Browsing by Subject "Journalism"

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According to a new study : when bad journalism meets questionable science
(2013-05) Burnson, Forrest Matthew; Dahlby, Tracy; Gil de Zúñiga, Homero
Accurately reporting scientific studies remains a challenge for journalists. Often lacking any formal background in science, journalists are expected to communicate the complex findings of scientific research in such a way that average readers can understand. As a result, news coverage tends to exaggerate, misrepresent, or sensationalize the findings of scientific studies. This report examines the common errors that journalists make when reporting on scientific studies, as well as the issues in modern scientific research that contribute to this problem. While total scientific literacy in journalism remains a lofty ideal, the democratizing force of the Internet not only holds journalists more accountable in their reporting, but also provides platforms for skeptics and experts to weigh in on the news treatment that studies receive.
Amy Gajda - Guest Lecture
(The Joynes Reading Room, 2017-09-14) Valentine, Matt
Ana Marie Cox Guest Lecture
(Joynes Reading Room, 2014-10-02) Valentine, Matt
The Arab street : a photographic exploration
(2009-12) Cheney, Clifford Sidney; Darling, Dennis Carlyle; Reed, Ellis
Journalists use the term Arab Street to describe what they often imply is a volatile Arabic public opinion. This photo story travels through four Arab areas or Jordan, Qatar, Israel/Palestine and Egypt in order to show the diversity and complexity of each. The media’s tendency to lump all Arabs into one political block is detrimental to a true sense of cultural understanding that is required for peace.
At the crossroads of crisis : newspaper journalists' struggle to redefine themselves and their work as their organization and the profession change
(2010-08) Hinsley, Amber Willard; Poindexter, Paula Maurie; Sylvie, George; Lasorsa, Dominic; Coleman, Renita; Bartel, Caroline
Newspaper journalists today find themselves at the nexus of a changing media landscape. Their professional principles and job roles are being challenged by changes in the technology they are expected to use, changes in the economic model that has supported the industry since this nation was founded, and changes in public attitudes and perceptions of newspaper journalism. This study examines these changes through the lens of social identity theory, examining how technological and economic changes have affected newspaper journalists’ perceptions about the ways in which they are able to perform their jobs and their perceptions about threats to the status of their profession, and how those beliefs affect their identification with their newspaper organizations and the profession. The primary methodological approach used was a national Web-based survey of journalists working at newspapers with circulations of more than 10,000. To supplement the survey findings, in-depth interviews were conducted with survey participants who volunteered to be interviewed. The findings included that journalists who have negative perceptions about changes in the newspaper industry will be more likely to have negative feelings about the impact of those changes on their jobs, and that journalists with negative feelings about those changes on their jobs will be more likely to have lower organizational identification. Professional identification was found to partially mediate this relationship, in large part because it has a considerable overlap with journalists’ organizational identification. This study also found that journalists who have negative perceptions about changes in the industry will be more likely to perceive the status of the profession has been threatened, and that journalists who perceive those status threats will be more likely to have lower professional identification. Additionally, journalists’ job type and the circulation size of their newspaper affected some of these relationships, such as the link between negative feelings about technological and economic changes and lower organizational identification. The implications of this study’s findings for the newspaper profession and those who study it are discussed in the last chapter.
Austin media in the digital age
(2012-05) Gomez-Garcia, Oscar David; Gil de Zúñiga, Homero; Alves, Rosental C.
This report first explores the changes journalism is experiencing since the advent of the Internet in a broad manner. Second, and more specifically, it aims to shed more light on the mechanisms that are used by the very diverse Austin-area range of outlets and journalistic corporations, and the way they are embracing and adopting new technologies. To that end, it also tries to analyze the current Austin media ecosystem in depth, focusing on some of the most representative local media outlets and interviewing some of the more relevant personalities that are making all of these changes feasible.
