Health disparities has been a pressing problem in america. These disparities may be observed from various perspectives and at various levels. For example, prevalence of certain diseases or health issues have been higher in some communities or ethnicities than others. Similarly, for some communities, mortality due to the disease may be higher. There are many other angles looking from which , various types of disparities may be exposed in health environment. Some of these variable may be variables like trust in medical system, nature of relationship and communication with medical personnels, and degree of access to health infrastructure. However, these are complex environments and required multi pronged approaches to tackle these issues.
Recently, there has been a push on getting more research done on these disparities which is backed by grants from various agencies. School of communication at Ohio University has been involved in health communication related efforts for previous some time and now the school wants to go to the next level and intensify its engagement with identifying and decoding health disparities and finding efficacious solutions.
The school has announced a brown bag meeting on February 11, 2011 at noon at 107, Scripps Hall and both graduate students and faculty members are welcome to attend.
Monday, February 7, 2011
Thursday, February 3, 2011
Theory Matters: What’s up with the FCC and how theory helps us see why we should care
Editor’s Note: This is the first of an occasional series of blogs addressing the value of theory.
As journalists, we tend to be consumed with documenting what is.At our best, we stand between our readers/viewers and the forces that seek to use them for their own benefit, shining sentinels on the wall of public discourse, pointing out the targets and shouting the coordinates for the next salvo. At our worst, we are willing, if often blind, accomplices to the disingenuous and corrupt as they sneak into our communities on soft shoes.
Rarely do we pause in our race to print, post and broadcast to ask why. Why are they (often, we don’t even bother to ask, let alone find out, who “they” are), for instance, paving this street as opposed to that street? Or, why are they giving this company a tax break while a company down the street is going out of business?
Theory helps us to do that, to tease out the broader questions that should inform the relentless quest for what is. Of course, as graduate students we are less concerned with committing acts of journalism per se than with perpetrating supposed scholarship. Yet, the issues are the same: Are we satisfied with documenting what is or are we probing the deeper why? Theory helps us, as journalists consumed with what is, look up to the horizon and ask: Why?
As scholars, our essential task is the same as the journalist: To be the sentinel, the lonely watchperson on the wall, standing between those who do the hard work and those who seek to profit unfairly from that labor. Our primary weapon is not the narrative that reveals and enlightens but the theories that help us examine the why.
The Federal Communications Commission has presented a delightful opportunity to put theory to the ground, so to speak. On January 21, the FCC issued a call for public comment on the future of “local news” (FCC, 2011). The question has to be: What the *&%* is up with that?
FCC and localism
The FCC traditionally has been guided by the assumption that locally originated programming would necessarily address local issues and politics, thereby serving First Amendment ideals of robust debate (Napoli, 2001). Technological changes, however, including direct satellite transmission and the rise of the Internet, have challenged the idea of “spatial” orientation as the foundation for a definition of local. If local is envisioned as a community of interest, geography is only part of the equation. The Internet has allowed people of like interests to gather in a cyberworld, regardless of physical location (2001, pg. 220). Further, the crescendo of convergence among the media through digital channels has given the FCC a foothold into areas where it has never gone before: print journalism. The federal agency has taken an intense interest in taking over regulation of the Internet as a mass communication network. Perhaps no other issue is as important for those interested in the future of journalism, democratic involvement, and the role of the individual citizen.
How does theory help us look at the broader question of why? Traditional democratic liberal theory, as best expressed by Jonathan Stuart Mill in his famous On Liberty, holds that citizen involvement begins at the local level. This is where citizens learn the mechanics of self-government by consuming information, debating issues of public interest, and taking action through voting and petitioning – a process I would argue is best explained by Jurgen Habermas in his widely criticized theory of communicative action and the public sphere. These procedures are then translated to the national stage. The principles of localism also are meant to preserve local traditions and cultures, which are under continual pressure from a “mass society” fueled by mass media, which tends to homogenize everything from holidays to economics (Napoli, pg. 2009). A political economist, however, likely would dismiss the notion of democratic citizenship involvement as a quaint, utopian relic, a gaggle of sheep bahhing at each other while the wolves munch happily on the lambs. Under these ideas, the FCC’s move to examine “local news” is merely a logical expression of institutional power flexing its natural muscle at the behest of capitalists. This is best seen, I would suggest, in the arguments of Horkheimer and Adorno and their highly lucid explanation of the base consuming the superstructure.
