Discusses the formation of the Committee on Mass Communication and Political Behavior by the Social Science Research Council in 1974. Describes the committee's proposal to alleviate the need for broad-gaged coordinated studies covering the entire process and range of the media-political spectrum. (MH)

The two articles in this document deal with the political influence of the press during political campaigns. The first article explores the findings of agenda-setting studies, especially those comparing the agenda-setting effects of television and newspapers, and concludes that, since newspapers are the most important source of public agendas,…

This paper reviews the Westley-MacLean communication model, suggests some important research questions generated by it, and discusses recent research in mass media. A brief review of recent research suggests that the concept of agenda setting may be usefully superimposed on the Westley-MacLean model to reveal partial answers to some of these…

Reports on a study revealing that members of the Israeli Parliament elected after the 1973 Yom Kippur War showed a higher level of exposure to the news media, and a greater appreciation of the media's contribution to their knowledge of public opinion, than members elected before the war. (GW)

States that the system of local political journalism has become fragile and that steps should be taken to remediate the situation, such as developing tax incentives that invite television news, distributed in nonbroadcast form, to enter the arena of local political information. (DF)

A cohort analysis of data gathered in three national election surveys (1956, 1968, 1980) was used to study the effect of media use on political knowledge, which was divided into knowledge of issues, personalities, and political parties. Knowledge levels were calculated by creating indices from open-ended questions about why a person liked or…

Reports on an investigation focusing on the interrelationships of certain media and nonmedia variables (including newspaper, television, and candidate image variables) that appeared to be operating in a way that influenced the outcome of 23 Texas mayoral races. (Author/GT)

A review of research on the roles played by the mass media and the political parties during the agenda-setting stage of political activity in the United States indicates that the mass media have assumed some of the informing and issue-initiating functions generally understood to be performed by political parties. It seems desirable to develop an…

Since the classic Columbia University studies conducted in the 1940s, the role of the mass media in modern U.S. politics has been the subject of debate among political scientists. This paper contributes to that debate by examining news media coverage of American national political institutions: the presidency, Congress, and the Supreme Court. A…

Print journalism and journalism research have contributed many concepts, principles, and communication techniques to the field of political communication. An examination of the indexes of "Public Opinion Quarterly,""Journalism Quarterly," and the "Journal of Communication" through the mid-1960s indicates the evolution of the study of print media…

The papers in this edited volume on the directions in mass communication research deal with two broad questions: What is the current state of knowledge with respect to the area in question? And what might be the most fruitful directions for future research? The nine articles include: (1) an attempt to structure the field of mass communication; (2)…

On 9 September 1976, the Aspen Institute Program on Communications and Society, the League of Women Voters, and the Post/Newsweek Broadcast Stations sponsored a public meeting in New York. The subject of the meeting was politics and television; the participants were leading political advertisers, journalists, and researchers. This monograph…

This paper presents a conceptual analysis of bias and outlines the complexity and subtlety of the questions engulfing bias by sorting out views of bias that have been implicit in debates about the media, assessing the scientific value of these competing views in identifying and understanding bias in the media, offering an alternative view which is…

The results presented in this article are but a portion of the information gathered in a larger survey examining the relative roles of "selective exposure" to and "selective retention" of political advertising during the 1972 presidential election. Random samples in two metropolitan areas in different regions of the country (Atlanta, Ga., n=281;…