Civic engagement in a mobile landscape : testing the roles of duration and frequency in learning from news
(2015-08) Molyneux, Logan Ken; Poindexter, Paula Maurie
Consuming the news is often seen as preparing a person to participate in a democracy by giving them the information they need to make choices and provide input. This relationship has varied depending on the ways in which news is delivered, with different news platforms delivering different results in terms of learning from the news. As society changes and people's news consumption habits shift toward mobile, it is necessary to re-examine this relationship in a mobile age. This dissertation conducts surveys of two samples of U.S. adults one year apart in order to examine civic engagement in a mobile news landscape. Study 1, given to a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults in 2014, tests the Mobile News Dependency Model. The model predicts that reliance on mobile devices for news consumption will lead people to consume news in shorter, inattentive sessions, which should have detrimental effects on news knowledge and therefore civic engagement. Study 2, given in 2015 to a different sample of U.S. adults, refines the tests conducted in Study 1 using updated measures to identify those who snack on the news and compare them with those who get news in larger portions. Results show that news sessions on smartphone are indeed shorter than on other platforms, and that smartphone news use is associated with snacking on the news. But those who get news from smartphones are not significantly less knowledgeable and are in fact slightly more civically engaged than those who do not. Links between smartphone news use and short sessions or snacking are supported, but the overall Mobile News Dependency Model is not supported. The overall relationship between mobile news use and civic engagement appears to take a different path than the one specified. Finally, results show that most people consume news on multiple platforms, perhaps normalizing the effects of any one platform on knowledge. Implications for news consumers, news producers, and democracy in a mobile age are discussed.
Digging in the Lone Star State : techniques of Texas record-seeking reporters
(2017-08-03) Moravec, Eva Ruth; Brenner, R. B. (Robert B.); McElroy, Kathleen Oveta
This thesis examines the role of journalists in the open records-seeking process by identifying factors that may contribute to a record-seeker’s success at obtaining public information. Set in Texas, this study also looks specifically at how journalists operate under the Texas Public Information Act. Previous research has indicated that only a sliver of journalists employ open records laws in their regular reporting. Through elite interviews and an autoethnographic analysis of the researcher’s journal from a yearlong reporting project, this study examines journalists who regularly request records and how they use the laws to their benefit, the barriers and challenges they face in obtaining materials, and the role of records custodians. All participants have become experts on state and federal laws on their own, mostly learning on-the-job. Only one received formal training in school – even then, only the very basics of filing a federal request – before becoming a journalist. Their self-taught expertise gives them confidence in knowing what records should be released, which enables them to stand up for themselves in disagreements with records custodians. Rarely do news outlets file lawsuits to wrestle records out of the grasps of agencies, a costly process for a cash-strapped industry, but many journalists file complaints against agencies that violate the law. One challenge facing journalists who file open records requests is the various ways agencies interpret open records laws, arbitrary actions that can be beneficial at times and a detrimental barrier at other times. In addition to more training, this study suggests that journalists could benefit from filing complaints on law-breaking agencies and writing letters on their own behalves to the state, better tracking records requests and paying closer attention to deadlines that, if ignored by agencies, can lead to the release of records.
Diversity in news staff and among sources : history, today’s numbers and a case study of source tracking at KUT in Austin
(2022-12-21) Scarpelli, Leah Michelle; Alves, Rosental C.
As the only profession protected by the U.S. Constitution, journalism has been subject to much scrutiny about whether it is truly representative of the people it claims to inform. Three moments of crisis within the last century have highlighted a call for change within the industry, and attending to matters of insuring that diverse voices populate the news media is one important mechanism. In terms of diversity, current staffing distributions at many important media sites fall short of adequately representing the U.S. population. The theories of gatekeeping, framing and the hierarchy of needs help inform the function of journalism within a society and how changes might take root in the profession. This research examines recent efforts to bring more diversity into news coverage in the form of source tracking and discusses practices at various news outlets, taking a closer look at source tracking at National Public Radio headquarters in Washington, D.C., and at its Austin affiliate station, KUT.
Examining Texas diversity : identifying the composition of diversity and the coverage of a minority-related issue in the top ten daily Texas newspapers
(2015-05) Mastervich, Ashley C.; Rivas-Rodriguez, Maggie; Jensen, Robert
A newsroom may be fast-paced and exhilarating; and the prestige of reporting, editing or managing for a well-known newspaper in the United States is a dream that aspiring journalists long for. The first goal of this study is to examine the existing diversity in the top ten daily Texas newspapers. The second goal of this study is to analyze the newspapers' content, specifically relating to President Barack Obama's most recent immigration speech given in November 2014. Obama's speech expressed his interest in temporarily protecting undocumented parents of U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents, while making greater efforts to deport unlawful immigrants who could be considered dangerous. The social responsibility theory is consistent with this study's research question and hypotheses because it sets a standard of what the news media should owe the public, such as employing a diverse set of journalists and fairly reporting on a minority-related issue. Thus, this thesis identifies the composition of diversity in Texas newsrooms and the pertinence of understanding how a minority-related issue is covered in the top ten daily Texas newspapers.
