Annenberg School for Communication

Founded in 1959 through the generosity and vision of diplomat and philanthropist Walter Annenberg, The Annenberg School for Communication stands at the forefront of education, research, and policy studies on the processes, nature, and consequences of existing and emerging media. The School offers students a firm grounding in a wide range of approaches to the study of communication and its methods, drawn from both the humanities and the social sciences. Home to a wide range of centers and projects, including the Annenberg Public Policy Center, the Center of Excellence in Cancer Communication Research, the Center for Global Communication Studies, the Scholars Program in Culture & Communication, the Institute for Public Service, and others, research at Annenberg encompasses political communication, global communication, health communication, visual communication, cultural studies, children and media, as well as new media and information technologies, with interests extending beyond the classroom. For decades, research conducted by faculty and students at the Annenberg School has influenced public discussion of the role of the media in shaping the perceptions of the viewing public.

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  • Publication
    How Christians Reconcile Their Personal Political Views and the Teachings of Their Faith: Projection as a Means of Dissonance Reduction
    (2012-03-06) Ross, Lee D; Lelkes, Yphtach; Russell, Alexandra G
    The present study explores the dramatic projection of one's own views onto those of Jesus among conservative and liberal American Christians. In a large-scale survey, the relevant views that each group attributed to a contemporary Jesus differed almost as much as their own views. Despite such dissonance-reducing projection, however, conservatives acknowledged the relevant discrepancy with regard to "fellowship"issues (e.g., taxation to reduce economic inequality and treatment of immigrants) and liberals acknowledged the relevant discrepancy with regard to "morality" issues (e.g., abortion and gay marriage). However, conservatives also claimed that a contemporary Jesus would be even more conservative than themselves on the former issues whereas liberals claimed that Jesus would be even more liberal than themselves on the latter issues. Further reducing potential dissonance, liberal and conservative Christians differed markedly in the types of issues they claimed to be more central to their faith. A concluding discussion considers the relationship between individual motivational processes and more social processes that may underlie the present findings, as well as implications for contemporary social and political conflict.
  • Publication
    The Two-Step Flow of Communication: An Up-To-Date Report on an Hypothesis
    (1957) Katz, Elihu
    The hypothesis that "ideas often flow from radio and print to opinion leaders and from these to the less active sections of the population" has been tested in several successive studies. Each study has attempted a different solution to the problem of how to take account of interpersonal relations in the traditional design of survey research. As a result, the original hypothesis is largely corroborated and considerably refined. A former staff member of the Bureau of Applied Social Research at Columbia University, the author is now on leave from his post as assistant professor of sociology at the University of Chicago and is currently guest lecturer in sociology at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
  • Publication
    Systematic and Random Disagreement and the Reliability of Nominal Data
    (2008-02-10) Krippendorff, Klaus
    Reliability is an important bottleneck for content analysis and similar methods for generating analyzable data. This is because the analysis of complex qualitative phenomena such as texts, social interactions, and media images easily escape physical measurement and call for human coders to describe what they read or observe. Owing to the individuality of coders, the data they generate for subsequent analysis are prone to errors not typically found in mechanical measuring devices. However, most measures that are designed to indicate whether data are sufficiently reliable to warrant analysis do not differentiate among kinds of disagreement that prevent data from being reliable. This paper distinguishes two kinds of disagreement, systematic disagreement and random disagreement, and suggests measures of them in conjunction with the agreement coefficient α (alpha) (Krippendorff, 2004a, pp. 211-256). These measures, previously proposed for interval data (Krippendorff, 1970), are here developed for nominal data. Their importance lies in their ability to not only aid the development of reliable coding instructions but also warn researchers about two kinds of errors they face when using imperfect data.
  • Publication
    Curing Television's Ills: The Portrayal of Health Care
    (1985-10-01) Turow, Joseph; Coe, Lisa
    Content analysis of TV programming across day- and night-time genres shows drugs and machines as the ubiquitous modes of healing, with doctors diagnosing incorrectly only three percent of the time.
