COMM Assignment 3 Yingquan Wang
bizarreness, conflict, and currency) p5
Impact: the significance, importance, or consequence of an event or trend Timeliness: the more recent, the more newsworthy. An event may have occurred in the past but only have been learned about recently Prominence: occurrences featuring well-known individuals or institutions, eg. the president or a celebrity Proximity: closeness of the occurrence to the audience may be gauged either geographically or in terms of the assumed values, interests, and expectations of the news audience The bizarre: the unusual, unorthodox, or unexpected attracts attention Conflict: controversy and open clashes, regardless of what the conflict is over.
in society Currency: occasionally something becomes an idea whose time has come, eg abduction of children in 2002
2. Three "origins" for news stories (naturally occurring events, subsidized news, and enterprise news) p7
Naturally occurring events: disasters, floods and earthquakes and so on that are inherently unpredictable, and journalists must respond after the fact Subsidized news: a person, group or organization does something public and newsworthy (eg. pass a law, important lawsuit), seeks press attention Enterprise news: journalists take the initiative on a story, beat coverage and investigative journalism
3. Information subsidies p8
-the news sources providing information to organizations who publish news, so that the news source itself has written the news instead of the reporter
4. Knowledge gap hypothesis
-In the development of any social or political issue, the more highly educated segments of the population know more about the issue early on and acquire information at a faster rate than the less well educated.
5. Two-step flow model
-ideas often seem to flow from radio and print to opinion leaders and from them to the less active sections of the population
6. Opinion leaders (in the two-step flow model)
-the ones who gather information from the media to craft persuasive arguments
7. Early deciders/campaign deciders/last minute deciders
: Early deciders: those who make up their minds early, tend to be strong partisans, likely to identify with a major party, to pay close attention to political media, to be likely to discuss politics. Unlikely to change Campaign deciders: less partisan, more likely to be political independents, but somewhat less interested in politics than early deciders, pay lower routine attention to political content but somewhat more likely to follow political news during campaigns Last minute deciders: least partisan and least likely to follow politics in general or the campaign, to discuss politics and to vote
8. Agenda setting model
-media setting and telling people what issues are important for public debate and what are less of importance to be discussed
9. Priming
-the ability of news programs to affect the criteria by which individuals judge their political leaders
-refers to the impact of news coverage on the weight assigned to specific issues on making political judgments
10. Third-person effect
-media messages may have an impact on our behavior but little or no impact on our attitudes, individuals will perceive media messages to have greater effect