Akiba A Cohen
Biographic Data
| ID | 82988 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Akiba A Cohen |
| GIVEN NAMES | Akiba A |
| FAMILY NAME | Cohen |
| SIGNATURE | COHEN A A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Tel Aviv University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 237 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1973 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
The geographic frame matters (too)
The growing body of comparative studies on journalistic role performance has generally neglected the geographic frame of the news. Based on a content analysis of 145,817 news items published in 365 outlets (print, online, radio, and television) in 37 countries, we compare the performance of six journalistic roles in four geographic frame categories: domestic, foreign, and mixed news (domestic news with foreign involvement and foreign news with do…
How iconic news images travel
Iconic photographs are symbolically dense images characterized by broad circulation over time and recognition by large publics. Following this definition, we track the republication and reframing, over nearly 70 years, of 15 news photographs previously identified as most recognized by the Israeli public. Distinguishing between “discrete icons” (singular photographs of particular scenes) and “aggregate icons” (where several variants of the same ev…
Journalistic Role Performance in Times of Covid
This paper examines journalistic role performance in coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, based on a content analysis of newspaper, television, radio and online news in 37 countries. We test a set of hypotheses derived from two perspectives on the role of journalism in health crises. Mediatization theories assume that news media tend to sensationalize or to politicize health crises. A contrasting perspective holds that journalists shift toward more…
Does News Platform Matter? Comparing Online Journalistic Role Performance to Newspaper, Radio, and Television
The shifting role of journalism in a digital age has affected long-standing journalistic norms across media platforms. This has reinvigorated discussion on how work in online newsrooms compares to other platforms that differ in media affordances and forms. Still, more studies are needed on whether those differences translate into distinct practices, especially when examining cross-national studies. Based on the second wave of the Journalistic Rol…
Reviving icons to death
Iconic photographs possess broad social and symbolic significance, are widely replicated over time and circulated across media platforms, and fuel public discussion. In an era of digital memes, they have become generative resources for memetic performances that not only can draw on these images’ historic authority but can also undermine it. Based on the analysis of the ‘Accidental Napalm’ memes, our research leads to a fourfold taxonomy, from mem…
Speaking under duress
Videos of living captives presented in the media are extremely influential and have broad implications even beyond the boundaries of the countries involved in the depicted events. This study is the first to present a comprehensive analysis of the visual and verbal contents of captive videos. This analysis of eleven videos of captives involved in seven abductions in three countries between 1986 and 2014 describes recurring media patterns, both vis…
Comparing Media Cultures
The transmission of information across countries has changed dramatically since the middle of the 20th century, not just because time has passed, but also due to social developments in, between, and among countries. Nonetheless, perhaps the most important development has been technological, with the advent and impact of the Internet during the last quarter-century. Technological change alone, however, cannot totally explain the pattern of informa…
Mobile phone usage as an indicator of solidarity
This study presents a secondary analysis of real-time data of mobile phone usage in Israel during two recent wars – with the Lebanese Hezbollah in 2006 and with the Palestinian Hamas in Gaza in 2008/9. The data, provided by Cellcom Israel, the country’s largest mobile operator, enabled an analysis of real behavior patterns rather than relying on memories of people who may have been under stress or traumatized during the hostilities, hence unable …
Foreign news on television
Contents: Akiba A. Cohen/Thomas Hanitzsch/Agnieszka Stepinska/William Porath/Christine Heimprecht: Rationale, Design, and Methodologies - Agnieszka Stepinska/William Porath/Constanza Mujica/Xiaoge Xu/Akiba A. Cohen: The Prevalence of News: Domestic, Foreign, and Hybrid - Knut De Swert/Antonio Belo/Rasha Kamhawi/Ven-hwei Lo/Constanza Mujica/William Porath: Topics in Foreign and Domestic Television News - Jurgen Wilke/Christine Heimprecht/Youichi I…
What prompts users to click and comment
This study examined the relationship between two mechanisms of online participation – clicking and commenting – as well as the characteristics of heavily clicked versus highly commented-upon news items. Based on 15,431 items from a popular Israeli website, correlations between clicking and commenting were calculated for 12 separately analysed months from 2006 to 2011. In addition, overlap rates were determined, showing that 40–59% of the heavily …
The geography of foreign news on television
Since the advent of television in the middle of the 20th century, news has been an essential ingredient in TV programming. Often these newscasts are the most heavily viewed programmes, and by and large they are the main source of information for many people. This is particularly true for news from other countries and regions in the world. This immense significance of TV news has made it an important field in communication research. The article pr…
