e.g., bibliophiles vs. technophiles, traditionalists vs. futurists, optimists vs. pessimists Ñ is a poor way to order discussions about the nature and implications of new communications media. Through review and analysis of a selection of recent popular and scholarly literature related to the book, reading, knowledge and communication in the digital era, the paper pursues the notion that attitudes toward older and newer media are evolving conjointly, often on the basis of shared rather than divergent goals and priorities. Values discerned as important to both boosters and skeptics of new media Ñ comfort, communion, community and continuity Ñ are examined in terms of old and new media technologies.
Re-Covering the Homeless: Hindsights on the Joyce Brown Story • Jimmie L. Reeves, Texas Tech University • A reconsideration of what Morley Safer once called a moral fable for our time, this paper takes a radically-historical interpretive perspective to treat the Joyce Brown controversy as a significant moment in the flow of 246 television news reports broadcast between 1981 and 1988 that, collectively, gave expression to the Reagan-era homeless narrative.
Preaching to the Unseen Choir: African-American Elders Producing Public-Access Television • Karen Riggs, Robert Pondillo, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee • The authors interviewed five older African-Americans who have been involved in producing or appearing on public-access television shows in order to promote particular social causes. The study contends that religious identification, joined with a charismatic and purposeful personal style, motivated these elders to turn to public access as a pulpit for democracy. The authors conclude that public access is imperfect as an element of the public sphere but carries the potential for people to effect change in their communities.
A New Media Analysis Technique: An Ethical Analysis of Media Entertainment • Eileen R. Ringnalda, University of Iowa • This paper asserts the need for an ethical analysis of media entertainment texts and describes how it may be carried out. Just as other forms of media criticism are grounded in the disciplines of linguistics, psychology, and sociology, this media analysis technique is based on ethical principles and the evaluation of values communicated by media entertainment.
From Legitimacy Crisis to Opportunity: The Advertising Industry and the Art of Spin in the 1930s • Inger L. Stole, University of Wisconsin-Madison • The 1930s advertising industry faced a burgeoning consumer movement. This paper examines how the industry used public relations in order to contain criticism of advertising. The advertising industry constructed bogus pro-industry consumer groups and undermined the drive to provide critical consumer education in schools. The advertising industry effectively limited discussion about advertising, channeling all advertising criticism into forms that would not threaten advertising’s privileged position.
An Exploration of the Social, Political, Religious, and Economic Constraints to the Implementation of an Effective AIDS Prevention Program • Radhika Talwani, University of Florida • Until a cure for AIDS is found, prevention is the key, but health communication research states that effective AIDS/HIV prevention programs have not been implemented. Researchers and AIDS prevention program coordinators agree about what constitutes an effective AIDS prevention program. However, both groups discussed various obstacles to the implementation of such programs. This study found that the obstacles that are the most prevalent spring from the conservative movement that has been sweeping the nation since the 1980s.
Black, White and Read All Over: Racial Reasoning and the Construction of Public Reaction to the O.J. Simpson Criminal Trial Verdict • Lauren R. Tucker, University of South Carolina • This case study deconstructs the media frame of the racial divide used by the Chicago Tribune and the Chicago Defender define the public reaction to the October 3, 1995 Simpson criminal verdict. This frame analysis identifies differences and similarities between two newspapers, one mainstream and one Black, as they define, interpret and evaluate the public reaction to the Simpson’s acquittal.
Television and the Politics of Values: The Case of M*A*S*H • James H. Wittebols, Niagara University • As a long running situation comedy, «M*A*S*H» is an ideal vehicle for examining television’s politics and values. Four value orientations are presented to look critically at how: 1.) television lags behind value shifts occurring in society, 2.) television’s imperatives produce a focus on commercial and universal values, 3.) oppositional or counter cultural values are rarely portrayed, even in a show regarded as innovative and provocative and 4.) television stays within safe boundaries while reflecting some social tensions and contradictions.
Rethinking the Unintended Consequences: The Pursuit of Individualism in America Primetime Television Advertising • Joyce M. Wolburg, Marquette University, Ronald E. Taylor, University of Tennessee • A long-standing, unresolved issue concerns whether advertising messages merely reflect existing cultural values or construct new values. To reconsider the issue, this study examined primetime television advertising for expressions of individualism, the most basic cultural value in American society. Using a document analysis approach, four types of main message strategy and eight contextual categories emerged as elements that express individualism. These expressions showed that advertising portrayals often misrepresent what we know of the culture from census data. Conclusions were offered regarding advertising’s ability to construct new values.
Spokesperson as Agenda Builder: Framing the Susan Smith Investigation • Lynn M. Zoch, Columbia, Erin A. Galloway, Greater Columbia Chamber of Commerce • This paper analyzes the thematic frames used by Sheriff Howard Wells, the main police spokesman in the Susan Smith investigation. Three overlapping frames served to build the media coverage of the nine day investigation, keeping the focus of the media on efforts to achieve the safe return of the two missing children, and downplaying suspicions of Smith while police conducted parallel investigations. Wells’ characteristics as a successful source, and his use of strategic ambiguity in his statements are also noted.
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