  • Publication
    Star Academy as Arab Political Satire
    (2008-01-01) Kraidy, Marwan M
  • Publication
    Cybernetics’s Reflexive Turns
    (2008-01-01) Krippendorff, Klaus
    In the history of cybernetics there have been several attempts by cyberneticians to put themselves into the circularities of their theories and designs, invoking a shift from the cybernetics of mechanisms to a cybernetics of cybernetics. The latter is the title of a book chapter by Margaret Mead (1968) and of Heinz von Foerster’s (1974) edited compilation of articles on cybernetics. Foerster introduced the concept of second-order cybernetics which may have overshadowed or sidelined other reflexivities. I am attempting to recover four reflexive turns, describe their origin, implications, and suggest ways in which they continue what Karl Müller (2007) calls an unfinished revolution. These turns are not discussed here in their historical succession but as conceptual expansions of cybernetics.
  • Publication
    How Bias Shapes the News: Challenging the New York Times' Status as a Newspaper of Record on the Middle East
    (2002-12-01) Zelizer, Barbie
    This article addresses bias in the American press and shows how the inevitability of reporting from a point of view challenges the possibility of a newspaper of record on the Middle East. Examining 30 days of coverage of the Intifada, it both shows that coverage of events varied across three mainstream US newspapers - The New York Times, The Washington Post and Chicago Tribune - and demonstrates that in the case of the newspaper most often called a newspaper of record - The New York Times -coverage varied in distinct ways from other mainstream newspapers. The article thus considers how the Times reputation and influence converge with its record in creating a broader impression about the perspective of the US press on the Middle East.
  • Publication
    Media Transitions in the Rear-View Mirror: Some Reflections
    (2009-12-01) Price, Monroe
    This essay explores the development of media systems in Central and Eastern Europe in the post-Soviet period, including the influence of social and political factors, outside media assistance, and the drive toward privatization and public service broadcasting, in an effort to understand what the experience teaches about democracy promotion, about the efficacy of various forms of media intervention, and about the utility of various forms of incentives and pressures in setting agendas and effecting political change. Despite differing historical, social, and political traditions and different forms of and reactions to media assistance efforts, factors, both exogenous (“Americanization” and “strategic communication”) and endogenous (“modernization,” secularization and commercialization), ultimately contributed to a homogenization of systems, rendering less relevant the particular distinctions among countries.
  • Publication
    Die Politisierung des Unterhaltungsfernsehens in der arabischen Welt / The Politicization of Entertainment Television in the Arab World
    (2006-01-01) Kraidy, Marwan M
    Die Reality-TV-Show Superstar, eine arabische Version von Deutsch- land sucht den Superstar, ist auch im Libanon und in Syrien extrem erfolgreich. Das Unterhaltungsformat wird in den Jahren 2003 bis 2006 unversehens zur Bühne für die politischen Umwälzungen in den beiden Ländern und dient als eine Art Gradmesser für ihre politischen Beziehungen.
  • Publication
    Hypermedia and Governance in Saudi Arabia
    (2006-01-01) Kraidy, Marwan M
    The advent of new media has altered the information dynamics that shape public discourse. Convergence, miniaturization, personalization, interactivity, and mobility have blurred the boundaries between producers, consumers, and regulators of information. The role and impact of old mass media such as radio, television and the press, has changed as a result of their interaction with electronic mail, cellular phones, digital cameras, among others. Through an examination of public discourse surrounding Star Academy, the most popular and most controversial program in Arab television history, this article explores how dynamics of information among different media have shaped the Arab public sphere. Based on five months of fieldwork in 2004, the analysis focuses on electronic fatwas, press commentary, new legislation to “protect morality”, SMS messages from fans, cellular phone voting, participatory television talk–shows, and media marketing strategies. The article examines new articulations among political, cultural religious and commercial factors that have been enabled by new technologies and the impact of these interactions on Arab public discourse. The analysis suggests a model of inter–media dynamics.