Covering China
China, the world's most populated country and its fourth largest, has always held great interest and even curiosity for its neighbors and beyond. Across its thousands of years of recorded history
On the Gendered Nature of Mobile Phone Culture in Israel
Real Time and Recall Measures of Mobile Phone Use
This article discusses the development, reliability, and validity of real-time measures of mobile phone use by means of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology, in comparison with traditional questionnaire-generated recall measures. The sample consisted of 211 Israeli adult mobile phone subscribers subdivided by gender and by the amount of airtime that they normally use. The measurements were applied to three questions to which the participan…
Israel
On a summer evening in 1999, a fully loaded bus traveling from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem had just climbed to one of the highest points overlooking the city, ten minutes from its final destination. A young lady sitting a few seats behind the driver slipped her mobile phone from her purse, dialed a number, and put the phone to her ear. To the person on the other end of the line she said: "Okay, we've just passed Mevasseret [a suburb of Jerusalem], so w…
The Red, the White and the Blue
The two waves of immigration to Israel from the former Soviet Union, in the 1970s and the 1990s, have created the largest (over one million people) and most distinct cultural and linguistic ethnic community. Russian-speaking immigrants soon developed their own cultural institutions and attained significant political power. Rising communication needs led to the swift development of Russian media, including radio, television and over one hundred ne…
The consumers choice
This study focuses on two large minorities in Israeli society: the 'returning Diaspora' of Russian immigrants and the 'involuntary' Arab minority. Using survey data, this paper examines the relationship between the use of Hebrew, Russian and/or Arabic media, and the strength of two identities that members of a minority group possess; i. e., the one shared with the Israeli majority and the one based on one's respective minority. Based on the use o…
Assessing virtual nuclear arsenals
The term 'virtual nuclear arsenals' has recently entered the lexicon of nuclear strategy, arms control and non-proliferation. Virtual-nuclear-weapons capabilities are, to some degree, a reality of physics that inevitably results from the spread of nuclear-energy technologies and programmes. But an examination of the cases of South Africa, Israel, Japan, Belarus, Khazakstan and Ukraine suggests that virtual arsenals will have limited appeal for mo…
Between Content and Cognition
The main thesis of this article is that television news represents one of the most difficult and complex media stimuli that people face towards the end of the twentieth century. It is suggested that this is due to the combined interaction effects of the content of the news items and the inherent cognitive limitations of viewers. It argues that the way reporters, editors and newscasters present the news makes it extremely difficult, if not often i…
Social Conflict and Television News
One of the Bloodiest Days
This article analyzes television news reports, from five countries, dealing with an incident that took place in the West Bank village of Nahalin in April 1989 during the Palestinian uprising. The analysis of both the verbal and visual texts attempts to explicate “open” and “closed” presentations of the incident by referring to three dimensions: the rhetoric of balance, the rhetoric of facticity, and the rhetoric of neutrality. The analysis sugges…
Research from Start to Finish
Answers Without Questions
An analysis of television news interviews in the United States, Britain and South Africa reveals that the newcasts differ in terms of the frequency of interviewing, the frequency of the presentation within the interviews of questions asked, and the nature of the questions used. American news programmes carry the most interviews, the fewest questions `on the screen', and the most challenging questions used; in South Africa there are the fewest int…
The Holocaust and the Press
Part 1 The Holocaust and Nazi War Crime Trials in Retrospect. Part 2 The Trials and Their Journalistic Context: The Nuremberg Trial The Eichmann Trial The Auschwitz Trial The Demjanjuk Trial. Part 3 The Holocaust and the Israeli and German Societies: The Holocaust and German Society The Holocaust and Israeli Society. Part 4 The Framework of the Study: The Newspapers Studied The German Newspapers The Israeli Newspapers The Content Analysis Problem…
Factors Affecting Viewers' Perceptions of Sensationalism in Television News
Using national survey data, this study examines factors that affect Taiwanese television viewers' perceptions of sensationalism in TV news. Findings indicate that TV formal features, channel selection, motivations for watching TV news, and viewers' demographics are significant factors that influence viewers' perceptions of sensationalism. Compared to other news topics, gossip was identified as the most sensational news topic. Concerning TV news f…
What prompts users to click and comment
This study examined the relationship between two mechanisms of online participation – clicking and commenting – as well as the characteristics of heavily clicked versus highly commented-upon news items. Based on 15,431 items from a popular Israeli website, correlations between clicking and commenting were calculated for 12 separately analysed months from 2006 to 2011. In addition, overlap rates were determined, showing that 40–59% of the heavily …
