ELECTRONIC NEWSPAPERS

NewsLink--links to hundreds of newspapers, magazines

The Ultimate Collection of Newslinks (broken down by continent, country, and state)

NewsVoyager "A gateway to your local newspaper"

OnlineNewspapers.com--from Web Wombat, an index to 10,000 online newspapers from around the world

ABYZ News Links--Links to over 15,800 newspapers and other news sources from around the world.

The Newspaper Association of America's "NewspaperLinks"

The New York Times on the Web

Washington Post

Christian Science Monitor

Los Angeles Times

The Chicago Tribune

San Francisco Examiner News Wires Page

Boston Globe Online: Search (15 yrs. of articles)

USA TODAY

San Francisco Examiner News Wires Page

The Austin Chronicle

San Antonio Express-News Online Home Page

Compare the front pages of newspapers in the U.S. and around the world at Newseum: The Interactive Museum of News

NEWS FROM THE PAST

Brooklyn Daily Eagle online: 1841-1902

FOREIGN PAPERS

The Internet Public Library: foreign news

Online Newspapers.com--links to papers from around the world

London Telegraph

The Guardian

TASS

Maximov --News, Information And Guide To The Russian Federation

PRINT MAGAZINES BECOME ELECTRONIC

• Magazine searcher (PLServer Search)
• The Atlantic Monthly--with fantastic searcher for a century's worth of articles
• The Economist

• Forbes - Capitalist Tool
• Welcome to Money
• The New Republic
• The Nation Digital Edition--now with a searchable directory of past articles and annotated links to "people, organizations, non-profits, agencies, books and other resources relating to the worlds of politics, economics and culture"
• National Review
• U.S. News Online
• THE UTNE LENS
• The Saturday Evening Post
• Harper's Index
• Mother Jones
• Rollingstone.com
• HotWired!
• LIFE Photo Home Page

ZINES

New Jour--Electronic Journals & Newsletters

Slate

SALON: Current Issue

Third Age - The Web for Grownups

CyberWire Dispatch, by Brock N. Meeks

Hype

Suck

CASE STUDIES OF THE VARIOUS MEDIA

TELEVISION

One half century after television's entry into American homes, the medium remains a favorite scapegoat for the multitude of perceived social and cultural ills arising in post-war American society. Its audience-attracting themes of violence, for instance, are seen to underlie the historically-increasing rates of aggression and homicide. U.S. News & World Report charged in 1955 that the very mind and character of Americans was being altered by television. Over the next twenty years the medium's potency to affect both identity and social structure was to attract the energies of scholars and popular writers alike. Among its suspected effects were (followed by year argument first appearing according to author's informal survey of popular literatures):

• Cognitive Impacts

• social factor responsible for a changing contemporary personality (56)
• attributed as being the major cause of the decrease in magazine reading (56)
• presents greater distraction for those with average to below average education than for those with better education, who are less apt to repelled by written words (56)
• strong force for social change (59)
• inadvertently transforms man's energies from active participation into passive knowledge (60)
• restructures beliefs (63)
• brought about generation gap (69)
• increases total range and variety of press items read; increases reading of daily and Sunday paper reading at the expense of weekly and monthly magazines (69)
• those 30+ are "aliens in TV land" (71)
• causes "bandwagon thinkers" (71)
• hampers intellectual development and creativity (71)
• promotes adolescent egocentrism (71)
• informational overload (81)
• Affective Impacts
• has impacted housewives' leisure time (56)
• serves as an escape mechanism; relieves societal stress (59)
• is an exciting source of education, entertainment and cultural enrichment for children (63)
• abnormalities of everyday life become normal TV news items (71)
• provides opportunities for emotional release and relaxation (71)
• communicates life in emotional rather than intellectual or rational terms (71)
• imaginal desensitization of emotions (77)
• Behavioral Impacts
• Effects of TV on behavior (55):
• has similar effects for all classes, residential locations, and duration of televiewing
• has greater effect on adults' behavior than childrens'
• has greater effect on blue collar workers' overt behavior than for white collar workers
• has greater effect on behavior of suburbians than metropolitans by and large
• evidence about the connection between viewing violence and viewer aggression is often mixed, but with historically increasing support

Professor John Murray's "Impact of Televised Violence"

"Sex on TV 2" A Biennial Report to the Kaiser Family Foundation (2001)

Todd Gitlin's "Imagebusters: The Hollow Crusade Against TV Violence"

National Coalition on Television Violence

• reinforces materialism (71)
• contrary to popular belief, TV does not cause the elderly to disengage; they relate to current affairs through TV viewing (76)
• shatters families (77).

