The studys purpose was to discover if two Louisiana newspapers gave Louisiana State Universitys football team more favorable coverage than that of the team from Southern University, a historically black university. A content analysis of articles published in The Advocate (Baton Rouge) and the Times-Picayune (New Orleans) from the 1995 and 1998 seasons when Southern Universitys team accomplished greater success than LSUs team, and the 2003 season when both teams won national championship titles revealed that while LSUs team did not receive more prominent coverage and praise than Southern Universitys team, racial stereotypes appeared throughout the 667 articles analyzed. Although each team has a predominant number of black players, characteristics stereotypical of white players (intelligence, hard work) were used to describe LSUs football team, which represents a predominantly white university. Characteristics stereotypical of black players (athletic ability) were used in describing Southerns football team, which represents a historically black university. Although there was not significantly more black stereotypes used to describe Southern than LSU, LSU players were framed significantly more often as intelligent and hard working than were Southern players. These findings are consistent with modern racism theory.

This is a follow up study to a 2000 report, which measured and compared Illinois state legislators attitudes and perceptions toward constituent e-mail, and its impact on personal political agendas. Along with measuring attitudes, this study sought to measure and compare the impact of advances in e-mail technology on Illinois legislators use of e-mail as a political tool of communication. The panel comparison consisted of 59% of respondents who participated in both the 2000 and the 2004 study. A survey conducted in February 2000 showed that 89% of Illinois legislators had an active e-mail address, but only 65% of those legislators agreed that they were using e-mail to communicate with constituents, albeit very infrequently. Legislators inability to determine the origin of e-mail negatively affected constituent e-mails impact on legislators personal political agendas. Despite this minimal impact, legislators indicated a strong future reliance on e-mail as a form of communication. Improvements in e-mail technology, especially filtering systems like Echo-mail, could greatly affect legislators attitudes and perceptions, thus changing constituent e-mails impact on legislators political agendas. This study aspires to gauge the impact of advancing e-mail technology on Illinois legislators perceptions and attitudes toward constituent e-mail.

The purpose of this thesis was to determine whether online versions of printed magazines shared an overall purpose. Guided by grounded theory, interviews were conducted of publishers and staff members from the Web sites of 15 printed magazines. The analysis of the interviews suggested that the overall purpose of online versions of magazines is marketing of the printed magazine, and that the sites also are intended to accomplish a number of secondary purposes.

This study is a content analysis of newspaper coverage of baseball and steroids. The data are a random sample from four newspapers: Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Washington Post. The period under study consists of 77 weeks, from April 10th, 2003, to December 9th, 2004. The results supported four hypotheses and negated one. Analysis showed that the issue of baseball and steroids was not institution-driven news; it was the result of governmental action, events outside of government, and local interest. The number of stories rose after governmental action. It also rose after an event, but faded away quickly from the news. Other findings indicated that political reporters rely on government sources more than sports reporters do. They rely as heavily on sports and professional sources as they do on government sources. The results took the form of descriptive statistics. For statistical significance, the study used SPSS software to run an F-test and a paired-sample t-test.

Crime news is an important component of local news. A literature review suggested that the medias coverage of crime news can reveal vital information about media routines and biases. The main issue in this study is race and the media. The subtext of crime news and how the media cover different races when dealing with crime can speak to the larger issues of race and the media. The primary focus of this study was to examine how the media cover victims of murder, but more specifically to investigate any differences that may exist in how they cover White and Black victims. The study also looked for differences in coverage according to gender and social class. A content analysis looked at articles about homicide victims from The Advocate. Interviews with reporters were conducted to determine how these reporters approach and cover murders. Interviews with police media relations officers revealed how these officers disseminate information. This study concluded that the media give White murder victims more prominent coverage than Black victims and female victims better coverage than male victims. The content analysis demonstrates that those who are most likely to be victimized, Black males, receive the least prominent coverage.

An experiment with 98 participants was conducted to explore the effects of government versus multiple sources on perceived credibility and interest when applied to the same risk stories. It also analyzed the effects of source treatment on participants' assessment of government credibility and source reasonableness. The study investigated the effects of demographic characteristics of participants (age, gender, media use) on the same variables, and tried to determine if there was any statistical correlation between the two dependent variables of credibility and interest. It also analyzed the effects of human-interest reports on credibility and interest. Overall, the study found that participants who read stories with multiple sources (government, industry, expert), perceived the risk stories (two about HIV epidemic, and two about coastal erosion in Louisiana) as more credible and more interesting than the participants who received only government sources. Age appeared to affect the two dependent variables, as well as media use and the anecdotal (human-interest) frame. The study also found that participants liked and believed the health stories more than the environmental stories.