The geography of foreign news on television
Since the advent of television in the middle of the 20th century, news has been an essential ingredient in TV programming. Often these newscasts are the most heavily viewed programmes, and by and large they are the main source of information for many people. This is particularly true for news from other countries and regions in the world. This immense significance of TV news has made it an important field in communication research. The article pr…
Foreign news on television
Contents: Akiba A. Cohen/Thomas Hanitzsch/Agnieszka Stepinska/William Porath/Christine Heimprecht: Rationale, Design, and Methodologies - Agnieszka Stepinska/William Porath/Constanza Mujica/Xiaoge Xu/Akiba A. Cohen: The Prevalence of News: Domestic, Foreign, and Hybrid - Knut De Swert/Antonio Belo/Rasha Kamhawi/Ven-hwei Lo/Constanza Mujica/William Porath: Topics in Foreign and Domestic Television News - Jurgen Wilke/Christine Heimprecht/Youichi I…
On the Gendered Nature of Mobile Phone Culture in Israel
Real Time and Recall Measures of Mobile Phone Use
This article discusses the development, reliability, and validity of real-time measures of mobile phone use by means of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology, in comparison with traditional questionnaire-generated recall measures. The sample consisted of 211 Israeli adult mobile phone subscribers subdivided by gender and by the amount of airtime that they normally use. The measurements were applied to three questions to which the participan…
One of the Bloodiest Days
This article analyzes television news reports, from five countries, dealing with an incident that took place in the West Bank village of Nahalin in April 1989 during the Palestinian uprising. The analysis of both the verbal and visual texts attempts to explicate “open” and “closed” presentations of the incident by referring to three dimensions: the rhetoric of balance, the rhetoric of facticity, and the rhetoric of neutrality. The analysis sugges…
On the Meaning and Validity of Television Viewing
The construct validity of "television viewing" is developed and explicated. It is suggested that while this concept is usually used as a strict behavioral variable, many different constructs are implied by it. The construct validity of television viewing can be derived from a conceptualization of what it is in television which, when viewed, or exposed to, interacts with human behavior and attributes. Four such conceptualizations are illustrated, …
Reviving icons to death
Iconic photographs possess broad social and symbolic significance, are widely replicated over time and circulated across media platforms, and fuel public discussion. In an era of digital memes, they have become generative resources for memetic performances that not only can draw on these images’ historic authority but can also undermine it. Based on the analysis of the ‘Accidental Napalm’ memes, our research leads to a fourfold taxonomy, from mem…
The Red, the White and the Blue
The two waves of immigration to Israel from the former Soviet Union, in the 1970s and the 1990s, have created the largest (over one million people) and most distinct cultural and linguistic ethnic community. Russian-speaking immigrants soon developed their own cultural institutions and attained significant political power. Rising communication needs led to the swift development of Russian media, including radio, television and over one hundred ne…
Journalistic Role Performance in Times of Covid
This paper examines journalistic role performance in coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, based on a content analysis of newspaper, television, radio and online news in 37 countries. We test a set of hypotheses derived from two perspectives on the role of journalism in health crises. Mediatization theories assume that news media tend to sensationalize or to politicize health crises. A contrasting perspective holds that journalists shift toward more…
Does News Platform Matter? Comparing Online Journalistic Role Performance to Newspaper, Radio, and Television
The shifting role of journalism in a digital age has affected long-standing journalistic norms across media platforms. This has reinvigorated discussion on how work in online newsrooms compares to other platforms that differ in media affordances and forms. Still, more studies are needed on whether those differences translate into distinct practices, especially when examining cross-national studies. Based on the second wave of the Journalistic Rol…
Intentionality in the use of hand illustrators in face-to-face communication situations
Adolescents' Perceptions of Social Conflicts in Television News and Social Reality
This study examined Israeli adolescents' differential perception of social conflicts in society and of their presentation by TV news, given the assumption that TV presents a distorted picture of real social conflicts along three dimensions: complexity, intensity, and solvability. It was hypothesized that age and degree of remoteness of social conflicts from one's life experiences will account for the main differences in an adolescent's differenti…
Factors Affecting Viewers' Perceptions of Sensationalism in Television News
Using national survey data, this study examines factors that affect Taiwanese television viewers' perceptions of sensationalism in TV news. Findings indicate that TV formal features, channel selection, motivations for watching TV news, and viewers' demographics are significant factors that influence viewers' perceptions of sensationalism. Compared to other news topics, gossip was identified as the most sensational news topic. Concerning TV news f…