In the 1980s, the medium was accused of having effectively destroyed childhood as a developmental stage (Postman 1982). In 1990, a Gallup survey found nearly seven in ten Americans believing that they would be better off or at least not adversely affected if television was to disappear from their lives.

Such beliefs are reminiscent of the 1930s research which saw radio technology centralizing, standardizing, and massifying (Lazarsfeld 1940). Arnheim, for instance, writing a short decade after the radio became a commercial success, condemned the new medium and its listeners in scathingly contemptuous language:

Wireless relieves the listener from the necessity of `mental labours.' Instead of an individual with definite preoccupations who ... seeks certain things and rejects others ... the wireless listener bobs like a cork on the waves, hears one after the other on endless succession of totally unconnected things, and so entirely without a breathing space that he does not manage subsequently to ponder and consider what he has heard. Which suits him just as well (1936:264-65).

And so for the past forty years the radio generation has informed the younger television generations that they have been cognitively impaired by their viewing practices, with such symptoms as shortened attention spans, weakened linguistic abilities, eroded imaginations, impatience with deferred gratification, and inability to distinguish information from wisdom. On the other hand, radio was praised for its ability to evoke imagery, its creativity, and its ability to present dramatic events. In fact, television's "Golden Years," we're told, coincided to its early era when controlled by the radio elite. One wonders whether the next forty years will feature the television generations similarly belittling the virtual reality generations

There is a prevalent view that the printed page is the only truly intellectual medium. Other media are suspect in terms of their ability to satisfy educational needs and are portrayed as "mere" entertainment, at the least offensive end of the spectrum of contempt, to the creation of mindless followers whose very emotional state is molded by the non- print media, at the most hostile end of the spectrum. There is, one suspects, a bit of the Protestant Ethic embedded in these critiques: if it is fun and easy it must be bad; intellectual stimulation must be difficult, time consuming, and "work."

Click here to see the percent of Americans watching four or more hours of television a day, by age and education. What measureable effects does such viewership have?

Let's consider the relationship between the hours of television individuals watch daily and their responses to the NORC General Social Survey question "In general, do you find life exciting, pretty routine, or dull?" (variable LIFE) What do you hypothesize this relationship to be? When thinking about your answer, reflect on two possible causal directions that might underlie any correlation between these two variables:

• the more individuals' watch television the less likely they report their lives as being exciting. Here, in addition to arguing that those watching large amounts of television are indeed living more boring lives, one might also claim that televised stories occasion viewers to compare their lives with those on the screen, which may be more exciting and glamorous than their own. One might further argue that this relationship weakens with age, as social opportunities to be heroic often decline with advanced years. Click here to see Percent of Americans who "in general find life exciting" by hours of television daily watched, by age and education.
• those who live unexciting lives watch more television in order to add excitement to their existence. Evidence for this direction of causality comes from the Somer's Dyx and Dxy asymmetric measures of association: When correlating LIFE with hours of television daily watched (recoded as 1 hour or less, 2 hours, 3 hours, or 4 or more hours), Somer's D when LIFE is the dependent variable equals .14 while D when TVHRS is dependent equals .19.

Such findings are often the disappointments for those attempting to demonstrate television's causal effects using survey data. Typically there are extremely weak correlations between hours watched and individuals' stereotypes, beliefs and fears. And even if moderate relationships are located they generally are spurious, explainable in terms of individuals' education and age.

Another research tradition has been to study the medium's demographic biases. For instance, click here to see the underrepresentation and stereotypical depictions of older persons.  Minorities and women fare no better. According to a survey of prime-time shows during the Fall of 2000 by Children Now, a child advocacy group, out of a total prime-time population of 2,251 characters, there were 145 black, 25 Asian, 18 Hispanic and no native American female characters.

TV Net®

TV LINKS

Welcome to The TV Rundown

Nielsen Media Research - Interactive Services

UltimateTV -- TV Biz -- Nielsen Media Research

Vanderbilt Television News Archive

Ad Age -Facts & Features - History of TV Advertising

Museum of TV

Ascom Standardization Service, Telecom Standards

The History Channel

Discovery Channel Online

The BBCNC Home Page

    HISTORY OF TELEVISION

Museum of TV

Home Page of Rich Samuels: Broadcasting in Chicago, 1921-1989

MOVIE AND TELEVISION PRODUCTION HOUSES

Welcome to Warner Bros. Home Page

RECORDINGS OF SOUNDS & IMAGES FROM THE PAST

• University of California at Santa Barbara's Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project
• 19th-century recordings taken from wax cylinders from tinfoil.com
• Internet Moving Image Archive a project of the Internet Archive in association with Prelinger Archives.  Currently under construction, the site will eventually include 1,001 archival films, digitized as MPEG-2 files, that are free for everyone to use for any purpose except resale.  
• Original format motion pictures from American Memory
• From the University of Washington's Digital Collections, Moving Image Collection, including a 1915 motorcycle race to a ride on the monorail at the 1962 Seattle Worlds Fair

