Different Media for Organizational Communication: Perceptions of Quality and Satisfaction

We examined the satisfaction in and perceived quality of information about one’s job, business unit, and company, as well as perceived quality of urgent news (i.e., news about changes in business and generally considered legally sensitive material), communicated via different media. Results from 598 fulltime employees revealed that rich media (e.g., face-to-face) was most related to satisfaction in information about one’s job and business unit and in perceived quality of information from the supervisor; lean media (e.g., company newsletter) was most related to satisfaction in and quality of information from top management, while moderate media (e.g., e-mail) was only significantly related to perceived quality of urgent news. Trust in top management was positively related to satisfaction in and quality of information shared by management. Lean media most strongly related to quality of urgent news, over and above rich communication.The authors would like to thank Monica Moloney for her support on this project.     

A comparison of prebunking and debunking interventions for implied versus explicit misinformation

Psychological research has offered valuable insights into how to combat misinformation. The studies conducted to date, however, have three limitations. First, pre-emptive (“prebunking”) and retroactive (“debunking”) interventions have mostly been examined in parallel, and thus it is unclear which of these two predominant approaches is more effective. Second, there has been a focus on misinformation that is explicitly false, but implied misinformation that uses literally true information to mislead is common in the real world. Finally, studies have relied mainly on questionnaire measures of reasoning, neglecting behavioural impacts of misinformation and interventions. To offer incremental progress towards addressing these three issues, we conducted an experiment (N = 735) involving misinformation on fair trade. We contrasted the effectiveness of prebunking versus debunking and the impacts of implied versus explicit misinformation, and incorporated novel measures assessing consumer behaviours (i.e., willingness-to-pay; information seeking; online misinformation promotion) in addition to standard questionnaire measures. In general, both prebunking and debunking reduced misinformation reliance. We also found that individuals tended to rely more on explicit than implied misinformation both with and without interventions.     

Making the audience a key participant in the science communication process

The public communication of science and technology has become increasingly important over the last several decades. However, understanding the audience that receives this information remains the weak link in the science communication process. This essay provides a brief review of some of the issues involved, discusses results from an audience-based study, and suggests some strategies that both scientists and journalists can use to modify media coverage in ways that can help audiences better understand major public issues that involve science and technology. Carol L. Rogers is editor of the interdisciplinary journal Science Communication.     

Symbolic Sequence Effects on Consumers’ Judgments of Truth for Brand Claims

We introduce symbolic sequence effects—the consequences of whether the sequence of the initial letters of a pair of words (e.g., a word representing a putative cause and another word representing a putative effect) conforms to the structure of symbolic sequences that are stored in the mind as overlearned natural language traces (“natural sequence”). We synthesize insights from psychophysics as well as numerical and natural language symbolic representations to demonstrate that consumers are able to unconsciously perceive the mere sequence of symbols contained in a brand claim, and that this sequence information influences judgments of truth. Across three experiments, we showed that when a brand claim is structured in a way that is consistent with the natural sequence of symbols (“A causes B” rather than “B causes A”), people experience feelings of sequential fluency, which in turn influences judgments of truth. This occurs despite the inability of participants to attribute the true source of the feelings. Our results suggest that carefully designed brand claims are likely to benefit from this natural sequencing. These findings provide important contributions to the literatures on processing fluency, branding, and advertising. These findings also have sobering societal implications and warn that fake news might be more persuasive if the perpetrators understand symbolic sequencing techniques.     

FNDNet – A deep convolutional neural network for fake news detection

With the increasing popularity of social media and web-based forums, the distribution of fake news has become a major threat to various sectors and agencies. This has abated trust in the media, leaving readers in a state of perplexity. There exists an enormous assemblage of research on the theme of Artificial Intelligence (AI) strategies for fake news detection. In the past, much of the focus has been given on classifying online reviews and freely accessible online social networking-based posts. In this work, we propose a deep convolutional neural network (FNDNet) for fake news detection. Instead of relying on hand-crafted features, our model (FNDNet) is designed to automatically learn the discriminatory features for fake news classification through multiple hidden layers built in the deep neural network. We create a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to extract several features at each layer. We compare the performance of the proposed approach with several baseline models. Benchmarked datasets were used to train and test the model, and the proposed model achieved state-of-the-art results with an accuracy of 98.36% on the test data. Various performance evaluation parameters such as Wilcoxon, false positive, true negative, precision, recall, F1, and accuracy, etc. were used to validate the results. These results demonstrate significant improvements in the area of fake news detection as compared to existing state-of-the-art results and affirm the potential of our approach for classifying fake news on social media. This research will assist researchers in broadening the understanding of the applicability of CNN-based deep models for fake news detection.     

