News, Politics, and Negativity

News, Politics, and Negativity

Work in political communication has discussed the ongoing predominance of negative news, but has offered few convincing accounts for this focus. A growing body of literature shows that humans regularly pay more attention to negative information than to positive information, however. This article argues that we should view the nature of news content in part as a consequence of this asymmetry bia...

The Politics of News Media and Persuasion

Decades of research have found evidence of “minimal effects” of the news media on people’s attitudes and beliefs, thereby reinforcing notions of selective exposure and motivated cognition. This paper explores the possibility that, because in today's news environment, different news media outlets convey distinctly different messages, people with different ideological predilections may be especia...

Video, Politics, and Applied Semiotics: Constructing Meaning from Broadcast News

This paper examines the relationship between verbal and visual semiotic cues by analyzing how semiotic cues position speakers interactionally and communicate implicit evaluative messages in one television news story. The paper summarizes an analysis of this news story that my collaborator and I have done based solely on verbal cues (Wortham & Locher, 1996). Then the paper analyzes the visual cu...

MEDICAL NEWS and VIEWS

Intentionality, Politics, And Religion

The idea that intentionality is the distinctive mark of the mental or that only mental phenomena have intentionality emerged in the philosophical tradition after Franz Brentano. Much of contemporary philosophy is dedicated to a rejection of the view that mental phenomena have original intentionality. In other words, main strands of contemporary philosophy seek to naturalize intentionality of th...