This dissertation investigates the historical development of the right-to-know concept in the Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-know Act (EPCRA) of 1986. It starts with the use of words during the American Revolution, words capacious or general enough to later include the modern right-to-know idea. It also traces the real emergence of the right-to-know concept during the Cold War years of the 1950s and 1960s, including the enactment of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) in 1966. Some of the limitations of the FOIA are discussed here, limited as it was and is by nine broad "exemptions" to the release of information by the federal Executive Branch. This study deals with an important legislative response to environmental disasters and near-disasters, with the aid of the Anti-Toxic and Environmental Justice movements of the late 20th century and ending with the enactment of EPCRA in 1986 and its effects in subsequent decades. This historical account also provides a brief analysis on how the legislation based on the right-to-know principle opened opportunities for the field of communication, especially environmental risk communication. EPCRA was the first federal law in the United States to fully embrace the right-to-know approach to public policy, also known as regulation through revelation. The right-to-know approach is based on the ideas of self-governance and public participation in the decision-making process. EPCRA has served as a model for more than 80 countries, which adopted laws based on the right-to-know principle in different levels since EPCRA‘s enactment.

The study contributes to the understanding of how technology adoption effects organizations in structural and procedural operations. Specifically, this investigation was motivated by the perceived need to understand how digitization and networking technology is affecting how a community newspaper is produced. At its core, this study seeks to provide a foundation to focus efforts to understand what digitization and networking technologies mean to the practice of community newspapers by first making it clear what is happening. By establishing a framework of distinct identification for the phenomenon, more accurately aimed study of it can begin to occur. This, in turn, can be helpful in shaping the process of studying similar conditions in other professional arenas. The study provides a detailed qualitative analysis of the practical effect of digitization and computer networking technology on community newspapers. To guide this process, the study established clear working definitions for the key components; community newspaper, digitization and networking technology and effect. The study defined a community newspaper as any print news publication organization, regardless of circulation size or geographic location, which does not publish on consecutive days and which has as its primary editorial and advertising focus local content. Digitization and networking technologies were seen to encompass the range of technologies that exist to render information into digital form and to facilitate its transfer in digital form from one point to another. Effect was considered distinctly practical, the results of the technology on the process of producing the newspaper. The study reveals the currently limited scope of research related to digitization and computer networking technology and community journalism. The study explores three individual cases to understand accurately and in detail the effect of digitization and networking technology on each community newspaper studied. Analysis of the data collected from each case study established the actual presence and identity of the digitization and networking technology in the community newspaper, and a detailed understanding of the observable effect of this technology on the processes of producing the newspaper product. Strong commonality in the findings of the three cases suggested that technology adoption has an effect on organizational structure as well as performance processes for incorporated participants.

The study found consumers hold different types of business role schema. When participants viewed values advocacy advertisements, those who held socially oriented schema were more sensitive to the company’s prior perception (called individual company schema in this paper) on evaluating the sponsor’s motives than those who held business oriented schema. Sponsors’ perceived motives had influence on evaluating attitude toward and trustworthiness of the sponsor. Issue involvement significantly interacted with perceived motives. High-issue involvement subjects were more sensitive to perceived motives on the perceptions of the sponsor (trustworthiness and attitude) than low-issue involvement subjects. Issue involvement was also significantly interacted with the attitude toward the sponsor on purchase intention; when subjects had a high level of issue involvement, they became sensitive to the perception of attitude toward a sponsor when evaluating their purchase intentions. However, low-issue involvement consumers were less sensitive to the perception of attitude toward a sponsor when evaluating their purchase intention. Interestingly, the study showed the different results between the two designs, McDonald’s ad and Miller’s ad, which were discussed in this paper. Finally, the current study demonstrated that values advocacy advertising can achieve both goals from social perspective (enhancing socially conscious behavior) and from business perspective (purchase intention). Further, interestingly, self-efficacy toward the advocated actions was found to be an important factor influencing consumers’ purchase intention. The results suggest that consumers’ perceptions toward advocated action by a sponsor and evaluation of their purchase intention for products produced by a sponsor are likely to interact together rather than consumers process those two different goals separately.