Fear & faith in Texas
(2011-05) Vaughn, Casey L.; Coleman, Renita; Alves, Rosental C.
Fear and faith in Texas is a multimedia journalism report about Islam in Texas. Islam has gained significant media attention recently so it is important to know more about a religion that has a growing congregation in the United States. This project answers questions like "What are the basics of the religion?" "Is it really such a foreign concept, or is it grounded in concepts and history familiar to non-Muslims?" Getting to know and break down the barriers that keep stereotypes alive and misconceptions thriving is an important part to understanding Islam. Fear and faith in Texas highlights the truth about Islam and Muslim Americans that often is ignored due to fear and a lack of knowledge. The project incorporates text, video, interactive graphics and other visual aids to give background on the religion of Islam, Muslim Americans, and show the role education plays in communicating information about religion in Texas.
First 100 Days : a tabletop game for open-minded political conversations
(2018-05-10) Levent, Ekin; Gorman, Carma; Walker, James, M.F.A.
The 2016 presidential election that resulted in the presidency of Donald J. Trump has increased the ideological polarization between people in the United States. Today, Americans find having political conversations with someone who holds opposite political beliefs frustrating, and often report finding that they have even less in common with the person than they expected after having a political conversation with them. First 100 Days is a tabletop game that makes it possible for people of different ideological stripes to have open-minded conversations with one another about President Donald J. Trump’s first hundred days in office. In the game, players create headlines with a left, right, centrist, or “fake news” spin in response to Trump’s tweets about events that unfolded during those first hundred days. The cards that players use to construct these headlines contain words derived from converting a Kaggle open-source dataset of news headlines and RSS feeds dated between 2016 and 2017 into a text document, filtering it to eliminate irrelevant content, and “text mining” it in RStudio to determine which words were used most frequently in headlines/RSS feeds between January 20 and April 29, 2017, the president’s first hundred days in office.
Following the familiar : the effects of exposure and gender on follow intent and credibility of journalists on Twitter
(2017-05-09) Boulter, Trent Royce; Coleman, Renita; Chen, Gina; Eastin, Matthew; Sylvie, George; West, Kate
This dissertation examines the effect of mere exposure and journalists’ gender on the credibility and follow intent of journalists on Twitter. Through the use of controlled experiments it was found that both exposure and journalists’ gender does significantly impact the credibility and follow intent enjoyed by journalists. This indicates the need that practicing journalists have to strategically consider their level of activity on Twitter, and how it can be used to strengthen their position as an information source in the current media environment. Results also suggest that elaboration and credibility serves as mediators for the effects discovered. Also established was the perception of female journalists being more credible and having a higher likelihood of being adopted as an information source than their male counterparts. Future avenues of research are discussed.
From mass to elite protests : how journalists covered the 2013 and 2015 demonstrations in Brazil
(2016-08) Reis Mourão, Rachel; Reese, Stephen D.; Alves, Rosental; Straubhaar, Joseph; Johnson, Thomas; Lawrence, Regina
This dissertation uses a media sociology approach to untangle how multiple influences shaped journalistic coverage of two waves of protests in Brazil. In 2013, small demonstrations against bus fares evolved into a series of large protests expressing generalized dissatisfaction with conditions in the country. Following the reelection of center-leftist Dilma Rousseff, another wave of protests returned in 2015, this time with a clear agenda: the removal of the President. Communication research has long examined the “protest paradigm,” a pattern of news coverage that delegitimizes social movements. The Brazilian context provided a chance to assess the extent to which the paradigm holds when protests take on an elite-driven narrative contesting a government in crisis. This project uses a quantitatively-driven mixed methods approach to provide a holistic understanding of how journalists went about covering the demonstrations. First, content analysis presents an overview of how coverage evolved over time. Then, a survey of journalists reveals their newsgathering routines and political attitudes. Finally, 23 journalists were selected for a matched data analysis linking survey data to the content they produced. Results reveal that when grievances evolved into coherent anti-government demands, official sources from opposition parties served to legitimize the movement, even when journalists themselves viewed protestors with skepticism. In fact, findings suggest that the more journalists supported demonstrations, the less favorably they covered them. This holds true even when controlling for their outlet’s editorial line, as measured by journalists’ own perception of their employers. Through in-depth interviews, journalists described how they continually self-assessed and corrected for bias, citing professional norms as the basis for critical coverage of protests they personally supported. This study departs from an understanding of protest coverage as paradigmatic towards a more complex view of the relationship between protestors and the press. The analysis helps elucidate the conditions under which the protest paradigm fails and how favorable coverage can occur. The experience of Brazil shows that when an elite opposition supports protests, journalistic norms and routines validate demonstrations, regardless of journalists’ own attitudes.
