Pluralistic programming and radio diversity: a review and a proposal

While radio is America's most abundant medium, its content is characterized more by sameness than by diversity. Stations find it more profitable to duplicate mass appeal programming formats than to program to minority tastes. Such rational business decisions come at the expense of the listening audience which is given few formats from which to choose. The regulatory system, which speaks to the value of program diversity, has been unsuccessful in creating effective incentives to foster radio diversity. The article suggests a novel approach to radio regulation that combines economic incentives with new methods for identifying audience preferences such that a profit-maximizing radio industry would serve more tastes than are presently served.An earlier version of this paper was presented to the Mass Communication and Society Division of the Association for Education in Journalism, Boston, August 1980.     

Virtue,Interest, and Works in American Foreign Policy

Three questions shape American foreign policy: Is it right? Is it in the national interest? And does it work? “Right” is defined by the American ethos, sometimes called the civil religion. Self-interest and pragmatism characterize the other two elements. The interplay among these factors may be found most clearly in presidential rhetoric. After examining Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, and Ronald Reagan, the article finds that while effective presidents have invoked a religiously based virtue, U.S. foreign policy itself tended to avoid religious issues. In contrast, President George W. Bush has relied on the American civil religion to combat Islamism. But his rhetoric “stretches too far” on democratic virtue at the expense of national interest and pragmatism. The article concludes that the U.S. civil religion, although based on theological ideas, does not travel well.     

Do Surveys Provide Representative or Whimsical Assessments of the Economy?

We argue that survey responses to economic evaluation questionsexhibit instability and can be affected by fairly trivial changesin questionnaire wording. Our analyses make three empiricalcontributions to this area of survey research. First, we demonstratethat within the course of the interview there is considerableinstability in economic evaluations. Second, one source of thisinstability is cues regarding economic performance, such asthose provided by the media. We find that respondents can bepersuaded to change their economic evaluations if they receivecontradictory cues. Finally, we demonstrate that question placementcan affect economic evaluations. More specifically, we demonstratethat proximity to political questions can contaminate economicevaluations. If economic evaluations closely follow politicalpreference questions, respondents have a tendency to give economicresponses that are "consistent" with their political responses.Our empirical analysis is based on economic evaluations of respondentsto the Hungarian Markets and Democracy Survey administered duringDecember 1997.     

Monarchy and Democracy: A Progressive Agenda

The Blair governments since 1997 have seen the single most significant period of constitutional reform in Britain for over a century. However, they leave the monarchy, the institution at the apex of the unwritten constitution, untouched. It is argued that neither inaction nor abolition is advisable, but that reform should be undertaken, with particular attention to the rules of succession and to the royal prerogative powers, notable examples being the powers to declare war, to dismiss parliament, to assent to legislation and to appoint the Prime Minister. Those powers now exercised by the executive should be formally and linguistically separated from the office of head of state, and put on a statutory basis. The achievement of these reforms depends, however, on political will and cannot be initiated by the monarchy itself.