The Trial of the Century

My RQ:
How did Court TV's media coverage protray the OJ simpson trial and turn it into a juicy narrative or story for the public to feast on?

How:
I will investigate this through the communication concepts of pure/ambiguous symbols, rhetoric, persuasion, fictional narrative vs. factual narrative, media influenced narrative construction, culture of our institution of american court, and the humanistic behavioral wants of the public that were fullfilled by the media coverage.

Bibliography thus far:
Bell, Allan. "News Stories as Narratives." The Language of News Media. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991.

Abbott, H. Porter. "Narrative as Life." The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Friedman, Richard D, and Roger C. Park. "Sometimes What Everybody Thinks They Know Is True." Law and Human Behavior. 27 (2003): 629-644.

Moran, Garya, and Brian L. Cutler. "Bogus Publicity Items and the Contingency Between Awareness and Media-Induced Pretrial Prejudice." Law and Human Behavior. 21 (1997): 339-344.

O J Simpson Murder Case. 2005. Court T.V. 22 MAR. 2005.
http://www.courttv.com/casefiles/simpson/.

Vidmar, Neila. "Case Studies of Pre- and Midtrial Prejudice in Criminal and Civil Litigation." Law and Human Behavior. 26 (2002): 73-105.

Julie Motheral
Quality Post #6

Ways To Study Persuasion

Ahhh... the almighty judicial scales.
In Ways to Study Persuasion by Kelton Rhoads, PhD, he touches on many important topics in communication, including some of the topics we discussed in class today. The advertising and marketing sections are particularly good, but I want to study law, so his section on law communication interests me.

He mentions the journal Law and Human Behavior which relate the structure system of law to human pyschology. So, I looked it up, and we can access this journal through our library page. Some of the articles are extremely insiteful, and I will read more of them when i get more free time. It is convinient that our library has online jounrals, especially ones that we can access when doing research for our potential life careers.

Adrienne's study tip link was good stuff. This week is hecktic. Ah, spring break is almost here. Have fun in mexico Kristen. We are heading down to New Orleans.

Julie Motheral
Quality Post #5

MLA Style

Thanks to Purdue University for this easy website that breaks down how to cite in MLA style. The book is just not fun to flip through... so hopefully this is handy when putting together the bibliography and works cited page of our dossier.

Julie

Longitudinal Survey

Longitudinal Survey, or Trend Study is a study that covers a period of time. It is not a snapshot, like the surveys we have been conducting. The U.S. Department of Labor Bureau of Labor Statistics conducts various longitudinal surveys, and I came across one that was studying our age group. The study, called NLSY97, started with studying 9,000 males and females born from 1980-1984. The Bureau of Labor Statistics started surveying when the participants were ages 12-16. They now are surveyed annually to see the change in data. The purpose of this survey is to monitor the change from school to work and then into adulthood. They recieved some interesting data on high school transcript variations in PE courses, gifted courses, standardize testing scores, and number of absences when the group was is high school that I thought were interesting.

I bet that they are also running into complications collecting thier surveys just like our communications class has. Running into problems such as people dropping out of the survey, non-response survey, measurement error, and processing error are sometimes extremely hard to avoid. RYAN HERBS BLOG discusses different errors from survey. Dana's Blog is also touching on error with some good links.

"To live life expecting error, is to not live."
"error free is the way to be, oh and stay off drugs too."
Yea, i just made those up.

Posted by Julie Motheral
Quality Blog #4