Gay American gothic : a movement returns to its past
(2016-07-29) Araiza, José Andrés; Rivas-Rodriguez, Maggie; Jensen, Robert; Bock, Mary A; Landuyt, Noel; Byrd, Robert
This discourse analysis seeks to understand how depictions of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer) people within news coverage changed over the past 60 years and what those depictions mean for the future of a group of individuals who still face violence and bigotry and struggle to gain equal access to laws and rights. News stories are a salient tool to translate the unknown to known. This research approaches news stories as social constructions, which often times reflect existing power structures and shape social reality. Through the qualitative analysis of news coverage from four historically significant moments in Austin, Texas, this research demonstrates the path that gay and lesbian people experienced in the media—from being portrayed as sexual deviants to a homonormative monolith in the form of patriotic, domesticated, depoliticized, and desexualized couples. The news discourse over the past five decades demonstrated how stories slowly shed all radical politics from the gay liberationist past and adopted an assimilationist orientation. Bisexuals, transgender people, individuals who suffered from and died because of AIDS, and all other queer people who don’t adhere to the homonormative construct have been symbolically annihilated throughout history and continue to be. Journalists from mainstream, collegiate and alternative publications continue to utilize reporting practices that marginalize and delegitimize LGBTQ people. Nearly 70 years after making their first appearance in the mainstream press, framed as perverts and deviants, LGBTQ people continue to be subjected to homophobic discourse. By understanding changing news frames through the past six decades, this analysis attempts to weave an explanation of how the depictions may have and may continue to perpetuate false perceptions of LGBTQ people. This research interrogates the very power of the press, as an institution of power in society, to reflect hegemonic values, not challenge them.
Generative metaphor: filiation and the disembodied father in Shakespeare and Jonson
(2009-12) Penuel, Suzanne Marie; Bruster, Douglas; Loehlin, James; Moore, Timothy; Rebhorn, Wayne; Chapelle Wojciehowski, Hannah
This project shows how Jonson and Shakespeare represent dissatisfactions with filiation and paternity as discontents with other early modern discourses of cultural reproduction, and vice versa. Chapters on six plays analyze the father-child tie as it articulates sensitivities and hopes in remote arenas, from usury law to mourning rites, humanism to Judaism, witchcraft to visions of heaven. In every play, the father is disembodied. He is dead, invisible, physically separated from his child, or represented in consistently incorporeal terms. In its very formlessness, the vision of paternity as abstraction is what makes it such a flexible metaphor for Renaissance attitudes to so many different forms of cultural cohesion and replication. The Shakespeare plays treat the somatic gulf with ambivalence. For Shakespeare, who ultimately rejects a world beyond the impermanent material one, incorporeality is both the father's prestige and his punishment. But for Jonson, the desomatization more often indicates paternal privilege. Jonson wants filiation and fathering to counteract the progression of history, and since time destroys the concrete, abstraction and disembodiment are necessary for the process to work. His plays initially envision a paternally imagined rule of law achieving permanence for those under it. But Volpone undermines Every man in his humour's fantasy of law, and The staple of news dismantles it still more. Ultimately, in Staple's schematically represented father and son, a pair whose reunion allows them a courtroom triumph, Jonson resorts to an abstractly figured paternity itself to justify other abstractions, legal and literary. As with law in Jonson, so for religion and the supernatural in Shakespeare. Shakespeare's body of work eventually renounces the religious faith whose representation it interweaves with portraits of children and fathers. It does so first in Merchant's intimidating Judaism and hypocritical Christianity, then in Twelfth night's more subtly referenced Catholicism, mournful and aestheticized, and finally in The tempest's various abjurations. Monotheism vanishes altogether in the last play, replaced by a dead witch and multiple spirits and deities who do the bidding of a conjuror who plans to give them up. Both playwrights ultimately reduce their investment in other forms of cultural transmission in favor of more intimate parent-child structures, embodied or not.
