Discusses conceptual problems with the traditional approach to the study of news bias; reports on a study conducted with 73 college students, which yielded data supporting the thesis that what news consumers see as biased news is often material that is discrepant with what they already believe. (GT)

A study investigated audience news comprehension, focusing on objective knowledge questions measuring "acquaintance with" as contrasted to "knowledge of" as indexed by cognitive complexity and the frames of cognitive structure. A single continuing story--the Tax Reform bill that was moving through the United States Congress at…

Studies the importance of both debate discussion and general political discussion in predicting political cognition. Finds that political conversations with others leads to much learning, controlling for effects of education, gender, political interest and media use. (MG)

Five one-hour broadcasts of KPIX Eyewitness News (San Francisco) were analyzed to provide examples of a signification process and to understand both how humorous instances arise in the newscast and their likely meaning for the viewer. One general finding was that the amount of humor or attempted humor is quite small. Banter between anchorpersons,…

A study tested the cumulative acquisition model proposed by S. H. Chaffee and A. R. Tims to explain the development of adolescent patterns of news media use. The Guttman scale procedure was used to analyze patterns of news media use across a three-wave panel survey of 366 parent-child pairs over a 2-year period. In each wave, interviewers talked…

Schema theory may be significant in determining if and how news audiences process information. For any given news topic, people have from none to many schemata (cognitive structures that represent organized knowledge about a given concept or type of stimulus abstracted from prior experience) upon which to draw. Models of how schemata are used…

The fields of social and cognitive psychology and political science have offered several experimental designs for assessing the presence, type, and complexity of scripts (memory structures used to encode knowledge of an action) or event schemata. Script measurement is a potentially valuable tool for the study of information and news processing…

This monograph examines how bias affects the perception of journalists and discusses factors which might exacerbate or mitigate such bias. The book recommends the study of journalistic decision-making from perspectives developed in the field of social psychology. The book includes the following chapters: (1) "Media Bias, Cognitive…

The Communication Theory and Method Division section of the proceedings contains the following 16 papers: "Profiling TV Ratings Users: Content-Based Advisories and Their Adoption" (Robert Abelman and David Atkin); "It's All About the Information: Salience Effects on the Perceptions of News Exemplification" (Francesca R. Dillman…