Lazarsfeld
Award
Graber Award
Edelman Awards
Althaus and Tewksbury Win Lazarsfeld Award
Scott Althaus and David
Tewksbury, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, received the Lazarsfeld Award
for Best Paper of 2000. The paper is "Agenda Setting and the 'New' News."
Richard Flickinger, Wittenberg University, chair of the award committee, announced that the vote was unanimous. Other members of the committee were Bruce Bimber, University of California at Santa Barbara, and John Geer, Vanderbilt University.
Zaller Wins the Graber Book
Award
John Zaller, Political Science
Dept., UCLA, won the Doris Graber Book Award for Distinguished Contribution
to the Scholarly Literature of Political Communication, for his 1992 book, The
Nature & Origins of Mass Opinion (Cambridge, 1992).
In it Dr. Zaller laid out a framework for understanding the nature of responses to opinion surveys and the forces, including mass media messages, that shape them. Zaller provides a novel way to understand the role of political communication in the formation and change of the mass public's opinions.
"The work has already
become a classic in the study of political communication and public opinion,"
said Bob
Entman, North Carolina State University, the chair of the selection committee,
who will present the award. Other committee members were Doris
Graber, University of Illinois at Chicago, and Darrell
West, Brown University.
The award is for a book of lasting value in the field of political communication published within the last decade, 1991 - 2000, that is characterized by distinguished scholarship, theoretical creativity, and analytic ingenuity. The field is defined broadly to include studies with an emphasis on history, policy, or political advocacy as well as empirical and theoretical studies more traditionally associated with the section.
McLeod and Chaffee Win Edelman
Awards
Jack McLeod, Univ. of Wisconsin,
Madison, and Steven Chaffee, late of the University of California at Santa Barbara,
won the Murray Edelman Award for Career Achievement in Political Communication.
The two had collaborated on important work together.
The award decision was made before Prof. Chaffee died unexpectedly, and his award will be given posthumously. The presentation will include three brief talks by his friends. The selection committee included David Weaver, Indiana University, chair, Pamela Shoemaker, Syracuse University, and Susan Herbst, Northwestern University.