Press Association Research Articles

Breast cancer coverage in China and the United States: a comparative analysis of wire service news stories

The incidence rate of breast cancer is relatively high but declining in the United States whereas it is relatively low but increasing in China. This study analyzes coverage from the Associated Press (AP) and the Xinhua News Agency (Xinhua) to compare how news media in each nation have covered breast cancer. The results indicate that the AP was more likely to cover treatment and personal stories whereas Xinhua was more likely to cover risk reduction and prevention and to cover early detection and diagnosis. Subtler differences also emerged in coverage of breast cancer. The patterns observed may reflect not only differences between the two nations in incidence rates and efforts to address the disease but also broader differences in their news and medical values, practices, and institutions. News coverage of breast cancer, in turn, may influence how citizens of each nation will form perceptions regarding the disease.

Reporting Iraqi civilian fatalities in a time of war

BackgroundIn February, 2007, the Associated Press (AP) conducted a poll of 1,002 adults in the United States about their attitudes towards the war in Iraq. Respondents were remarkably accurate estimating the current death toll of US soldiers, yet were grossly inaccurate in estimating the current death toll of Iraqi civilians. We conducted a search of newspapers reports to determine the extent of the discrepancy between reporting Coalition and Iraqi civilian deaths, hypothesizing that there would be an over-representation of Coalition deaths compared to Iraqi civilian deaths.MethodsWe examined 11 U.S. newspapers and 5 non-U.S. newspapers using electronic databases or newspaper web-archives, to record any reports between March 2003 and March 2008 of Coalition and Iraqi deaths that included a numeric indicator. Reports were described as "events" where they described a specific occurrence involving fatalities and "tallies" when they mentioned the number of deaths over a period of time. We recorded the number of events and tallies related to Coalition deaths, Iraqi civilian deaths, and Iraqi combatant deathsResultsU.S. newspapers report more events and tallies related to Coalition deaths than Iraqi civilian deaths, although there are substantially different proportions amongst the different U.S. newspapers. In four of the five non-US newspapers, the pattern was reversed.ConclusionThis difference in reporting trends may partly explain the discrepancy in how well people are informed about U.S. and Iraqi civilian fatalities in Iraq. Furthermore, this calls into question the role of the media in reporting and sustaining armed conflict, and the extent to which newspaper and other media reports can be used as data to assess fatalities or trends in the time of war.

Letters to the Editor

Regarding the October 2008 article “Massacre at No Gun Ri?”: As one of the Associated Press (AP) reporters who confirmed the Korean War refugee killings, I can assure readers that the “intense controversy” over No Gun Ri, as the article calls it, is a contrived controversy. A mistake is made by placing too little faith in the straightforward, unbiased research and reporting of the world's largest news organization, and too much credence in the “investigation” by the U.S. Army, investigating itself, and in a book by a veteran of the very regiment responsible for the killings. Both the Army investigative report and the book are rife with deceit. One simple proof of their untruthfulness: Both cover up the existence of at least 19 documents in which high-ranking U.S. officers ordered or authorized the killing of South Korean civilians during the war's early months, with such words as “shoot all refugees coming across river” and “refugees are fair game.”

Traces of Drugs Found in Drinking Water

THE US PUBLIC MAY BE CONSUMing trace amounts of such pharmaceuticals as antibiotics, hormones, mood-altering drugs, and pain killers in each glass of water they drink, according to recent reports. Yet little is known about whether these chronic, low-level exposures pose health risks. An investigative report published by the Associated Press (AP) in March, documenting tiny quantities of various pharmaceuticals in the drinking water of 24 major metropolitan areas has drawn greater public attention to a problem scientists have been probing for several years. So far, researchers have documented ill effects in fish and other aquatic animals. But making an evidence-based determination whether such effects translate to humans will require further research, said George S. Corcoran, PhD, president of the Society of Toxicology. The attention generated by the AP report may help speed such research, added Corcoran, chair of the Department of Pharmaceutical Sciences at Wayne State University in Detroit, Mich. “The public has a legitimate right to know and the AP story . . . will lead us more quickly to the answers we need to have,” he said. In the meantime, physicians and their patients are being asked to take precautions to help stem the flow of pharmaceuticals into water supplies.