The consumers choice
This study focuses on two large minorities in Israeli society: the 'returning Diaspora' of Russian immigrants and the 'involuntary' Arab minority. Using survey data, this paper examines the relationship between the use of Hebrew, Russian and/or Arabic media, and the strength of two identities that members of a minority group possess; i. e., the one shared with the Israeli majority and the one based on one's respective minority. Based on the use o…
Answers Without Questions
An analysis of television news interviews in the United States, Britain and South Africa reveals that the newcasts differ in terms of the frequency of interviewing, the frequency of the presentation within the interviews of questions asked, and the nature of the questions used. American news programmes carry the most interviews, the fewest questions `on the screen', and the most challenging questions used; in South Africa there are the fewest int…
Speaking under duress
Videos of living captives presented in the media are extremely influential and have broad implications even beyond the boundaries of the countries involved in the depicted events. This study is the first to present a comprehensive analysis of the visual and verbal contents of captive videos. This analysis of eleven videos of captives involved in seven abductions in three countries between 1986 and 2014 describes recurring media patterns, both vis…
Attention to the Mass Media Among Straight and Split Ticket Voters
This study deals with one aspect of the communication behavior of voters who voted a straight ticket and those who split their ticket in the 1972 election in Michigan. In an election situation it is assumed that information about the candidates helps the individual make a decision how to vote. Paying attention to the candidates in the mass media is an important means of obtaining information. It was thus hypothesized that if an individual exposes…
Mobile phone usage as an indicator of solidarity
This study presents a secondary analysis of real-time data of mobile phone usage in Israel during two recent wars – with the Lebanese Hezbollah in 2006 and with the Palestinian Hamas in Gaza in 2008/9. The data, provided by Cellcom Israel, the country’s largest mobile operator, enabled an analysis of real behavior patterns rather than relying on memories of people who may have been under stress or traumatized during the hostilities, hence unable …
Between Content and Cognition
The main thesis of this article is that television news represents one of the most difficult and complex media stimuli that people face towards the end of the twentieth century. It is suggested that this is due to the combined interaction effects of the content of the news items and the inherent cognitive limitations of viewers. It argues that the way reporters, editors and newscasters present the news makes it extremely difficult, if not often i…
Intentionality in the use of hand illustrators in face-to-face communication situations
Attention to the Mass Media Among Straight and Split Ticket Voters
This study deals with one aspect of the communication behavior of voters who voted a straight ticket and those who split their ticket in the 1972 election in Michigan. In an election situation it is assumed that information about the candidates helps the individual make a decision how to vote. Paying attention to the candidates in the mass media is an important means of obtaining information. It was thus hypothesized that if an individual exposes…
Communication in the Family as a Function of Stress during War and Peace
Radio vs. TV
Journal Article Radio vs. TV: The Effect of the Medium Get access Akiba A. Cohen Akiba A. Cohen 1Akiba A. Cohen is on the faculty of the Communications Institute, Hebrew University, Jerusalem Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Communication, Volume 26, Issue 2, June 1976, Pages 29–35, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1976.tb01376.x Published: 07 February 2006
The Communicative Functions of Hand I1lustrators
Journal Article The Communicative Functions of Hand I1lustrators Get access Akiba A. Cohen Akiba A. Cohen 1Akiba A, Cohen is a Lecturer in Communications at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Communication, Volume 27, Issue 4, December 1977, Pages 54–63, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.1977.tb01856.x Published: 07 February 2006
Television Economic News and the Social Construction of Economic Reality
Exposure to the media is found to create a false impression that the media help people in understanding economic issues
On the Meaning and Validity of Television Viewing
The construct validity of "television viewing" is developed and explicated. It is suggested that while this concept is usually used as a strict behavioral variable, many different constructs are implied by it. The construct validity of television viewing can be derived from a conceptualization of what it is in television which, when viewed, or exposed to, interacts with human behavior and attributes. Four such conceptualizations are illustrated, …
Children's Literate Television Viewing
The limits of mental channel capacity and the depth of information processing may partially explain the discrepancy between what is watched and what is remembered
Communication and Cultural Development
c LASSICAL SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY has been concerned with the process by which societies change from traditional agriculturally based systems to modern ones in which wealth is generated primarily through industrial production (Tonnies 1912; Durkheim 1960; Spencer 1897; Parsons 1961). This process has become known as or , when dealing with a specific nation-state, national development. Despite the popularity of the terms development in the social sci…
