Volume 30, Issue 4

The article reports considerable changes in the content and style of German election coverage between 1990 and 2002. The findings are based on a content analysis of the main evening news of the four major television channels, spanning four Bundestag elections. During the observation period, television has immensely expanded its coverage of the top candidates. While the presence of the candidates in the news increased, they were not able to get their issues across to the audience. The news discourse was narrowed down to election and campaigning as issues. Matters of campaigning style, the ‘game schema’, as well as election polls became increasingly salient. The number of sound bites grew, although the average sound bite length decreased slightly. The presentation of the candidates became more vivid and more colorful, and, thus, more attractive for the audience. On the other hand, there are no signs of increasing negativism. The observable trends in the scope and kind of presentation of candidates can be interpreted as increasing personalization and dramatization of media coverage. The changes partially fit into the pattern of convergence (i. e., a mutual assimilation of public and commercial channels). These developments are partly rooted in the change of the German television market. Other results can be explained by historical incidents such as the German unification in 1990, and by the candidate constellation during each election. In spite of some similarities with developments in the US, the authors argue that it would be misleading to label the observable changes of German election coverage as ‘Americanization’.

Australia is second only to Israel in being the world’s most culturally diverse nation, based largely on high levels of immigration in the second part of the 20 th century. From the 1970s onwards, Australia formally recognized the massive social changes brought about by postwar immigration, and provided legislation to incorporate cultural diversity into everyday lives. One such ‘legislative’ enactment saw the establishment of multicultural broadcasting in Australia, as arguably a world-first, both in its comprehensiveness and diversity. Today, Australia has a public sector corporation, the Special Broadcasting Service, administering five radio services in 68 languages. Also, the Community Radio sector produces multicultural programming in 100 languages through a number of its 330 broadcast and 207 narrowcast stations. This article examines the relationship between radio and its communities. It argues that despite the ‘profile’ of SBS television, radio is much closer to its constituent communities, and therefore plays a greater role in enabling those communities to speak their own histories, beyond the confines of a consensual Anglophile paradigm.

Concepts of interaction theory play a central role in media research that deals with the relationship between media offerings and media reception. They cover the diverse activities of media users as well as the adaptation strategies utilized of mass communication. The first part of this article briefly describes where these broad and poorly defined concepts of interaction can be found in different areas of media research. One of the problems is deciding in which cases media communication can be analyzed using interaction models. Another problem is the lack of differentiation between how people deal with media offerings and how media offerings refer to their users. The second part of the article develops a new perspective in media research, which allows the aspects mentioned above to be assigned to processes of media socialization on the one hand, or to the inclusion by mass communication on the other hand. On this basis new research projects can be designed that represent a necessary addition to the established analysis of media reception and media socialization. This research focuses on processes of inclusion as they can be observed in mass communications, mainly in television. This new component of a sociological media theory demonstrates how mass communication itself is able to create an image of its addressees and, in this way, adapt to an anonymous public.

This contribution aims to shed light on the interface between language competence and two significant developments in contemporary society: the increase in international mobility and the growing importance of mediated communication. First, I will highlight some common features of mobility and mediated communication and their interaction with second language proficiency, and summarize relevant findings from communication research and media studies. Next, I will focus on the relationship between language and media use. I will model the impact of second language proficiency as a set of additional options within a variable context characterized by the interaction of linguistic competence, place of residence, and language status. I will analyze each factor in turn and illustrate my claims with data from empirical findings on student experience of residence abroad. I will then discuss implications for foreign language teaching before presenting some speculative thoughts about future developments.

If television news viewers are conceived as active audience members, their interpretations should be a crucial factor in the study of the ‘effects’ of television news. Here, viewers’ interpretations are understood as subjective (re)constructions of a news item. In a previous contribution, we argued that interpretations can vary both within and between viewers in regard to the level of complexity. Complexity is the degree to which interpretations are a) differentiated, and b) integrated. In this contribution, we will operationalize the concept of differentiation of television news interpretations by its viewers. Furthermore, we will present a procedure for measuring differentiation based on the thoughts viewers reported while they watched a television news program. Results of a small-scale study (N = 19) provided first indications that the procedure is able to discriminate between viewers with varying levels of differentiation in interpreting television news.

Veerle Van Rompaey Mackay, H. and Ivey, D. (Eds.). Modern media in the home. An ethnographic study (2004, Libbey)   Baldwin Van Gorp and Jasmijn Van Gorp Biegert, K. (Ed.). News of the other. Tracing identity in Scandinavian constructions of the eastern Baltic Sea region (2004, Nordicom)