UNNAMED SOURCES AS RHETORICAL CONSTRUCTS IN NEWS AGENCY REPORTS

The paper is an in-depth study of the use of unnamed sources in the reports of two big, international news agencies, The Associated Press (AP) and Reuters. Traditionally, news agencies have referred to issues of “factuality” and “objectivity” as their valued objectives (see e.g. Boyd-Barrett, 1980; van Dijk, 1988), and as one claim to “factuality”, journalists tend to use a wealth of direct and indirect quotes in their reports, often coming from unnamed sources. From the point of view of news rhetoric, presenting an unnamed source as a credible and newsworthy speaker calls for special strategies. Sometimes journalists emphasize that the person quoted does not want to be named, and recently AP, in particular, has resorted more and more to explaining the reasons for anonymity. Though the news agencies themselves seem to think that all the strategies boosting the standing of an unnamed speaker, and the expressions stressing the anonymity, just give necessary information to the reader, it can be argued that they also open a wealth of rhetorical possibilities, and thus can undermine the alleged factuality/objectivity of news agency discourse.

Cancer News Coverage and Information Seeking

The shift toward viewing patients as active consumers of health information raises questions about whether individuals respond to health news by seeking additional information. This study examines the relationship between cancer news coverage and information seeking using a national survey of adults aged 18 years and older. A Lexis-Nexis database search term was used to identify Associated Press (AP) news articles about cancer released between October 21, 2002, and April 13, 2003. We merged these data to the Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS), a telephone survey of 6,369 adults, by date of interview. Logistic regression models assessed the relationship between cancer news coverage and information seeking. Overall, we observed a marginally significant positive relationship between cancer news coverage and information seeking (p < 0.07). Interaction terms revealed that the relationship was apparent only among respondents who paid close attention to health news (p < 0.01) and among those with a family history of cancer (p < 0.05). Results suggest that a notable segment of the population actively responds to periods of elevated cancer news coverage by seeking additional information, but they raise concerns about the potential for widened gaps in cancer knowledge and behavior between large segments of the population in the future.

SARS News Coverage and Its Determinants in China and the US

/ This study investigates the prevalence of news frames in SARS news coverage from the Xinhua News Agency and the Associated Press (AP), as well as whether the frames were predicted by news environment and the SARS timeline. Factor analysis supported four frame dimensions: attribution of responsibility, human interest, economic consequences and severity. Frame prevalence was considered in terms of, first, the story as the unit of analysis and, second, word count as the unit of analysis. For both types of measurement, attribution of responsibility and severity frames were more common in AP. For economic consequences, story frame prevalence was higher in AP, while word frame prevalence was higher in Xinhua. For both types of measurement, economic consequences decreased over time, while attribution of responsibility and severity increased. Attribution of responsibility and human interest frames increased more over time in AP, while the severity frame increased more over time in Xinhua.

Evidence of Television Exposure Effects in AP Top 25 College Football Rankings

A potential source of bias in the Associated Press (AP) Top 25 football rankings is television exposure. Using the 2003-2004 and 2004-2005 college football seasons, the authors observe, all else equal, that AP voters change the ranking of teams differently on the basis of television exposure: The more often a team is televised, relative to the total number of own- and opponent-televised games, the greater the change in the number of AP votes that team receives, even after accounting for own and opponent's on-field performance.

An Effective Nonlinear Rewards-Based Ranking System

This article describes a new strategy for objectively quantifying the performance exhibited by each and every team as derived from that year’s games. When applied to the last sixteen seasons of division I-A college football, one can readily observe a strong correlation between the final rankings computed using this new strategy and the combined average ranking of the weekly polls administered by the Associated Press (AP) and USA Today (since 1991, and by the United Press International – UPI – before then). The nearly identical ordering of the top teams in these two rankings after all the post season bowl games have concluded, and the similarity of these rankings before the bowl games were played the past eight seasons, i.e. the "BCS years", are submitted here as evidence for the validity of this strategy.

