Page 259 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research

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substance abuse. Controversial elements of the civic journalism approach
include the use of surveys and focus groups to guide selection of topics
for news coverage of elections and the sponsoring of civic forums. Such
practices give critics cause to say journalists are overstepping their
bounds as neutral observers. Different media often work together cooper-
atively on large multimedia projects. These attempts to avoid characteris-
tic biases of journalism are noteworthy and have provided numerous
opportunities for scholars to examine local journalism in the context of
communities (Friedland, Sotirovic, & Daily, 1998).
The variety in goals and strategies used in the dozens of local civic
journalism efforts makes overall generalizations about success difficult.
One key to their successes is that local media can facilitate the construc-
tion of local networks of deliberation and action that endure beyond the
time frame of the program (Friedland, 2001a, 2001b). Denton and Thorson
(1998) also found positive effects on political knowledge of a civic journal-
ism intervention in a local community. Eksterowicz, Roberts, and Clark
(1998) look to civic journalism as a recipe for improving levels of political
knowledge. On the national level, Alvarez (1997) has examined several
elections using national survey data and complex rational choice models
to show, among other things, that voters are unlikely to vote for candi-
dates about whom they know very little. Knowledge gain was also fea-
tured prominently in results of the National Issues Convention experi-
ment in which a nationally representative random sample of people were
assembled in Austin in 1996 to hear discussion and debate about the
upcoming national election. People did learn from this exercise. The chal-
lenge is to draw lessons for the coverage of national politics.

Media-Based Youth Programs. Concern with low levels of participa-
tion among the young led to the development in the 1990s of dozens of
school-based intervention programs using media as sources of learning or
media production by youth as a learning device (Sirianni & Friedland,
2001). The strong interest of adolescents in new media beyond televi-
sion—videos, computers, and CDs (Roberts, 2000)—provides the basis for
such programs. The low level of news media use among adolescents is
partly compensated for by their use of new technologies. Young adults
not only are more likely than older adults to use the Internet for informa-
tion search and exchange, but also the strength of effect of such use on
civic engagement is greater (Shah, Kwak, & Holbert, 2001; Shah, McLeod,
& Yoon, 2001). Though various media-based programs have been success-
ful, the complex processes by which they achieve their goals are seldom
evaluated. A KidsVoting USA project was successful in stimulating ado-
lescent civic engagement through strategically combining the strengths of
teachers, parents, and local media (Chaffee et al., 1995; McDevitt & Chaf-