[PDF] The Construction News eBook

Author : W. Russell Neuman
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
Page : 194 pages
File Size : 38,28 MB
Release : 1992-10-15
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 9780226574400

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Photo opportunities, ten-second sound bites, talking heads and celebrity anchors: so the world is explained daily to millions of Americans. The result, according to the experts, is an ignorant public, helpless targets of a one-way flow of carefully filtered and orchestrated communication. Common Knowledge shatters this pervasive myth. Reporting on a ground-breaking study, the authors reveal that our shared knowledge and evolving political beliefs are determined largely by how we actively reinterpret the images, fragments, and signals we find in the mass media. For their study, the authors analyzed coverage of 150 television and newspaper stories on five prominent issues—drugs, AIDS, South African apartheid, the Strategic Defense Initiative, and the stock market crash of October 1987. They tested audience responses of more than 1,600 people, and conducted in-depth interviews with a select sample. What emerges is a surprisingly complex picture of people actively and critically interpreting the news, making sense of even the most abstract issues in terms of their own lives, and finding political meaning in a sophisticated interplay of message, medium, and firsthand experience. At every turn, Common Knowledge refutes conventional wisdom. It shows that television is far more effective at raising the saliency of issues and promoting learning than is generally assumed; it also undermines the assumed causal connection between newspaper reading and higher levels of political knowledge. Finally, this book gives a deeply responsible and thoroughly fascinating account of how the news is conveyed to us, and how we in turn convey it to others, making meaning of at once so much and so little. For anyone who makes the news—or tries to make anything of it—Common Knowledge promises uncommon wisdom.

Author : David L. Altheide
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 362 pages
File Size : 18,77 MB
Release : 2018-05-04
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 1351525271

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The creative use of fear by news media and social control organizations has produced a "discurse of fear" - the awareness and expection that danger and risk are lurking everywhere. Case studies illustrates how certain organizations and social institutions benefit from the explotation of such fear construction. One social impact is a manipulated public empathy: We now have more "victims" than at any time in our prior history. Another, more troubling resutl is the role we have ceded to law enforcement and punishment: we turn ever more readily to the state and formal control to protect us from what we fear. This book attempts through the marshalling of significant data to interrupt that vicious cycle of fear discourse.

Author : Gaye Tuchman
Publisher : Free Press
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 39,95 MB
Release : 1980-10-01
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 9780029329603

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From Simon & Schuster, Making News is Gaye Tuchman's exploration into the study in the construction of reality. The Professor of Sociology at Queens College and City University of New York, Tuchman's latest work is one to cherish. As described by Todd Gitlin of Contemporary Sociology, Making News is "simply the most comprehensive book on the social construction of news by an American sociologist to date."