Sample I.D. – J201 – Spring 2018 Midterm Practice
Class, these are just examples of the kind of answers you might come up with, but it’s important to know there’s not just one right answer for context or significance, that there’s no perfect answer, and that these answers below will get you full credit but also aren’t even perfect!
On the exam, you’ll be given a choice of five IDs and you’ll pick three to write about. You’ll have these instructions:
For each ID, using the space below, and drawing on concepts learned in class and the readings, write three to five sentences identifying what the term refers to, placing the term in context (whatever context is most relevant—it might be historical, scholarly, social), and explaining—based on what you’ve learned in this class—why it’s significant.
Uses and gratifications
Uses and gratifications is a media effect theory that states that audiences seek out different messages, have different uses for that message (for example, learning or companionship), and then respond in different ways to those messages. Audiences are not passive consumers. The context for this in communication research was a shift from focus on the media messages themselves to a focus on audiences. U&G is significant because it means not everyone will respond in the same way to media, whether that is a propaganda message or a violent video game. U&G pushed against the idea that media could act as a “magic bullet/hypodermic needle”; instead, media has variable, or maybe even limited, effects.
New York Times Co. v. Sullivan
This was a Supreme Court case from the 1960s, wherein an Alabama public official, Sullivan, sued The New York Times for libel because of an ad the Times had run that Sullivan thought reflected badly on him. The context for this was the Civil Rights movement in the U.S. and a time when silencing the press was trying to be used to silence civil rights. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of The New York Times and established the precedent in federal libel law for “actual malice”—that is, for a newspaper to be sued for libel, it has to be proved that they knowingly, maliciously published information they knew to be false. This was a significant triumph for press freedom under the First Amendment, but you could argue that it makes it too difficult for public officials to sue even irresponsible publications for libel because it’s hard to prove actual malice.