Using a community structure approach linking city characteristics and variations in media coverage, the authors examined newspaper coverage of physician-assisted suicide. A nationwide sample of 15 city newspapers yielded 288 articles in a four year period. Content analysis of article "prominence" (placement, headline size, story length, presence of photos) and overall article direction (favorable, unfavorable, or balanced/neutral) yielded a combined and widely varied single score "Media Vector" or measure of issue "projection" for each newspaper. Correlation and factor analysis yielded two significant city characteristic factors: a "stakeholder" factor, age (percent over 75) associated with unfavorable coverage of physician-assisted suicide (r = -.491; p = 000); and an "access" factor--combining media access (newspaper circulation, cable stations, FM or AM stations) and health care access (health care facilities, physicians)--linked to favorable coverage (r = .472; p = .000), combining to account for 46.3 percent of the variance. Western US newspapers and public opinion are most favorable to physician-assisted suicide.

The failure of children to acknowledge mixed, contradictory emotions is equally of developmental and clinical interest. Developmentally, children do not ordinarily acknowledge the existence of mixed emotions until late in middle childhood. Clinically, the failure to recognise mixed feelings toward others or self is a common presenting problem. The question addressed here is, how readily can such limitations be corrected in children of different ages. Two studies are reported showing that children as young as 6 and 7 years, who initially revealed little understanding of mixed feelings, showed more insight after a short training session. In Experiment 1. two groups of children were equated for their inability to diagnose the mixed feelings of a story character. Subsequently, both groups were presented with a second story containing a similar conflictual event, but only one group was prompted to consider the character's emotional reaction to each component of the conflict. Children in the prompted group were more accurate in diagnosing the character's emotional reaction at the end of the story than the control group, and they maintained their superiority on a post-test story where no prompts were given. Experiment 2 included a similar training procedure. but with a more stringent measure of post-test generalisation: Children were asked to describe or invent their own examples of emotionally charged conflictual situations. Four- and five-year-olds showed little benefit from the training session, but six- and seven-year-olds again showed considerable benefit. Taken together, the two experiments suggest that young school age children often fail to acknowledge mixed feelings because they engage in a cursory appraisal of the elements of an emotionally charged situation; highlighting the elements is sufficient to improve performance. Preschool children, however, appear to suffer from more basic limitations in their ability to integrate the relevant information.

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A community structure analysis compared cross-national coverage of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) with variations in national-level demographics from 19 newspapers worldwide, yielding combined article “prominence” and “direction” “Media Vector” newspaper scores emphasizing either “favorable” (42%) or “unfavorable” (58%) coverage of GMOs. Regression analysis revealed “poverty level” (24.2% of variance) and “percent of agricultural land” (4.7%) totaled 28.9% of the variance, confirming that “vulnerability” indicators are associated with favorable media coverage of GMOs. Contrary to conventional “guard dog” assumptions that media mirror elite interests, systematic research on demographics and GMO coverage reveals that media can mirror the interests of society’s most “vulnerable.”

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