SAGE Journal Articles

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W. James Potter and Karyn Riddle. A Content Analysis of the Media Effects Literature. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, March 2007; vol. 84, 1: pp. 90–104.

This study focuses attention on scholarship on mass media effects. The purpose of the article is to profile that effects literature in terms of specific medium tested, type of content, use of theory, use of method, and type of effect. The authors of the study conducted a content analysis of the mass media effects literature published in 16 scholarly journals published from 1993 to 2005.

Aeron Davis. Media Effects and the Active Elite Audience: A Study of Communications in the London Stock Exchange. European Journal of Communication, September 2005; vol. 20, 3: pp. 303–326.

This article explores the impact of communications on investor behavior and trading patterns in the London Stock Exchange (LSE). The significance of the work is two-fold. First, for many observers, the wild trading patterns that regularly occur in stock markets suggest the presence of “strong” media effects in action; a finding in conflict with mainstream audience research. Second, the audience investigated is an elite one that most “actively” consumes its media and is rarely observed in studies of media effects. The research thus attempts to identify in what ways the media are implicated in stock market movements and, at the same time, how exactly this active, elite audience makes use of its media. The empirical material presented here is primarily that gained from interviews with elite fund managers at the London Stock Exchange, Europe’s largest financial centre.