The research undertaken in this study explores five years of the Louisiana Office of Tourism's public relations campaign to attract Canadian visitors to Louisiana. The study considers how the campaign's organizers used the cultural bond between French-speaking Canadians and Louisiana to attract Canadians to Louisiana. The study also examines how important the public relations strategy of highlighting the cultural bond between host and tourist was in attracting Canadian visitors to the state. In addition, the study uncovers whether or not campaign organizers considered the impact their campaign would have on Louisiana's Cajun citizenry. The research method employed was the case study method. Interviews were conducted with campaign organizers, and a case description was used to organize and analyze the data. The findings of the study show that the campaign's planners segmented the Canadian market into two distinct demographics, French-speaking Canadians and English-speaking Canadians. In its campaign to attract French-speaking Canadians to the state, highlighting the cultural bond between the two regions was vital to the campaign's success. The strategy included the hosting of a year-long celebration of the state's French heritage as well as a mammoth Cajun family reunion and event sponsorships throughout French-speaking Canada. Ultimately, the Louisiana Office of Tourism concluded that its campaign positively impacted the state's Cajun community, both economically and culturally. For their part, representatives of the Cajun community expressed concern about the campaign. Specifically, they said they believed the way in which Cajuns were sometimes portrayed in the campaign served to perpetuate stereotypes. Lastly, the study shows that the campaign jibed with one of the four tourism public relations models developed by prominent tourism public relations scholar, Don Stacks. Stacks translated the four historic models of public relations developed by J. Grunig for application to the tourism industry. The campaign is a clear example of Stacks' two-way asymmetric model, the research shows.

Some contemporary theories in political science maintain that public lobbying is merely an expression of latent and resolute public opinion that is communicated to policymakers. Other theories contend that the public is highly manipulable and that public lobbying by extension can be considered a form of strategic framing that takes place through the news and paid media. Both theoretical approaches specify a function for words or text but are silent on the influence of photographs or images. In this dissertation, I hypothesize that environmental public lobbying operates as strategic framing and that text and photographs have unique and discrete effects on public opinion and policy action. In a study on the effects of greenwashing, I examine how photographs and text influence aggregate public concern for the environment, public preferences on specific public problems and congressional committee action on environmental issues. Time series agenda-setting models show that photographs and text do have differential effects on public salience and policy action: public concern is largely compelled by words, whereas photographs drive policy attention. In a related experiment, findings suggest that images may directly influence specific policy preferences, but that there is no evidence of exclusively photographic framing effects. Words on the other hand are capable of directly changing opinions and also show evidence of framing effects.

This qualitative study featured 33 in-depth interviews of college-aged, African-American women and offers baseline exploratory data about how a majority cultural artifact like televised depictions become utilized in the everyday lives of an underrepresented group in media studies. This research represents one of a few studies to explore how black females decode and utilize TV content, and offers a new theoretical framework to explain informants' decoded receptions, influence and utility of television. An inductive analysis of interview narratives found that viewers use TV content like a looking-glass to understand how they are seen by others and where they fit in the larger social arena. Television's normative cultural reflections are received, decoded, absorbed and self-applied to improve or enhance the social acceptability of black, female interpretive group members. The incidental lessons learned from the television mirror suggest that changing or reinventing oneself based on information gathered from TV content enhances viewers' satisfaction with themselves. Through TV transcripts black female informants in this study learn how they might improve their personal images to assimilate better into the social and professional circles of Caucasian-American lifestyles. Television's ubiquitous nature warrants a closer look at its influence and utility on TV audiences. This study posits that unwitting social and personal reasons promote the heavy television viewing behavior of African-American interpretive group members.

The news media are the main channel for public relations practitioners to get messages across to their publics. Getting their news or information materials used in the media is, therefore, a key professional responsibility for public relations practitioners. In an Asian country like Indonesia, this practice constitutes one of the more important parts of pubic relations practices. However, there has been little research conducted on predictive factors especially as concerns taking into account different factors together regarding Indonesian journalists uses of public relations news materials, since it is the largest nation in the Southeast Asian region, and no known academic public relations research of the subject has been done till now. The literature related to this study primarily examines how journalists professional roles, news values, informal relations between journalists and public relations practitioners, and business pressures predict Indonesian journalists uses and acceptance of public relations news materials. This thesis then employed survey methods to obtain data from Indonesian journalists working for national newspapers and television broadcasts in the capital city of Jakarta. The news value factor comes first in predicting Indonesian journalists uses and acceptance of public relations materials; the journalists also take their news organizations business interests seriously into their consideration. In addition, this study supports the suggestion that informal relations between practitioners and journalists could play a significant role in the use and acceptance of public relations news materials. The results do indicate that envelope journalism, or positive coverage provided by journalists in exchange for cash payment, is embraced by public Indonesian relations practitioners and journalists. However, this study finds its influence is not as significant as the fundamental tenets in journalism. The findings suggest that public relations activities in Indonesia comprise an important part of a set of complex media practices.