Construction of query concepts based on feature clustering of documents

In Information Retrieval, since it is hard to identify users' information needs, many approaches have been tried to solve this problem by expanding initial queries and reweighting the terms in the expanded queries using users' relevance judgments. Although relevance feedback is most effective when relevance information about retrieved documents is provided by users, it is not always available. Another solution is to use correlated terms for query expansion. The main problem with this approach is how to construct the term-term correlations that can be used effectively to improve retrieval performance. In this study, we try to construct query concepts that denote users' information needs from a document space, rather than to reformulate initial queries using the term correlations and/or users' relevance feedback. To form query concepts, we extract features from each document, and then cluster the features into primitive concepts that are then used to form query concepts. Experiments are performed on the Associated Press (AP) dataset taken from the TREC collection. The experimental evaluation shows that our proposed framework called QCM (Query Concept Method) outperforms baseline probabilistic retrieval model on TREC retrieval.

Allegations Raise Fears of Backlash Against AIDS Prevention Strategy

HIV TRANSMISSIONMuch to the dismay of AIDS researchers and clinicians around the world, the Associated Press (AP) ran a series last week that has reignited debate about the safety of one of the most heralded interventions in AIDS prevention: use of the drug nevirapine to prevent HIV transmission from an infected mother to her infant.

Forgotten war, forgotten massacres—the Korean War (1950–1953) as licensed mass killings

In 1999, the Associated Press (AP) revealed the existence of startling documents about the Korean War showing that United States troops had killed hundreds of civilian refugees in the early stages ...

Picturing Afghan Women

This study content analyzes the depiction of Afghan women in AP (Associated Press) photographs during the Taliban regime and after the fall of the Taliban regime. Analysis is based on visual subordination, point of view, social distance, imaginary contact, behavior and general portrayal. Findings suggest despite signs of visual subordination and framing stereotypes, women after the fall of the Taliban regime are portrayed as more involved, interactive, more socially intimate and symbolically equal to the viewer. Analysis shows AP photographs portray a more complex version of Afghan women’s liberation. Women after the fall of the Taliban regime are depicted still wearing their burqas, reflecting the complexity of a social liberation movement in a traditional society.

Rooted in Nations, Blossoming in Globalization? A Cultural Perspective on the Content of a “Northern” Mainstream and a “Southern” Alternative News Agency

This study compares news coverage produced by the mainstream Associated Press (AP) and the alternative Inter Press Service (IPS), an organization that highlights development issues and seeks balanced geographic representation in journalism. A cultural analysis of the two agencies’content provides a concrete example of how AP and IPS articles represent the South differently at the level where audiences actually experience news: the text. The qualitative analysis finds that in reporting on the Group of 77 Summit that convened in Cuba in 2000, IPS discourse emphasizes Southern nations’ cooperation, achievement, and goals, while the AP frames the event in terms of their disunity, neglect, and controversy. It concludes that the dominant agency filters news through U.S. hegemonic interests and assumptions, underscoring the need for more diverse sources of information in order for the public to adequately assess world events.

Other Research -- What's in a Name? Terms Used to Refer to People With Disabilities

What is in a collective name? Plenty, according to minority rights groups who have worked throughout the twentieth century to identify themselves using descriptive, reflective and respectful labels. These labels have often been "replacement" terms for those created by people outside of the group in question.How are persons with disabilities identified by the media? An examination of articles concerning persons with disabilities provided to the national media by The Disability News Service, Inc. is examined along with those provided by a more general news service, Associated Press (AP), to determine whether there is a difference in terms utilized. Implications of findings are discussed.

Early man, late journalists

Early man, late journalists

Importing Foreign News: A Case Study of the German Service of the Associated Press

News agencies play a significant role in procuring foreign news. This study analyzes how the Associated Press (AP) “imports” foreign news to Germany, seeks to determine by what criteria the news is selected, and examines how it is translated and revised. In the German central office in Frankfurt, the “slotter” determines which news should be passed on to the German media; selected news is given to other editors for revision. Although there are similarities in the structure of the selected and discarded news, differences do emerge. The importing of foreign news does not consist of a mere translation of news, but of a reduction and transformation of contextual details. Thus, the news is adapted to the specific journalistic style of Germany.