The FCC historically has adopted an ill-defined localism philosophy through regulations that ensure at least a portion of the broadcast spectrum and actual airtime is devoted to local programming produced by local people. Though no empirical evidence suggests this is always the case, the FCC has presumed its logic through a series of regulations, including broadcast licensing rules (2001, pg. 211); initial cable regulations that privileged local, over-the-air stations (pg. 212), and “main studio” requirements for radio stations (pg. 213). After pursuing these policies for some time, the FCC has veered from the idea that local geography directly translates into local programming and has tended to focus more on content as a definition of localism rather than point of origination (pg. 214). This is seen in changes in media ownership rules, which have tended to expand the number and types of outlets a single owner may acquire, cable regulation, and satellite rules.
The FCC has taken up the issue of localism with some force this year. In its request for comment in January, the agency announced a nationwide examination of the fate of local journalism. Said the FCC in its announcement: “The objective of this review is to assess whether all Americans have access to vibrant, diverse sources of news and information that will enable them to enrich their lives, their communities and our democracy” (FCC, 2011). The agency, for instance, is embracing a study by the highly respected Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California that compared coverage on all eight television stations to coverage of the same categories in the Los Angeles Times. The primary findings:
1) Local TV used 1.9 percent of its news hole to cover government in the LA media market; the LA Times used 3.3 percent.
2) The newspaper used more than three times the amount of its news hole for covering local business and the economy than TV did.
3) LA TV stations allocated nine times more of their news hole to soft, odd, and miscellaneous stories, and used almost three times more of their news hole for crime, than the newspaper did (Kaplan & Hale, 2010).
The study was conducted by the Lear Center at USC Annenberg, which is best known for hosting the Internet-popular TED Talks. The center is devoted, primarily, to studies of entertainment, including movies and television, and new technology. It is not for me to criticize our Left Coast brethren. I merely point out that the study as published by the center for popular consumption called two constructed weeks a “scientific sample;” offered no chi squares, intercoder reliability measures, or anything other than descriptive statistics; offered no theory to guide its questions, and did not appear to offer the findings for peer review. While these issues do not negate the power or accuracy of the study, I gently suggest the center’s founding focus and the fact an FCC commissioner helped release the findings may raise questions about possible proclivities toward seeing the agency as a white knight in Internet regulation.
Fundamental questions
Without theory-guided examination, I would argue this could be dangerous for fundamental First Amendment values as the FCC appears to be using the plight of the legacy news media as an excuse to reach toward regulating the Internet. If successful, this would – for the first time – put print and broadcasters in the same constitutional basket.
This would seem far-fetched, perhaps, if not for such language as is seen in the announcement calling for comment on local news: “As the nation’s expert agency (emphasis added) involved in media and communications policies (emphasis added) the FCC has begun an examination of the future of media and the information needs of communities in a digital age” (FCC, 2011). The result of this effort, the announcement said, would be recommendations for policies to the commission and “other government agencies.” The FCC did not single out broadcast stations in its emphasis on “media” in the production of local news. Further, the FCC-supported Annenberg study did not compare the eight local television stations to the dozens of radio stations in the LA market, the cable television systems, or satellite services. Rather, the researchers compared the stations to the local newspaper. Of course, the Los Angeles Times is a major player in Internet news.
In helping the Lear Center make its announcement on the study findings, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said, “Journalism – broadcast journalism and newspaper journalism – is in trouble” (Annenberg, 2010). He more explicitly linked broadcast and newspapers later in his remarks when he chided government regulators for allowing the “systematic dismantling of broadcast.” But, he noted, “It goes beyond broadcast because you have so many combinations of newspapers and broadcast.”
In making its announcement for public comment on the future of local news, the FCC lumped together all media with a rather astonishing focus on content. For instance, one question it asks: “Does the efficiency and specialization of the Internet make it less likely to support the cross-subsidies that existed for many decades within newspapers (in which, for example, popular human interest content effectively cross-subsidized news reporting)?” (FCC, 2011, pg. 4). The FCC appears to be arming for an assault to take over not just the wires of the Internet, the infrastructure that transmits information, but the World Wide Web, the information system sitting on top of it. The agency appears to be equating the Internet (in a rather perplexing mash-up of infrastructure and content) to a public good similar to the original argument for regulating television stations.
