Jennifer Midberry

Lehigh University · Department of Journalism and Communication

Media reports on interpersonal firearm violence largely present it as a crime issue focused on individual shooting events. This episodic framing can undermine support for public health solutions to firearm violence. Potential harms of this narrative on firearm-injured people are unknown. We aimed to understand how recently firearm-injured people pe...

This study investigated how visual framing influences discrete emotional responses, empathy, behavioral intentions, and efficacy in reaction to visual solutions journalism. A 2 (story topic: drug addiction, homelessness) × 4 (visual frame condition: no photo, solution-only, problem-only, combination) mixed design experiment revealed that images sho...

In times of health crisis, news media have generally contributed to public panic, though these instances are usually explored in crises involving communicable diseases. However, in 2017, the long-brewing opioid crisis was formally declared a federal emergency by the United States government, leading to a considerable uptick in media attention to dr...

Solutions journalism, which is defined as rigorous and fact-driven news stories that include responses to social problems, has gained momentum in U.S. newsrooms. To date, research on this journalistic practice is scant, and has primarily focused on text. This study synthesized literature about solutions journalism, visual communication theory, and...

Photojournalism contests have been criticized for continually awarding top prizes in hard news categories to images that depict conflict, disaster, poverty, and other problems. Pictures like these, which have a social issues visual frame, usually focus on people from countries other than the United States and on minorities. Some photojournalism con...

This discourse analysis examined posts in online comment boards about two different photographs of military mothers breastfeeding in uniform to unpack the Discourses that underlie criticism of nursing servicewomen. News coverage in 2012 of a photo of two air-force mothers breastfeeding negatively characterized it as controversial. The news framing...

This content analysis investigated whether Photos of the Day online galleries from The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, and the Washington Post present the world outside the United States in a negative manner. This study compared the results to previous content analyses of the winning images of the Pulitzer Prize and Pictures of the Year Inte...

Previous scholarship has demonstrated that Orientalist stereotypes pervade US and European photojournalism of the Middle East in general, and specifically of coverage of conflict, yet little work has investigated whether such ideology has been transmitted to audiences and incorporated into their personal worldviews. Therefore, this project investig...

Identifying influential speakers in multi-party conversations has been the focus of research in communication, sociology, and psychology for decades. It has been long acknowledged qualitatively that controlling the topic of a conversation is a sign of influence. To capture who introduces new topics in conversations, we introduce SITS—Speaker Identi...