News & Notes

Nina Eliasoph, University of Wisconsin, and Barbie Zelizer, University of Pennsylvania, are this year's winners of the NCA Diamond Anniversary Book Award, given for an outstanding scholarly book published during the previous two years. Susan Herbst, Jerold Hale, and Dilip Gaonkar (chair) served on the selection committee. Eliasoph's book, Avoiding Politics: How Americans Produce Apathy in Everyday Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), deals with a pressing question in political communication. Citing the book, the committee wrote, "Nina Eliasoph's methodologically innovative book sheds new light on an old and puzzling question: how and why do people create a sense of political disengagement in the public sphere? Eliasoph did field work studying "political conversation" among suburban volunteers, activists, and recreation club members for two and a half years. Her richly detailed and elegantly written empirical study showed how political apathy is not simply an unavoidable systemic "effect" but something that is culturally produced in everyday conversation and interaction among American citizens. Her insights will have a lasting influence on future studies in political opinion and attitude formation."

María José Canel has moved from the University of Navarra to the Complutense University in Aranjuez (near Madrid), Spain. Her new post is in the School of Audiovisual Communication, Felipe II Center for Advanced Study, where she has joined the research group headed by Ismael Crespo. The group has received a $60,000 grant from the Spanish government to study the 2000 national election campaign effects on citizens‚ evaluations of political candidates. Her book, Comunicación Política: Técnicas y estrategias para la sociedad de la información [Political Communication. Techniques and strategies for the information society], has been published by Tecnos in Spain. It is one of the few textbooks on political communication available in Spanish. Reach her through e-mail or telephone 629-490-314.

Christina Holtz-Bacha spent the fall 1999 term as a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Her project was a critical synopsis of the research on mass media and political alienation. She is a professor of communication at the Institut fuer Publizistik, University of Mainz, Germany. With Hans-Bernd Brosius, University of Munich, she co-edited "German Communication Yearbook" (Cresskill, N.J.: Hampton Press), an overview on German research on topics such as mass media and elections, public relations, audience research, agenda setting, and media economy. The yearbook was included in the conference package for participants in the IAMCR conference in Leipzig, Germany, last July. Reach her by e-mail or by fax 49 6131 394586 or telephone 49 6131 395636.