Probability scoring for spelling correction

This paper describes a new program, CORRECT, which takes words rejected by the Unix® SPELL program, proposes a list of candidate corrections, and sorts them by probability score. The probability scores are the novel contribution of this work. They are based on a noisy channel model. It is assumed that the typist knows what words he or she wants to type but some noise is added on the way to the keyboard (in the form of typos and spelling errors). Using a classic Bayesian argument of the kind that is popular in recognition applications, especially speech recognition (Jelinek, 1985), one can often recover the intended correction,c, from a typo,t, by finding the correctionc that maximizesPr(c) Pr(t/c). The first factor,Pr(c), is a prior model of word probabilities; the second factor,Pr(t/c), is a model of the noisy channel that accounts for spelling transformations on letter sequences (insertions, deletions, substitutions and reversals). Both sets of probabilities were estimated using data collected from the Associated Press (AP) newswire over 1988 and 1989 as a training set. The AP generates about 1 million words and 500 typos per week.

Reviews

Feona Hamilton, formerly the Library Association's Press Officer and later for a time Information, Research and Consultancy Group Manager at Aslib, offers her experience in public relations in the library world to librarians and information professionals wishing to publicise or market their services. She adopts the definitions that publicity consists of promoting something in order to draw attention to it, whereas marketing consists of promoting something in order to sell it. It has long been known that the public image of librarians is unacceptably low and that libraries fail to attract the attention they deserve, even within the organisation or authority that supports them. Everyone suffers in consequence yet surprisingly little is done to counter this belief of inferiority. There are articles and some other books, mostly of US origin, on this topic, but nothing exactly like Infopromotion.

Football rankings: A forecast for economists' productivity

A recent issue of this Journal contained an interesting verification by Shughart, Tollison, and Goff ["Pigskins and Publications," Atlantic Economic Journal, 14, July 1986, pp. 46-50] of the importance of university football teams to academia. Specifically, these authors claim that the productivity or publications of an economics faculty decline when their university's football team is having a winning season. They conclude that the opportunity costs for economists are higher when their football team is winning because they postpone their research in order to follow the team. With tongue in cheek, the authors clearly recognize the joy of having a winning team. This comment adds a forecasting measure, based on the college football season rankings by the Associated Press (AP) for the years 1965-85, for economists who are planning how to spend their fall semester or trying to determine whether their productivity will be high or low. The highest opportunity costs would be for faculty at the university whose football team is designated as No. 1 in the preseason ranking or becomes during the season a viable candidate for No. 1 in the postseason ranking. Therefore, it is important for economists to know how much confidence they can place in the AP forecasts as a predictor of postseason rankings. Note first that Alabama, Nebraska, Notre Dame, Oklahoma, and Southern California were selected by the AP as postseason No. 1 teams over 60 percent of the time between 1965 and 1985. Therefore, faculty members at these schools have a high chance of being faced with the ultimate opportunity cost of having a postseason No. 1 team. But even for these schools, knowledge of the preseason rankings does not necessarily indicate the extent of opportunity costs the faculty will face during the season. It is true that these same schools were selected as preseason No. 1 over 60 percent of the time, but not necessarily in the same year that they were given a postseason No. 1 rank. In fact, the team with the preseason No. 1 rank is seldom the team with the postseason No. 1 rank. In only four of these 21 years (19 percent) did the same team have a No. 1 for both preseason and postseason rankings. For those teams given an AP preseason rank of No. 1 during this period, the 95 percent confidence interval estimate of the postseason rank is between 3 and 8. This means that 5 percent of preseason No. 1 teams can expect to have a postseason rank of either 9 or greater, or 2 or less. The same analysis of teams with an AP postseason rank of No. 1 reveals a similar conclusion. The 95 percent conf idence in terval es t imate of preseason rank is between 4 and 11 for those teams given a postseason rank of No. 1. Therefore, 5 percent of postseason No. 1 teams can expect to have a preseason rank of either 12 or more, or 3 or less. Further, 14 percent of these teams were not even among the top 20 in preseason ranks. A n o t h e r ques t ion of interest is how reliable is the preseason rank in predicting team record for the season. For these years, there is significant negative (P < .10) correlation between preseason rank and team record for those teams receiving the coveted postseason No. 1 rank. This means that the worse the preseason rank, the better the team record during the season. Perhaps a low preseason rank simultaneously spurs the team on to gridiron victories and encourages economists to spend a productive season on research and publications, leading to promotion and tenure victories.