Local television news coverage of traumatic deaths and injuries

Controlling Nature: Weathercasts on Local Television News

Since discovering the shrinking politician sound bite, researchers have shown that TV news grew more journalist-centered since the 1960s. To explore how far journalistic authority extends, this study turns to the weather. We examine local coverage weekday mornings on three local stations before a national convention. Close qualitative reading, supplemented by content coding, compares weather rh...

Framing Responsibility on Local Television News

Acknowledgments: There are many who deserve thanks for their roles in the development of this project. First and foremost, this research would not have been possible without funding from the Jesse Bell duPont Fund. My Masters Thesis committee members were instrumental in providing ideas and fine tuning the finished product. The raw data provided by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, espe...

Does Local Television News Coverage Cultivate Fatalistic Beliefs about Cancer Prevention?

A substantial proportion of American adults hold fatalistic beliefs about cancer prevention despite evidence that a large proportion of cancer deaths are preventable. Several scholars suggest that news media coverage is one source of these beliefs, but scant evidence has been brought to bear on this assertion. We report findings from two studies that assess the plausibility of the claim that lo...

Race and the Misrepresentation of Victimization on Local Television News

Local Television and Newspaper Coverage of Political Advertising

How often do the news media cover the advertising of political candidates? And how do the characteristics of the news outlet, the media market, the race and the advertisements themselves influence the extent to which this ad amplification takes place? Examining Senate and gubernatorial campaign coverage by several newspapers and local television stations in five Midwestern states in 2006, we fi...