Journalism innovation and the ethic of participation : a case study of the Knight Foundation and its news challenge
(2010-08) Lewis, Seth Corwin; Reese, Stephen D.; Buckley, Cynthia J.; Chyi, Hsiang I.; Gil de Zúñiga, Homero; Lasorsa, Dominic L.
The digitization of media has undermined much of the social authority and economic viability on which U.S. journalism relied during the 20th century. This disruption has also opened a central tension for the profession: how to reconcile the need for occupational control against growing opportunities for citizen participation. How that tension is navigated will affect the ultimate shape of the profession and its place in society. This dissertation examines how the leading nonprofit actor in journalism, The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, has sought to help journalism innovate out of its professional crisis. This case study engages a series of mixed methods—including interviews, textual analysis, and secondary data analysis—to generate a holistic portrayal of how the Knight Foundation has attempted to transform itself and the journalism field in recent years, particularly through its signature Knight News Challenge innovation contest. From a sociology of professions perspective, I found that the Knight Foundation altered the rhetorical and actual boundaries of journalism jurisdiction. Knight moved away from “journalism” and toward “information” as a way of seeking the wisdom of the crowd to solve journalism’s problems. This opening up of journalism’s boundaries created crucial space in which innovators, from inside and outside journalism, could step in and bring change to the field. In particular, these changes have allowed the concept of citizen participation, which resides at the periphery of mainstream newswork, to become embraced as an ethical norm and a founding doctrine of journalism innovation. The result of these efforts has been the emergence of a new rendering of journalism—one that straddles the professional-participatory tension by attempting to “ferry the values” of professional ideals even while embracing new practices more suited to a digital environment. Ultimately, this case study matters for what it suggests about professions in turbulent times. Influential institutions can bring change to their professional fields by acting as boundary-spanning agents—stepping outside the traditional confines of their field, altering the rhetorical and structural borders of professional jurisdiction to invite external contribution and correction, and altogether creating the space and providing the capital for innovation to flourish.
A journalistic chasm? normative perceptions and participatory and gatekeeping roles of organizational and entrepreneurial health journalists
(2013-12) Holton, Avery; Coleman, Renita
An emerging body of media scholarship has examined the changing norms and routines of professional journalists, suggesting they are slowly adapting their practice to meet changes in audience expectations brought on by the widespread adoption of social media. Much of this scholarship has focused on traditional news producers, giving attention to journalists and other news producers who work in newsrooms. However slowly, journalists are beginning to welcome more audience participation in the process of news creation, hinting at a more reciprocal form of journalism and a loosening of traditional gatekeeping practices. In an effort to advance the theoretically conceptual research of the moment, this study considers how the perceived journalistic norms and participatory and gatekeeping roles of an emerging journalistic actor may be aligning with and/or deviating from more traditional journalists. The work of entrepreneurial journalists, or those who are not affiliated with or tied to a single news organization but instead freelance their work, is helping to fill major content gaps left by staff cutbacks that came on the heels of news media’s economic downturn. Most notably, specialized areas of journalism such as health reporting are increasingly calling upon entrepreneurial journalists to work aside more traditional journalists. Against the backdrop of health journalism, this study advances by employing semi-structured interviews with traditional journalists, entrepreneurial journalists, and their editors, analyzing recent changes in their journalistic norms and participatory and gatekeeping roles. The findings suggest an ideological split between organizational and entrepreneurial journalists and indicate that organizational journalists and editors alike may be relying on entrepreneurial journalists as innovators. For their part, entrepreneurial journalists may demonstrating an extension of participatory journalism—reciprocal journalism—that could enhance network connectivity and community building for journalists, news organizations, and other mass media practitioners. Though traditionally perceived as outsiders, these journalists may be serving as intrapreneurials, informing innovation in journalism and beyond. The impact of this and other observations on mass communication theory and practice are explored.
