Graduate Education 2006 Abstracts
Graduate Education Interest Group
Cultivating Political Activism Online: A Case Study of Democratic Meetup Groups in the 2004 Presidential Election • Carole V. Bell, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill • Political interest groups and candidates are increasingly turning to the Internet for a variety of political communication functions, from fundraising to volunteer mobilization. Much of this renewed attention results from the successes of the 2004 presidential primaries, most spectacularly the growth of Meetup.com, an online service that enables people with common interests to meet.
The Media’s Role in Declining Voter Turnout in Presidential Elections, 1960-2004 • Andrew Kaplan, University of Maryland • Voter turnout has declined precipitously in the past 45 years for presidential elections, from about 73% of the non-South in 1960 (the South is not counted due to discriminatory practices) to 54% in 2000 and 60% in 2004. In 1996, nearly half the country did not vote. For decades, scholars asserted that as education levels rose, voter participation would also increase. Yet, it has sharply declined.
Triple play competition in U.S. telecommunications industry: Exploring factors affecting cable operators’ adoption of triple-play services • Sangho Seo, Penn State University • The primary purpose of this study is to estimate empirically factors affecting adoption of triple-play bundled services of a cable operator in U.S. local telecommunications market and discovered what factors are important in order to lead to additional convergence in the future.
“Hidden cameras” in Bollywood: Indian responses to the journalistic ethics of undercover reporting of celebrities • Jaya Shroff and Mansi Tiwari, Ohio University • The paper discusses the serious and the ethical issues associated with the methods of investigation and news gathering namely the hidden cameras and changed identities. It looks at several cases from India and the United States with a focus on the IndiaTV controversy of March 2005 and analyses the responses from across the media to the newsgathering methods involved. The main concerns raised in the article deal with deception and invasion of privacy.
Supervision and Accuracy in an Online Newsroom: A Pilot Study • David Stanton, Diane Hickey and Keith Saliba, University of Florida • The current study examines supervision of a Web-driven news production and editing course at a large, southeastern university. The course, which has been taught for over a decade, recently transitioned from a static HTML Web site to a dynamic site driven by a relational database and XML. Content management systems (CMS) allow journalists to remotely input content, edit and deliver the final product to print and Web-based publications.
“I’m confident I’ll vote for you, but only if you go to church with me:” Motivated message processing, religious ideology and evaluation of political candidates • John Wirtz and Penelope Sheets, University of Minnesota • The current paper examines the relationship between commitment to religious beliefs, need for closure (Kruglanski, Webster, & Klem, 1993), and the level of confidence individuals place in the inferences they draw when given limited information about a political candidate. A statistically significant relationship (F(1, 74)=4.103, p<.O5) was found between participants’ commitment to Christian orthodox beliefs and the level of confidence they placed in their inferences about a political candidate.
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