The question is not whether the legacy media are failing. They are. Neither is the question whether the absence of reporters “pounding the street,” as Copps put it, hurting the core functions of the press in a representative democracy. It is. The question is whether the FCC, as an executive agency of the federal government, should be leading the charge for a remedy.
Advocacy groups across the country are paying attention, without seeming to see any broader implications. Common Cause in California, for instance, spurred by the Annenberg study, issued a call to its members to let the FCC know what it can do to “address local news” (Common Cause, 2011). Yet, Common Cause in its suggested letter to be sent by members to the FCC did not mention newspapers or the Internet but focused on rolling back the deregulation of broadcast during the Reagan era. The group should be forgiven its failure to catch the nuance in the FCC’s announcement. It is natural to see the agency in its traditional role of broadcast regulator, not its self-proclaimed recasting as the “expert agency on media and communications policies.”
This should, it would seem, spark an urgent call for the academy to address vital and fundamental issues centered on government involvement in First Amendment values. Ensuring a national grid of broadband Internet access, which gets only a passing mention in the FCC’s announcement for public comment on local news, seems a noble and important goal. Regulating the content that flows across that grid is an entirely different matter.
Documenting the what is of the FCC’s investigation of local news is not difficult. Explicating the broader and more important why is far harder but is aided by deploying the big guns of theory: What forces are shaping the what is? Guided by the pluralists, we may well reach one conclusion. Guided by political economists, we may well reach another. That is not the point. The point is did we ask the right questions and sound the alarm?
Source
Annenberg, USC, (2010), “Highlights of FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps,” posted to
YouTube, dated March 11, 2010, available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2glhu5bC6g (accessed February 3, 2011).
Common Cause, (2011), “Eight ways the FCC can address local news,” available at
http://www.commoncause.org/siteapps/advocacy/ActionItem.aspx?c=dkLNK1MQIwG&b=5863341 (accessed February 3, 2011).
FCC, (2011), “FCC launches examination of the future of the media and information needs of
communities in a digital age,” available at http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DA-10-100A1.pdf (accessed February 1, 2011).
Kaplan, M. & Hale, M. (2011), “Local TV news in the Los Angeles media market: Are stations
serving the public interest?,” available at http://www.learcenter.org/pdf/LANews2010.pdf (accessed February 3, 2011).
Napoli, P.M., (2001), Foundations of Communications Policy: Principles and Process in the
Regulation of Electronic Media, (Creskill, N.J.: Hampton Press).
As journalists, we tend to be consumed with documenting what is.At our best, we stand between our readers/viewers and the forces that seek to use them for their own benefit, shining sentinels on the wall of public discourse, pointing out the targets and shouting the coordinates for the next salvo. At our worst, we are willing, if often blind, accomplices to the disingenuous and corrupt as they sneak into our communities on soft shoes.
Rarely do we pause in our race to print, post and broadcast to ask why. Why are they (often, we don’t even bother to ask, let alone find out, who “they” are), for instance, paving this street as opposed to that street? Or, why are they giving this company a tax break while a company down the street is going out of business?
Theory helps us to do that, to tease out the broader questions that should inform the relentless quest for what is. Of course, as graduate students we are less concerned with committing acts of journalism per se than with perpetrating supposed scholarship. Yet, the issues are the same: Are we satisfied with documenting what is or are we probing the deeper why? Theory helps us, as journalists consumed with what is, look up to the horizon and ask: Why?
As scholars, our essential task is the same as the journalist: To be the sentinel, the lonely watchperson on the wall, standing between those who do the hard work and those who seek to profit unfairly from that labor. Our primary weapon is not the narrative that reveals and enlightens but the theories that help us examine the why.
The Federal Communications Commission has presented a delightful opportunity to put theory to the ground, so to speak. On January 21, the FCC issued a call for public comment on the future of “local news” (FCC, 2011). The question has to be: What the *&%* is up with that?
