Faculty

Research of Ph.D. candidate Lilach Nir and Professors Joseph Cappella and Vincent Price appears in two articles in a special issue of Political Communication (2002, volume 19, no.1) devoted to Campaign 2000.

"As Seen on TV: Health Policy Issues in TV's Medical Dramas" is the title of the report issued by Professor Joseph Turow and PhD candidate Rachel Gans, recipients of a Kaiser Family Foundation grant to study the presence and nature of health care images in medical shows on television. The report is the product of an extensive content analysis of every episode of every prime time doctor series in the 2000/2001 television season, a total of 74 shows.

Key findings include:

"A New Scholarly Dispensation for Civil Religion" by Professor Carolyn Marvin appears in a special issue of the Journal of Communication and Religion (March 2002) titled: Twenty-five Years After The Political Pulpit. Dr. Marvin explores what makes United States civil religion so compelling that citizen believers will offer their lives to it on well-defined ritual occasions. She proposes that U.S. patriotism is a full blown religion defined, like all religions, by a transcendent god principle with the authority to deal life and death to its own believers.

Professor Oscar Gandy delievered the second Dixons Public Lecture at the London School of Economics and Political Science, November 7, London, England. His talk, titled: "Data Mining, Discrimination and the Decline of the Public Sphere" was followed by a reception held in his honor.

"In Dialogue: On Race and the Political Economy of Communication: A Dialogue with Oscar H. Gandy Jr.," is the feature article in Art & Survival: An Internet Review (Issue 2, Volume 1). Keith R. McKinley, editor of Art & Survival, and Dr. Gandy discuss the ways in which communication about race influences the distribution of power. Dr. Gandy's most recent book on the subject is titled Communication and Race: A Structural Perspective (Oxford, 1998).

Media coverage of deadly explosions in Bali shows "not much has changed in journalism since Sept. 11" according to Professor Barbie Zelizer in Newsday (October 17). "Despite the incessant cautionary statements about violence and the warning signals pushing the national state of alert up and down the color scale, journalism gave us the same old news. Its knee-jerk treatment of violence, terror and atrocity - exemplified by the coverage of the bombing in the Indonesian resort village - differed hardly at all from its treatment of countless other events overseas before Sept. 11."

Advertisers may be missing key opportunities to reach and cultivate a powerful, diverse lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) market, according to a report released today by the Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation's (GLAAD) Center for the Study of Media and Society. The study also notes these missed opportunities can result in significant potential loss of revenue and have created a skewed perception of what has been traditionally viewed as a niche market.

Oscar Gandy, Ph.D., has been appointed to the National Research Council's Committee on Privacy in the Information Age.

A national panel of experts in behavioral science, suicide, and the media has developed specific recommendations for the media on how to report acts of suicide. These recommendations are intended both to help reduce the copycat or contagion effect that media coverage of suicide may produce and also to provide accurate and helpful information to the public about suicide. A partnership of public and private organizations will disseminate the recommendations to reporters, editors and producers throughout the United States.