Ethnocentrism is the experience of seeing one’s own culture as superior to other cultures. It is an element of intercultural communication that has the potential to greatly affect how one communicates. As the cultures of the world are in increasingly close contact, understanding the significance of ethnocentrism as related to intercultural communication competence, intercultural willingness to communicate and elements of international interaction (i.e., amount of intercultural interaction, desire for intercultural interaction, and satisfaction with intercultural interaction) becomes an important process in both interpersonal and organization communication. To test the relationships among these variables, 304 undergraduate students were surveyed using a previously designed ethnocentrism scale, intercultural communication competence scale, intercultural willingness to communicate scale, and self-designed questions to measure intercultural interaction. The results indicate that ethnocentrism, intercultural communication competence, and intercultural willingness to communicate are collectively predictive of the amount of, the desire for, and satisfaction with intercultural interaction. Individually, ethnocentrism was negatively predictive of the desire for and satisfaction with intercultural interaction. Intercultural communication competence was positively predictive of the amount of and the desire for intercultural interaction. Intercultural willingness to communicate was positively predictive of the desire for intercultural interaction. In addition, the results of the study, interpretation of the data analysis, study implications, and directions for future research are discussed.

Podcasting has become something of a buzzword in several different circles from education to entertainment. It is being used as a way to disseminate lectures at major universities. Government officials are using it to broadcast messages to their citizens. It is also a new venue for independent artists and Internet users to generate publicity and to express themselves creatively. Yet, very little research on podcasting has been published. This thesis explores podcasting, and the differences between the print edition of a national newspaper, The Washington Post, and two of its podcasts by asking: How does the political coverage of the 2008 presidential primary in The Washington Post print edition compare with the coverage in its podcasts? This research question is explored through a pilot study utilizing a content analysis of the 2008 presidential primary campaign coverage beginning in September 1, 2007, though December 31, 2007. The content analysis covered writing style, lead type, number of quotes, and main and secondary focus in each newspaper article and podcast segment. The results of the pilot study found that other than the visual versus audio nature of the two media platforms, there was little difference in how the news organization covered the primaries.

This study examined the influence of government, politicians and advertisers on the content of Croatian Public Television (HTV) news. This research examined whether HTV has remained state TV and under as strong government influence as it was in the former Yugoslavia? Or has it transformed into public TV, which has been the goal since Croatia gained independence in 1991? Or has it become commercial TV? The data were gathered through 10 semi-structured in-depth interviews with journalists and producers in the HTV news department and through a content analysis of HTV’s main newscast, Dnevnik. The major findings suggest there is still a lot of coverage of politics in Dnevnik, but not as much as in the past. The political influence has been stronger again in the last three years; however, self-censorship is a bigger problem at HTV today than actual censorship. The results indicate the big advertisers like the phone company Croatian Telecom or the gas company Ina influence the news programming at HTV, especially Dnevnik. The conclusion is that HTV today is state TV with commercial influences.

This study observed the news coverage of three historically significant and especially emotional national tragedies – the September 11th terrorist attacks, the Space Shuttle Columbia explosion, and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina – specifically regarding front page design, an increasingly important yet underrepresented facet of journalism research. Past research regarding newspaper page design on typical news days and research regarding the atypical, emotional coverage of the three tragedies fueled the researcher’s hypotheses that type, photographs, and layout on front pages covering the tragedies would be significantly different than those on typical news days. In an examination of 436 front pages covering the three national tragedies, the study measured headline word count, headline capitalization, photo count, article count, and the area occupied by photographs, headlines, and text relative to either the entire page or the areas above and below the fold. The study found that headlines tended to be more brief than usual, and 9/11 headlines tended to be fully capitalized, suggesting that headlines were powerful on front pages by being “briefly spoken, yet echoing loudly.” Headlines and photos were not buried on the front page, as they tended to occupy more space above the fold, and news articles, while fewer in number, tended to occupy more space below the fold, suggesting that the dramatic headlines and photos “introduced” readers to the page and led them to read the articles. Future research should examine the front page design of other historically significant events, as well as the front page design of newspapers covering typical news days. Future research also should investigate front page layout as a concept of page design (instead of being considered synonymous with design) and layout’s linking function among other design elements.

