Political/Mass Communication

Faculty in the OU Department of Communication pursue the study of political and mass communication with a wide range of theoretical and methodological approaches. The department is also the home of the Political Communication Center, which holds the world’s largest archive of political advertising. Mass communication research typically concerns the production, content, audiences, reception, and/or effects of messages transmitted via the mass media. Because contemporary politics is largely (but not exclusively) mass mediated, political communication research often addresses these same concerns with regard to political campaigns, issues, ideology, and power.

Comm 5363 Communication and Technology
Comm 5383 Survey of Political Communication
Comm 5553 Persuasive Communication Campaigns
Comm 6373 Seminar in Mass Communication
Comm 6463 Media and Political Behavior
Comm 6473 Communication and Public Opinion
Comm 6483 Media and Civic Life
Comm 6023 Communication Research Task Groups
Comm 6960 Directed Readings

Lindsey Meeks
Pat Meirick
Jill Edy
Norman Wong

Woodall, Ant (2024). Constricting the body politic: Three studies of political communication apprehension and why they matter.

Hammonds, Kyle. (2023). An American knightmare: Joker, fandom, and malicious meaning-making with movies.

Hubbard, Caleb. (2023). Fanship scale development.

Shpeer, Maria. (2023). Evaluations of intersectional identity traits and their effects on voting behaviors in U.S. congressional elections.

Cortes Quantip, Reinaldo. (2022). Mythologies of the migrant caravans: Religion, ideology, and migration.

Hurst, Elizabeth H. (2021). Navigating political identity and identity politics in the big red dot: political conversations among rural Oklahoman college students.

Maiorca, Cheryl. (2019).For every action there is a story: Narratives of Oklahoma teachers about the 2018 walkout and teaching In Oklahoma.

Adams, T. & Edy, J. A. (2021) How the past becomes the past: The temporal positioning of collective memory. British Journal of Sociology 72, 1415-1429.  doi/10.1111/1468-4446.12881

Austin, J.T. & Edy, J.A. (2022). Narrating the past on fairer terms: Approaches to building multicultural public memory. Critical Studies in Media Communication 39(4), 276–290. . doi: 10.1080/15295036.2022.2049616

Austin, J. A., Wong, N., & Owens, A. (2022). The hashtag heard around the world: Social media users’perceptions and responses to the #MeToo hashtag. Atlantic Journal of Communication. Advance online publication.https://doi.org/10.1080/15456870.2022.2083136

Edy, J. A. (2021). Let’s find a usable past. In Hart, R. P. (Ed.) Fixing American Politics: Civic Priorities for the Media Age. New York: Routledge.

Edy, J.A. & Austin, J.T. (2022). Generating more inclusive public memory: The limits and possibilities of news archives. Media, Culture & Society 44(4), 802-819. doi:10.1177/01634437211065700

Edy, J. A. & Castleberry, G. (2021). The political economy of global memory: Collective memory of global conflict in Captain America: The First Avenger. Memory Studies 14(2): 521-534. doi: 10.1177/1750698019843957

Lees, J., Banas, J. A., Linville, D., Meirick, P. C.,  & Warren, P.  (2023). The Spot the Troll Quiz game increases accuracy in discerning between real and inauthentic social media accounts. PNAS Nexus, 2 (4), pgad094. https://doi.org/10.1093/pnasnexus/pgad094

Lookadoo, K., Hubbard, C., Nisbett, G., & Wong, N. (2021). We’re all in this together: Celebrity influencer disclosures about COVID-19. Atlantic Journal of Communication. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1080/15456870.2021.1936526.

Massey, Z., Wong, N., & Barbati, J. (2021). Meeting the trans(parent): Test of parasocial contact with transgender characters on reducing stigma toward transgender people. Communication Studies, 72(2), 232-250. https://doi.org/10.1080/10510974.2021.1876125.