FCC and localism
The FCC traditionally has been guided by the assumption that locally originated programming would necessarily address local issues and politics, thereby serving First Amendment ideals of robust debate (Napoli, 2001). Technological changes, however, including direct satellite transmission and the rise of the Internet, have challenged the idea of “spatial” orientation as the foundation for a definition of local. If local is envisioned as a community of interest, geography is only part of the equation. The Internet has allowed people of like interests to gather in a cyberworld, regardless of physical location (2001, pg. 220). Further, the crescendo of convergence among the media through digital channels has given the FCC a foothold into areas where it has never gone before: print journalism. The federal agency has taken an intense interest in taking over regulation of the Internet as a mass communication network. Perhaps no other issue is as important for those interested in the future of journalism, democratic involvement, and the role of the individual citizen.
How does theory help us look at the broader question of why? Traditional democratic liberal theory, as best expressed by Jonathan Stuart Mill in his famous On Liberty, holds that citizen involvement begins at the local level. This is where citizens learn the mechanics of self-government by consuming information, debating issues of public interest, and taking action through voting and petitioning – a process I would argue is best explained by Jurgen Habermas in his widely criticized theory of communicative action and the public sphere. These procedures are then translated to the national stage. The principles of localism also are meant to preserve local traditions and cultures, which are under continual pressure from a “mass society” fueled by mass media, which tends to homogenize everything from holidays to economics (Napoli, pg. 2009). A political economist, however, likely would dismiss the notion of democratic citizenship involvement as a quaint, utopian relic, a gaggle of sheep bahhing at each other while the wolves munch happily on the lambs. Under these ideas, the FCC’s move to examine “local news” is merely a logical expression of institutional power flexing its natural muscle at the behest of capitalists. This is best seen, I would suggest, in the arguments of Horkheimer and Adorno and their highly lucid explanation of the base consuming the superstructure.
The FCC historically has adopted an ill-defined localism philosophy through regulations that ensure at least a portion of the broadcast spectrum and actual airtime is devoted to local programming produced by local people. Though no empirical evidence suggests this is always the case, the FCC has presumed its logic through a series of regulations, including broadcast licensing rules (2001, pg. 211); initial cable regulations that privileged local, over-the-air stations (pg. 212), and “main studio” requirements for radio stations (pg. 213). After pursuing these policies for some time, the FCC has veered from the idea that local geography directly translates into local programming and has tended to focus more on content as a definition of localism rather than point of origination (pg. 214). This is seen in changes in media ownership rules, which have tended to expand the number and types of outlets a single owner may acquire, cable regulation, and satellite rules.
The FCC has taken up the issue of localism with some force this year. In its request for comment in January, the agency announced a nationwide examination of the fate of local journalism. Said the FCC in its announcement: “The objective of this review is to assess whether all Americans have access to vibrant, diverse sources of news and information that will enable them to enrich their lives, their communities and our democracy” (FCC, 2011). The agency, for instance, is embracing a study by the highly respected Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California that compared coverage on all eight television stations to coverage of the same categories in the Los Angeles Times. The primary findings:
1) Local TV used 1.9 percent of its news hole to cover government in the LA media market; the LA Times used 3.3 percent.
2) The newspaper used more than three times the amount of its news hole for covering local business and the economy than TV did.
3) LA TV stations allocated nine times more of their news hole to soft, odd, and miscellaneous stories, and used almost three times more of their news hole for crime, than the newspaper did (Kaplan & Hale, 2010).
The study was conducted by the Lear Center at USC Annenberg, which is best known for hosting the Internet-popular TED Talks. The center is devoted, primarily, to studies of entertainment, including movies and television, and new technology. It is not for me to criticize our Left Coast brethren. I merely point out that the study as published by the center for popular consumption called two constructed weeks a “scientific sample;” offered no chi squares, intercoder reliability measures, or anything other than descriptive statistics; offered no theory to guide its questions, and did not appear to offer the findings for peer review. While these issues do not negate the power or accuracy of the study, I gently suggest the center’s founding focus and the fact an FCC commissioner helped release the findings may raise questions about possible proclivities toward seeing the agency as a white knight in Internet regulation.
Fundamental questions
Without theory-guided examination, I would argue this could be dangerous for fundamental First Amendment values as the FCC appears to be using the plight of the legacy news media as an excuse to reach toward regulating the Internet. If successful, this would – for the first time – put print and broadcasters in the same constitutional basket.
