At midnight on May 1, 2000, Time Warner Cable dropped the signal of Disney's ABC network from its systems in seven major markets. The signal was unavailable for approximately 39 hours, affecting roughly 3.5 million subscribers. While lawyers and regulators pondered the retransmission consent provisions of the Cable Act of 1992 and the accompanying FCC rules, the press was called upon to report and interpret these issues to the public. This paper examines the frames present in journalistic accounts triggered by the loss of ABC's signal in five mass newspapers and five trade publications. Specifically, the paper addresses the question: How did the press portray the role of the public in relation to the Time Warner ‐ Disney dispute? The data presented in the paper strongly suggest that the press failed to develop a cogent discussion of the underlying policy issues in a way useful to the public. The analysis of the press coverage concludes that the public was framed as passive and was largely excluded from the policy debate around the dispute.

An experiment was conducted to examine the effects of news photo presence and role‐congruency in news stories of Hillary Clinton on reader interest and memory. In the photos and stories, Clinton was either portrayed as a wife, or as a professional person. Results indicate readers processed the photos at least sufficiently to rate them as fitting with the story or not. Further, this study showed that mere presence of a photo meant the story would be ranked as more interesting, but photo presence and role‐congruency with the story did not affect recall of story ideas. Results of this study therefore, suggest typical news photos of a political actor/public figure serve as attention‐getting devices, but are not used as an important informational aid.

This study employed an online survey of 187 editors of online versions of traditional newspapers to investigate their journalistic values. It examined whether those values were predicted by age, gender, education, major, years of journalism experience, circulation of the traditional newspaper, political interest and political ideology, and the degree to which online newspaper editors believe they control the content of their Web site. The findings suggest that the values of online newspaper editors more closely mirrored traditional newspaper journalists than online journalists in terms of their news values. As in previous studies, few variables predicted news values. None predicted the disseminator/investigative value, although the two political measures, political interest and ideology, did explain adversarial attitudes even after controlling for the demographics, experience levels, and newspaper size. Liberals and those most politically interested were more likely to believe in an adversarial role for the press.

The digital divide is not the only gap relating to the Internet. The Websites of state legislatures have demonstrated widespread differences in content and design so as to create a quality divide. This disparity potentially inhibits these sites from stimulating public participation. New Jersey, rated as the top site, serves as an example of best practices. Legislatures with poorer sites should adopt some of these practices so as to better develop the Internet as a public resource.

Odysseus Makridis's (2003) essay, Is a Levinasian Theory of Justice Possible: A Response to Murray, offers a sustained and compelling challenge to my hypothesization of a phenomenology of justice (Murray, 2003a). Makridis's analysis smartly begins by breaking down the question of whether a theory of justice is possible into several distinct preliminary questions and issues. Among these many points of discussion are the following four important questions, reviewed here in logical order. Makridis wonders first if a phenomenology of ethics is possible. If it is, he wonders second if a theory of ethics is subsequently possible. Makridis asks third if a phenomenology of justice is possible. If it is, he asks fourth if a theory of justice is subsequently possible. In short, Makridis (2003) probes the central presumption of my essay (Murray, 2003a) far more deeply than I had. Acquittingly, my essay's goal was to explore the communicative implications of a phenomenology of justice rather than prove its existence. In any case, the more fundamental question of whether a phenomenology of justice is even possible requires more careful attention. The following essay, then, endeavors to present a stronger and more thorough case for both a phenomenology of justice and, subsequently, a theory of justice. In so doing, it will address in turn the four aforementioned questions.