RADIO

100 Years of Radio--Marconi

Old Time Radio (OTR) WWW Page

Surfing the Aether--history of radio

Antique Radio Page

Phil's Old Radios -- Antique Radio Gallery

Public Broadcasting Corp

NPR Online

Radio Classics--RealAudio versions of the classic programs

Case study: Impacts of listening to Limbaugh on Americans' confidence in the Clinton administration

ADVERTISING

• PBS's Frontline's Merchants of Cool A Report on the Creators and Marketers of Popular Culture for Teenagers
• From Duke University's John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History, Ad*Access, "images and database information for over 7,000 advertisements printed in U.S. and Canadian newspapers and magazines between 1911 and 1955"
• Advertising History Online - Duke University
• The American Advertising Museum (Portland, OR)
• 19th Century Advertising from Harper's Weekly
• AdFlip "the world's largest archive of classic print ads
• AdCritic.com gotta love this site--top television commercials
• Advertising Age's 50 Best Commercials
• The American Marketing Association
• Welcome to the Advertising Review
• International Advertising Association
• World Advertising Research Centre Microscope Home Page: Best Ads On The Web
• Gender Ads.com--from Prof. Scott Lukas, "to provide gender studies educators and students with a resource for analyzing the advertising images that relate to gender"
• JZ Presents: The Advertising Graveyard
• THE INSTITUTE FOR RETAIL STUDIES

PUBLIC RELATIONS

Public Relations Society of America Home Page

Spector and Associate's "Museum of Public Relations"

The Museum of Public Relations

EXPLORING THE CONCEPT OF "MEDIA LITERACY"

From what I hear, one current focus of media researchers is "media literacy." In part, an outgrowth of the likes of the missile gap of the old, Americans nowadays are supposedly more susceptible to the stream of electronic messages than those of other developed (particularly European) nations. Their lack of cognitive immunity from the emotional and irrational component of these messages derives from their media illiteracy.

There are, not surprisingly, a number of groups having a vested interest in this concept and "problem." For the academic field of communications studies, for instance, it is what defines the discipline and what distinguishes it from the myriad of social sciences--and what prevents the discipline from slipping to a media technologies training profession on par with medical technicians and dental hygienists. For those in English, media literacy provides opportunities for grant monies and for expanding the discipline's purview beyond critical/competitive reading/interpretation of paper-based works in an increasingly non- reading, paperless, multimedia world.

Nevertheless, there can be little question that the media ecology produces intriguing effects on its consumers' cognitions, values, identities and behaviors.  Perhaps most-studied nowadays is the influence of media violence on aggressive behavior.  Further, there's how television provides its viewers with role models in societal situations for which prior generations did not supply scripts, such as the 37 extramarital affairs that Dallas presented during the 1980s. But it is a proverbial two-way street: media power is a function of audience receptivity. Might it be the case, as Muriel Cantor (1987) argues, that people turn to television as a substitute for real experience because of their feelings of helplessness. Click here for studies of the effects of television and radio on the American voter.

And then there's the matter of understanding how mediums' information streams can be contextualized, or framed, by the viewpoints of presenters.  If, for instance, a story item conforms to the mindset of those deciding what's "news" then it is more likely to be reported in the press (i.e., in 1992, making Presidential candidate Dan Quayle's "potatoe" misspelling in a grade school classroom a news story because it reaffirmed the belief that he was not the most intellectually gifted of the candidates).

Center for Media Literacy--replete with Media&Values archive

Yahoo! - Media Literacy sites

Media Awareness Network (award winning Canadian site)

Media Research Center media literacy lessons from the right--with video collection of Gore gaffes but none of Bush's

The Center for Public Integrity: Investigative Journalism in the Public Interest --these are the folks who in 2008 reported how in the two years following 9/11 President Bush and his top officials made at least 935 false claims about the Iraqi threat in order to galvanize public opinion for war

Media Literacy Online Project

Media Literacy from KQED

From the Museum of Hoaxes, test your pop culture literacy with the Hoax Photo Test

Return to A Sociological Tour Through Cyberspace