This would seem far-fetched, perhaps, if not for such language as is seen in the announcement calling for comment on local news: “As the nation’s expert agency (emphasis added) involved in media and communications policies (emphasis added) the FCC has begun an examination of the future of media and the information needs of communities in a digital age” (FCC, 2011). The result of this effort, the announcement said, would be recommendations for policies to the commission and “other government agencies.” The FCC did not single out broadcast stations in its emphasis on “media” in the production of local news. Further, the FCC-supported Annenberg study did not compare the eight local television stations to the dozens of radio stations in the LA market, the cable television systems, or satellite services. Rather, the researchers compared the stations to the local newspaper. Of course, the Los Angeles Times is a major player in Internet news.
In helping the Lear Center make its announcement on the study findings, FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said, “Journalism – broadcast journalism and newspaper journalism – is in trouble” (Annenberg, 2010). He more explicitly linked broadcast and newspapers later in his remarks when he chided government regulators for allowing the “systematic dismantling of broadcast.” But, he noted, “It goes beyond broadcast because you have so many combinations of newspapers and broadcast.”
In making its announcement for public comment on the future of local news, the FCC lumped together all media with a rather astonishing focus on content. For instance, one question it asks: “Does the efficiency and specialization of the Internet make it less likely to support the cross-subsidies that existed for many decades within newspapers (in which, for example, popular human interest content effectively cross-subsidized news reporting)?” (FCC, 2011, pg. 4). The FCC appears to be arming for an assault to take over not just the wires of the Internet, the infrastructure that transmits information, but the World Wide Web, the information system sitting on top of it. The agency appears to be equating the Internet (in a rather perplexing mash-up of infrastructure and content) to a public good similar to the original argument for regulating television stations.
The question is not whether the legacy media are failing. They are. Neither is the question whether the absence of reporters “pounding the street,” as Copps put it, hurting the core functions of the press in a representative democracy. It is. The question is whether the FCC, as an executive agency of the federal government, should be leading the charge for a remedy.
Advocacy groups across the country are paying attention, without seeming to see any broader implications. Common Cause in California, for instance, spurred by the Annenberg study, issued a call to its members to let the FCC know what it can do to “address local news” (Common Cause, 2011). Yet, Common Cause in its suggested letter to be sent by members to the FCC did not mention newspapers or the Internet but focused on rolling back the deregulation of broadcast during the Reagan era. The group should be forgiven its failure to catch the nuance in the FCC’s announcement. It is natural to see the agency in its traditional role of broadcast regulator, not its self-proclaimed recasting as the “expert agency on media and communications policies.”
This should, it would seem, spark an urgent call for the academy to address vital and fundamental issues centered on government involvement in First Amendment values. Ensuring a national grid of broadband Internet access, which gets only a passing mention in the FCC’s announcement for public comment on local news, seems a noble and important goal. Regulating the content that flows across that grid is an entirely different matter.
Documenting the what is of the FCC’s investigation of local news is not difficult. Explicating the broader and more important why is far harder but is aided by deploying the big guns of theory: What forces are shaping the what is? Guided by the pluralists, we may well reach one conclusion. Guided by political economists, we may well reach another. That is not the point. The point is did we ask the right questions and sound the alarm?
Source
Annenberg, USC, (2010), “Highlights of FCC Commissioner Michael J. Copps,” posted to
YouTube, dated March 11, 2010, available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2glhu5bC6g (accessed February 3, 2011).
Common Cause, (2011), “Eight ways the FCC can address local news,” available at
http://www.commoncause.org/siteapps/advocacy/ActionItem.aspx?c=dkLNK1MQIwG&b=5863341 (accessed February 3, 2011).
FCC, (2011), “FCC launches examination of the future of the media and information needs of
communities in a digital age,” available at http://hraunfoss.fcc.gov/edocs_public/attachmatch/DA-10-100A1.pdf (accessed February 1, 2011).
Kaplan, M. & Hale, M. (2011), “Local TV news in the Los Angeles media market: Are stations
serving the public interest?,” available at http://www.learcenter.org/pdf/LANews2010.pdf (accessed February 3, 2011).
Napoli, P.M., (2001), Foundations of Communications Policy: Principles and Process in the
Regulation of Electronic Media, (Creskill, N.J.: Hampton Press).
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