Media misdiagnosis? : a longitudinal analysis of frames, primes, and public opinion in relation to newspaper coverage of HIV/AIDS and smoking
(2016-08) Suran, Melissa Nicole; Coleman, Renita; McCombs, Maxwell E.; Johnson, Thomas J.; Lasorsa, Dominic L.; Mackert, Michael S.
Medical issues are considered among the most popular topics in the media. However, because much health news research tends to focus on specific attributes rather than macro frames that are universally applicable to medical issues at large, paired with the fact that most framing studies do not examine topics for more than a decade, this study explores how macro frames and stereotype primes in medical news change over time as well how these changes affect public opinion. This was accomplished by developing a content analysis to longitudinally examine medical news content from The New York Times and The Washington Post. Two topics— HIV/AIDS and smoking—were strategically selected for this study, as they both have been considered major issues for decades and written about extensively. A follow‐up, agenda‐setting study comparing HIV/AIDS and smoking news to related public opinion polls was also conducted to determine how much the media influence the public over time and if the general opinion corresponds with framing and priming changes in the news. Previous research about frames, most of which examines less than a decade of coverage, emphasizes that topics in the news tend to gradually change from being episodic to thematic in nature. Therefore, the first study of this dissertation contributes to framing theory by determining whether similar patterns occur when analyzing issues during a longer period of time. The findings of the first study revealed that when examined over the course of decades, frames did not change in a particular direction; rather, there was an ebb and flow of frame changes based on whether the events of a particular year were inherently episodic (e.g., a celebrity death) or thematic (e.g., the release of a groundbreaking study). Because journalists strive for objectivity, how the news is framed tends to be influenced by the sources they choose. Therefore, this study also examined what sources predict the frames found in news about HIV/AIDS and smoking. The results indicated that experts and government organizations were significant predictors of thematic news while laypeople predicted episodic coverage. This study also determined that the media did not perpetuate exaggerated stereotypes in coverage of HIV/AIDS or smoking. The second study found that coverage of HIV/AIDS with combined episodic and loss frames was significantly associated with the public attributing the contraction of HIV/AIDS to individual blame. News that featured both thematic and loss frames significantly correlated with the public being in favor of societal efforts to end smoking. Thus, this study confirmed the results from experimental research that found pairing thematic and loss frames causes similar audience effects. However, unlike the former experiments, this study concluded that episodic/loss frame combinations influence public opinion as well.
News engagement logics : examining practices of media outlets and their audiences on social networking sites
(2020-12-04) Tenenboim, Ori; Reese, Stephen D.; Chen, Gina; Chyi, Hsiang; Johnson, Thomas J; Stroud , Natalie J
In an attempt to build relationships with audience members in the digital media environment, news organizations operate beyond their proprietary platforms. On non-proprietary platforms, such as Facebook, they occupy spaces that are termed here triple-party news-spaces: digital spaces that involve a news publisher, a platform owner, and users. The proposed dissertation seeks to identify and explicate the underlying logics of media production and usage in these spaces. On the production side, it draws on 28 interviews to investigate how 14 news organizations in the United States of America and Israel produce messages for triple-party news-spaces. On the media usage side, it employs a content analysis of 1,600 messages and an analysis of engagement metrics for 157,962 messages to examine to what extent and how news organizations’ messages differ in the modes of engagement they generate: commenting versus sharing versus liking/reacting. By examining media production and usage in triple-party news-spaces, the dissertation develops conceptually and empirically news engagement logics that are employed in these spaces—logics by which news organizations act to evoke audience interaction with their content, and audience members actually interact with it. While audience engagement is generally important for news organizations, it is particularly important on social networking sites where algorithms prioritize posts that generate engagement. In developing news engagement logics, the dissertation uses the theoretical construct of media logics, news value theory and literature on engagement enhancers, and the participatory paradigm in audience research, suggesting that certain content characteristics are associated with each of the examined modes of engagement in more than one country and other content characteristics are associated with particular modes of engagement. The dissertation also suggests that the news organizations under study strive to balance between perceived journalistic imperatives or standards and perceived rules of the social media “game” by combining older and newer logics in selecting content, deciding when to post it, choosing expression style, signaling which content deserves more attention, and determining the organizations’ approach toward user-generated content. Business implications for news organizations and democratic implications for civic life are discussed.