What I Wish I Knew Then...Reflections from Personal Experiences in Counseling about Down Syndrome

Sharing the news about a newborn baby’s diagnosis of Down syndrome with families is a scenario genetic counselors frequently face. Yet often we may feel uncomfortable or unsure how to best support families in this setting in a way that will foster competence and resilience. This commentary is a reflection of one genetic counselor’s experiences in counseling about Down syndrome over the course of her career and how her thinking has transitioned from a medical based model of disability to a more individual and family-focused model. Ideas and suggestions are offered that genetic counselors can incorporate into their practice.     

Out of Sight,out of Mind? Controversy over Offshore Wind Energy in Norway's News Media

News media are important reference points for public sense-making of emerging technology. In Norway, offshore wind can be considered an emerging technology. Siting renewable energy technology offshore is commonly regarded as a solution to onshore implementation problems, as development happens ‘out of sight, out of mind’ of the public. However, does moving renewable energy technology offshore really prevent controversy? How is emerging offshore wind technology made comprehensible in Norwegian news media? The dominance of supporting actors and arguments in the Norwegian news media discourse on offshore wind energy technology and the high prevalence of the argument that offshore wind should be non-controversial due to its placement ‘out of sight’ suggest that the expectation that such technology will prevent controversy has been partly met. Still, the emerging technology has been accompanied by an evolving controversy, though with a different extent and focus than the controversy over onshore wind. Both supporting and opposing actors have made offshore wind energy technology comprehensible by employing economic, environmental and moral arguments. Economics has appeared as a privileged frame of interpretation used by both supporters and opponents. Environmental arguments have shifted their focus to biodiversity and global aspects such as sustainability and climate change, and lost their dominance relative to their role in onshore controversies.     

A Statement of Principles for Health Care Journalists

Many journalism organizations have published codes of ethics in recent years. The Association of Newspaper Editors, for example, lists 47 different codes on its website. But an organization of health care journalists felt that none of those codes addressed the unique challenges of covering complex health care topics. The Association of Health Care Journalists (AHCJ) is an independent, non-profit organization dedicated to advancing public understanding of health care issues. Its mission is to improve the quality, accuracy and visibility of health care reporting, writing and editing. AHCJ has written a statement of principles for its 750 members. In it, AHCJ states some of the unique challenges faced by journalists covering health care, and offers suggestions on how to face those challenges. Bioethicists are invited to comment on the statement, and to help generate continued discussion of the issues addressed therein.     

Metaphors that communicate weight-based stigma in political news: A case study of New Jersey Governor Chris Christie

IntroductionNews media use metaphors to describe politics (Landau & Keefer, 2014) and obesity (Barry, Brescoll, Brownell, & Schlesinger, 2009). Weight-based stigma is prevalent in U.S. news media (Heuer, McClure, & Puhl, 2011). Media coverage of politicians’ body size may contain metaphors that stigmatize weight. Metaphors reflect and shape how people think about important issues like politics or obesity (Landau, Sullivan, & Greenberg, 2009; Landau, Meier, & Keefer, 2010; Landau & Keefer, 2014).ObjectiveThis study uses stigma communication theory (Smith, 2007) to examine stigmatizing metaphors used in media coverage of a United States politician, and candidate for the 2016 Republican presidential nomination, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, Republican.MethodWe coded n = 240 articles, from January 2011 to December 2014, that referenced Christie's weight. Considering both the articles and the comments in response to them, we identified n = 246 weight references that utilized metaphors and coded these using categories derived from the stigma communication theory framework.ResultsOur coding of these weight references, from journalists and comments posted by the public, demonstrated that metaphors accomplish all four functions of stigma communication: they mark, label, assign personal responsibility, and link to peril the stigmatized person.ConclusionOur findings demonstrate not only that news media use metaphors to describe a politician's weight, but also show how these metaphors — alone and together — function to constitute stigma communication messages. These messages can affect public opinions toward politics and obesity.     

真实性及其伦理边界——对新闻真实性原则的伦理反思

真实是新闻的生命 ,追求并维护新闻的真实性是新闻工作者的伦理准则。然而和任何准则都不可能是绝对的一样 ,真实性同样不是一条绝对性原则。在具体的新闻传播活动中 ,由真实性引发的伦理冲突是经常存在的。新闻从业人员的职责之一 ,就是如何运用自己的道德智慧来解决这些伦理冲突。