Neustadt transformed academia’s fundamental conception of presidential leadership by arguing that extra-constitutional resources such as strategic persuasion, public prestige, and professional reputation are more critical to effective presidential governance than the simple application of the president’s constitutional powers. Professional reputation, which refers to political elites’ appraisals of the president as a leader, is a central yet scholastically understudied pillar of Neustadt’s theory. Neustadt argued that the “echoes” of a president’s professional reputation typically emerge from the newspaper columns of prominent political commentators (1990, p. 53-54). In essence, newspaper columns function as public forums where elites engage each other in interactive dialogue regarding their assessments of presidential leadership. The president’s professional reputation literally emerges from the give and take of those public discussions, thus the president’s reputation can be regarded as a socially constructed concept that emanates fundamentally from a communicative process (Denton & Hahn, 1986; Graber, 1981; Littlejohn, 2002). The purpose of this study is to explore through qualitative methods the opinion-editorial section of The New York Times in order to discover the thematic structure of President George W. Bush’s professional reputation as it relates to his stewardship of Iraq policy in the fall of 2002. In accordance to the tenets of Neustadt’s theory, this study identified “a dominant tone, a central tendency” in elite assessments of President Bush’s leadership on Iraq policy within the specified population of elite writings (Neustadt, 1990, p. 53).

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the media and audience frames used in print media coverage of Mountain Justice Summer and mountaintop removal. The study synthesizes aspects of framing theory of media effects as described by other media scholars in an attempt to create a working model to evaluate media and audience frames. As this study will show, the media use an overall negative frame in the coverage of Mountain Justice Summer, but also have an overall negative frame in the coverage of mountaintop removal. Based on these findings, the study suggest activists with Mountain Justice Summer helped to frame the issue of mountaintop removal by staying on message, and the overall source for negative perception of activists came from industry representatives or community members. Evaluation of audience frames shows an overall positive perception of Mountain Justice Summer activists and opposition to mountaintop removal. This finding suggests a weak connection between media frames and audience frames, but also allows for further evaluation of the framing theory of media effects.

Weather is important to local television newscasts, so it is becoming important to expand research regarding this area. It is important to understand why certain people are chosen to present the weather on-air. Currently, three different kinds of degrees seem to be the choice for the people who are presenting the weather on television. On-air weather forecasters who work for the local affiliated stations of ABC, CBS, FOX, and NBC networks tend to have degrees in meteorology, communications, or broadcast meteorology. Which one of these degree categories is preferred and why? Two predictors come to the forefront to answer this question: severe weather and market size. Market size long has been a defined term due to the A.C Nielsen ranking of television markets in the United States from 1 to 210, then is grouped into categories of large, medium, and small. Severe weather is defined for this research as having the frequent occurrences of blizzards, tornados, or hurricanes. Both severe weather and market size are statistically significant factors associated with the educational degrees on-air weather forecasters possess. Not only are they significant factors correlated with the degree type, they also show that different areas (calm vs. severe weather) may correlate with hiring people with certain types of degrees. The threat of severe weather leads to local-affiliated television stations hiring more meteorologists to present weather on-air. Large markets and medium markets also are significantly more likely than small markets to use meteorologists to deliver the weather. The results of this thesis point to some important areas that describe the educational qualities of the on-air weather forecaster.