Adolescents' Perceptions of Social Conflicts in Television News and Social Reality
This study examined Israeli adolescents' differential perception of social conflicts in society and of their presentation by TV news, given the assumption that TV presents a distorted picture of real social conflicts along three dimensions: complexity, intensity, and solvability. It was hypothesized that age and degree of remoteness of social conflicts from one's life experiences will account for the main differences in an adolescent's differenti…
News Diffusion of the Palme Assassination among Journalists in Iceland, Israel and the US
Journalists interviewed in Iceland, Israel and the US in the aftermath of the Palme assassination gave markedly different accounts of how they first heard of the tragedy. Radio was the predominant first source of diffusion in Iceland, personal contacts were most important in Israel, and in the US no first source predominated. Shock and astonishment were the sharpest initial reactions. Although the event occurred during the early evening in the US…
Decision Making in VCR Rental Libraries
Answers Without Questions
An analysis of television news interviews in the United States, Britain and South Africa reveals that the newcasts differ in terms of the frequency of interviewing, the frequency of the presentation within the interviews of questions asked, and the nature of the questions used. American news programmes carry the most interviews, the fewest questions `on the screen', and the most challenging questions used; in South Africa there are the fewest int…
Where Did We Come From and Where Are We Going
Research from Start to Finish
Social Conflict and Television News
One of the Bloodiest Days
This article analyzes television news reports, from five countries, dealing with an incident that took place in the West Bank village of Nahalin in April 1989 during the Palestinian uprising. The analysis of both the verbal and visual texts attempts to explicate “open” and “closed” presentations of the incident by referring to three dimensions: the rhetoric of balance, the rhetoric of facticity, and the rhetoric of neutrality. The analysis sugges…
Assessing virtual nuclear arsenals
The term 'virtual nuclear arsenals' has recently entered the lexicon of nuclear strategy, arms control and non-proliferation. Virtual-nuclear-weapons capabilities are, to some degree, a reality of physics that inevitably results from the spread of nuclear-energy technologies and programmes. But an examination of the cases of South Africa, Israel, Japan, Belarus, Khazakstan and Ukraine suggests that virtual arsenals will have limited appeal for mo…
Between Content and Cognition
The main thesis of this article is that television news represents one of the most difficult and complex media stimuli that people face towards the end of the twentieth century. It is suggested that this is due to the combined interaction effects of the content of the news items and the inherent cognitive limitations of viewers. It argues that the way reporters, editors and newscasters present the news makes it extremely difficult, if not often i…
Israel
On a summer evening in 1999, a fully loaded bus traveling from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem had just climbed to one of the highest points overlooking the city, ten minutes from its final destination. A young lady sitting a few seats behind the driver slipped her mobile phone from her purse, dialed a number, and put the phone to her ear. To the person on the other end of the line she said: "Okay, we've just passed Mevasseret [a suburb of Jerusalem], so w…
The Red, the White and the Blue
The two waves of immigration to Israel from the former Soviet Union, in the 1970s and the 1990s, have created the largest (over one million people) and most distinct cultural and linguistic ethnic community. Russian-speaking immigrants soon developed their own cultural institutions and attained significant political power. Rising communication needs led to the swift development of Russian media, including radio, television and over one hundred ne…
The consumers choice
This study focuses on two large minorities in Israeli society: the 'returning Diaspora' of Russian immigrants and the 'involuntary' Arab minority. Using survey data, this paper examines the relationship between the use of Hebrew, Russian and/or Arabic media, and the strength of two identities that members of a minority group possess; i. e., the one shared with the Israeli majority and the one based on one's respective minority. Based on the use o…
Real Time and Recall Measures of Mobile Phone Use
This article discusses the development, reliability, and validity of real-time measures of mobile phone use by means of Interactive Voice Response (IVR) technology, in comparison with traditional questionnaire-generated recall measures. The sample consisted of 211 Israeli adult mobile phone subscribers subdivided by gender and by the amount of airtime that they normally use. The measurements were applied to three questions to which the participan…
On the Gendered Nature of Mobile Phone Culture in Israel
Covering China
China, the world's most populated country and its fourth largest, has always held great interest and even curiosity for its neighbors and beyond. Across its thousands of years of recorded history
Sociology (24 works) · Political science (21 works) · Psychology (19 works) · Computer Science (16 works) · Media studies (15 works) · Advertising (14 works) · Media Studies and Communication (14 works) · Business (13 works) · Social Psychology (10 works) · Politics (9 works)