Meeks, L. (2024). Sheriffs, school boards, and the necessity of pro-democracy news in local elections. In Johnson, T., & Veenstra, A. (Eds.), The press and democratic backsliding: How journalism has failed the public and how it can revive democracy. (Ch. 5, pp. 105-126). Lexington Books.

Meeks, L. (2023). Promising a greener Paris: Anne Hidalgo’s framing of environmental issues in her mayoral campaigns. Environmental Communication, 17(6), 550-565. https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2023.222656

Meeks, L. (2023). “Mask up. Pony up. Vote.” Examining university e-mails surrounding the 2020 U.S. elections. Communication and Democracy, 57(1), 119-142. https://doi.org/10.1080/27671127.2023.2179518

Meeks, L. (2023). Blue bird in a coal mine: How 2020 Democratic presidential candidates framed climate change on Twitter. Journal of Information Technology & Politics. Journal of Information Technology & Politics, 20(2), 169-183. https://doi.org/10.1080/19331681.2022.2069182

Meeks, L. (2023). Red, blue, and green: Examining the effects of framing and source trust on partisans’ climate change beliefs. In Moy, P. and Neumann, R. (Eds.), Political communication, culture and society. (Ch. 8, pp. 150-166). Routledge.

Meeks, L. (2022). Media distrust and Republican identity in Trump’s wake. In Gutsche, R. E. (Ed.), The future of the presidency, journalism and democracy: After Trump. (Ch. 3, pp. 67-83). Routledge.

Meeks, L. (2022). When two become one? Examining Kamala Harris and Joe Biden’s campaign themes from primary to general election. Presidential Studies Quarterly, 52(2), 313-339. http://doi.org/10.1111/psq.12759

Meeks, L. (2021). Conservatives and women. In Jarvis, S. (Ed.), Conservative political communication: How right wing media and messaging (re)made American politics. (Ch. 6, pp. 102-118). Routledge.

Meirick, P. C. (2023). News sources, partisanship, and political knowledge in  COVID-19 beliefs. American Behavioral Scientist, online first, April 2023. https://doi.org/10.1177/00027642231164047

Meirick, P.C. (2022). Television news, political comedy, party, and political knowledge in global warming belief: Evidence from a large-scale panel survey. Science Communication, 44(4), 494-513. https://doi.org/10.1177/10755470221119839

Meirick, P.C. & Franklyn, A.E. (2022). Seeing and believing fake news: The interacting roles of news sources, partisanship, and education. International Journal of Communication, 16, 3379-3401. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/18579/3824

Meirick, P.C. & Edy, J.A. (2022). Beyond polarization and priming: Public agenda diversity and trust in government. Social Science Quarterly, 103(4), 934-944. https://doi.org/10.1111/ssqu.13165

Schmierbach, M., Andsager, J., Banning, S., Chung, M., Lyons, B., McLeod, D. M., Meirick, P. C., Pan, Z., Rojas, H., & Sun, Y.  (2023). Another point of view: Scholarly responses to the state of third-person research. Mass Communication and Society, 26(3), 359-383, DOI: 10.1080/15205436.2023.2193512

Spheer, M. & Meeks, L. (2022). “The stiletto in Putin’s side”: Analyzing Russian media coverage of the only female presidential candidate in 2018. International Journal of International and Intercultural Communication. Online Advance. https://doi.org/10.1080/17513057.2021.1896023

Wong, N. C. H., Massey, Z., Barbati, J., Bessarabova, E., & Banas, J. A. (2022). Theorizing prejudice reduction via mediated intergroup contact: Extending the intergroup contact theory to media contexts. Journal of Media Psychology, 34(2), 89-100. https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-1105/a000338

*Woodall, A., & Meeks, L. (2024). #politicalcommunicationsowhite: A call for considering race in the undergraduate political communication course. Journal of Communication Pedagogy, 8, 140-145. https://doi.org/10.31446/JCP.2024.1.11