The evolution of a campaign: tracking press coverage and party press releases through the 2001 UK General Election

• This paper builds upon a content analysis of all news articles that appeared in six national daily newspapers and of all national press releases issued by the three main political parties during the UK General Election 2001 campaign. The results were compared with data from two opinion polls conducted at the start and at the end of the campaign. Here, using the same basic data, we track the coverage of issues in party press releases and daily newspapers on a weekly basis to determine how the parties' priorities and press coverage evolved.
• The results show that the Labour and Liberal Democrat campaign strategies, in terms of relative issue priorities, did not change during the campaign. However, the Conservatives shifted their attention to the public priorities of Health and Education towards the end of the campaign. There is evidence that the Conservative emphasis on Europe and taxation earlier in the campaign may have influenced the volume of press coverage but did not appear to have affected relative party standings. The implications of these results for political marketers are considered.

Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Postmortem magnetic resonance images of the injured brain: effective evidence in the courtroom.

Magnetic resonance images (MRI) of the whole, formalin-fixed brain produce details of pathologic changes deep within brain substance not apparent on external examination. Photographs of these radiographic images present pathologic features in a black-and-white, 2-dimensional format which has proven particularly effective in court before judge and jury. This pathologist has noted acceptance of such photographs in explaining to jurors the details of his testimony in selected cases where brain trauma resulted in a wrongful death. Penetrating missile wounds and blunt impact injuries are particularly well documented by this method.     

U.S. experiences with racial and ethnic profiling: history, current issues, and the future

The issue of racial and ethnic bias in policing has been the focus of legal and criminal justice scholarship, court action, and public debate in the U.S. for a number of years. The issue has also been prominent in criminal justice scholarship, public discussion, and policy making in other countries, particularly the U.K., for an even longer period. This article surveys the history of the issue in the U.S. and attempts to give scholars and policy makers the benefit of the insights gained through the U.S. experience in handling the issue. Among these are the importance of the empirical question of the “hit rate” and how police use of race or ethnicity as a criterion changes it, and the difficulties of dealing with the thorny benchmarking issue. The article also discusses how advocates in the U.S. have attempted to meet and overcome arguments that police and their supporters have made in an attempt to minimize the problem or justify doing little or nothing about it.     

Assay of free and total tocainide by high performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with ultraviolet (UV) detection

A rapid high performance liquid chromatographic (HPLC) method for the determination of tocainide, using N-(2,6-dimethylphenyl)-2-amino-butanimide as an internal standard, was developed. A methylene chloride extraction involving salting out at pH 9.0 was employed. An 85:15 mixture of 0.025M monobasic potassium phosphate at pH 3.0 and acetonitrile was used as the mobile phase. The separation and quantitative analysis of tocainide was performed on a mixed phase column with a 1.0-mL/min flow rate and detection at 210 nm. Separation of tocainide from some of its metabolites required the use of heptane sulfonic acid as an ion-pairing reagent. For the free-drug assay, the specimen was centrifuged through an Amicon Centrifree filter before being processed.