Hello, I'm Ellen Wartella and welcome to this episode of the Architects of Communication Scholarship Podcast series, a production of the ICA Podcast Network. Today, our architect is Akiba Cohen. Professor Cohen founded the Department of Communication at Tel Aviv University and served as its first chair between 1996 to 2001. He retired as Professor Emeritus in 2012. Before that he held faculty positions in the Department of Communication and Journalism at Hebrew University, where he also served as Director of the Smart Family Foundation Communication Institute and Chair of its department. Professor Cohen is past President of the International Communication Association and an Elected Fellow of the Association. Today, Akiba Cohen is in conversation with Ori Tenenboim. Professor Tenenboim is an Assistant Professor in the School of Journalism, Writing and Media at the University of Tel Aviv. And here is Professor Tenenboim.
About 10 years ago, I was a Master's student in Communication at Tel Aviv University and I was fortunate to have Akiba Cohen as my instructor and thesis advisor. Thanks to his guidance, I learned issues in communication theory and quantitative research methods. During my PhD journey in the US, we connected at annual ICA conferences. He has been a great mentor, supportive, generous, curious and meticulous. Today, it is my pleasure to talk to him as part of this podcast series. Hello, Akiba. I'm excited to talk to you.
Hi, Ori. Same here.
I would like to hear about your personal history. How would you start your story?
Well, my story began in Detroit, Michigan, in September of 1944. That's where I was born and lived until I was three years of age, at which point my mother and I joined my father who was working in Germany after World War Two. And in 1951, we moved to Israel. After high school, I attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where I did my undergraduate work in a dual major in Psychology and Sociology. After that, I joined the Israeli Army. I was a junior research officer in the manpower branch; we did surveys, sociometric studies of soldiers, and so on. And that was excellent training for what later became my graduate studies. I chose Michigan State and I'll explain a little bit later how I got to Michigan State of all places. At the time professor Gerry Miller was the chair of graduate studies. And when I got the acceptance letter, it said, "Welcome to the knowledge generation program at Michigan State." And I wonder what is knowledge generation? Is it the age of generation? Or is it a verb where we generate knowledge? To this very day, I don't know the answer to what he meant. I spent three years there; got my Masters within a year, got my PhD at the end of the third year. Fortunately, I was hired by the Hebrew University to come back as a lecturer. I was at Hebrew University from 1973 until 1995, during which time I was the first head of the Smart Family Foundation Communications Institute. And I also served as Chair of the department for three years. But in 1995, Tel Aviv University invited me to come and establish a Department of Communication. I should mention that Jerusalem was the first university that had a Department of Communication. So I moved to Tel Aviv and I became the founding chair, and I served this chair for five years. In 2012, I retired because in Israel, there is mandatory retirement, you have to retire at age 68. Doesn't mean you have to quit working. So, that's the basic history.
Why did you choose to study communication?
The real truth is that I was always interested in media as a child. And I remember in the town where we lived I would visit a store on the main street and I would leaf through the newspapers and the storekeeper said to me, "What are you looking at?" And I said, "It's interesting." And he said, "But why are you looking at the different papers?" I said, "Because it's even more interesting." That's where my comparative research idea was probably born. But I guess the background in sociology and psychology led me in that direction.
At the time at the Hebrew University, you couldn't really study communication for your BA, right?
There was no BA program at the time. In fact, Elihu Katz established the Communications Institute. I believe it was in 1966. So I started Sociology and Psychology, which I think is a good foundation in the social sciences for communication research.
Back to Michigan State University, how was it like being a doctoral student there?
David Berlo was chair of the department. And he promised us that by the end of the first quarter some of us won't be here. And he was right. Four of the bunch of students who had entered that year quit the program for various reasons. Studying was very intense compared to what I had been used to at the Hebrew University. One of the main differences is that at Hebrew University, given the fact that the literature is mostly in English but people don't know English that well, we got relatively short reading lists. We would translate and share copies of translations of the English articles and so on. In the States, suddenly, you found yourself with tremendous amounts of reading in English. For me, it was a relatively easier proposition because I had come from an English-speaking home, etc. But it still was quite a dramatic change. It was very intense. As you know, Ori, studying in Israel is more relaxed in that sense. Although the undergraduate degree in Israel is three years, and it's four years in the States, the graduate program in the States is much more structured.
Who were your mentors as you came into the field of communication?
The person who I started working with in the second year was a professor by the name of Verling or better known as Pete Troldahl. Unfortunately, Pete Troldahl passed away because of a heart attack in July of 1973 while I was writing my dissertation. He was a fantastic guy. Bradley Greenberg, who was a faculty member in the department at the time, stepped into his shoes and helped me finish writing the dissertation. And the third person I would mention is Randy Harrison, who was a specialist in nonverbal communication. He was also on my committee, and he was a wonderful colleague. Those are the three people who mentored me through graduate school. I must say that at the undergraduate level, I didn't have any mentors to speak of, because in Israel it doesn't work that way. You don't have close relationships with faculty. But at the graduate level, the three that I mentioned, were definitely my mentors there.
Who were your intellectual models or influencers?
I mentioned Elihu Katz before, having founded the Communications Institute. I met him during my military service when I was contemplating going to the States to study communication. I took a couple of courses at the Hebrew University. I discussed with Elihu what should I do, where should I go, and so on. And he raised several options. He guided me in which direction I should go based on the interest that I seem to have expressed at the time. Michael Gurevitch, who was also at Hebrew University at the time. Those two gentlemen were, in a way, intellectual models. A third person I would mention is Jay Blumler whom I met through Elihu. Jay was the comparative guy and had a big, strong influence on my work later on, in doing comparative research. Fourth and last person I'll mention is Louis Guttman, who was a sociologist, a psychometrician. Those of you who know the Guttman scale. He was a real, devout orthodox methodologist, who insisted that one must develop a comprehensive theory for what you're doing. So, in that sense, Louis had a very strong influence on the work that I had done later on.
You have authored or co-authored multiple books and refereed journal articles. Thinking about them, could you identify common threads in addition to the fact that they are all related somehow to communication?
Most of my research has been comparative that is cross-national or international in scope. And most of my research, with some exceptions, deal with news. I was a news maniac. In fact, my son who was then about five or six years old, once commented to me when I was looking at something over and over again, he said, "Aren't you bored watching the same news item again and again?" And I said, "No, because each time I look at it, I see new things." I think that one of the innovative studies that I did with my two very good colleagues, Hanna Adoni and Charles Bantz, who was then at the University of Minnesota, we did a project on what we call "social conflict in television news". What stands behind this is the fact that most news is conflict; typically, conflict stories dominate the news. And it was interesting for us to look at what and how television news covers, in terms of social conflict. Now, we developed three dimensions of conflict, what we called complexity, intensity, and solvability of conflict. That is you can analyze any particular conflict along the dimensions of how complex it is, how intense it is, and how solvable or insoluble it seems to be. What we were interested in doing is to look at how conflicts were presented on television news, on the one hand, and how audiences perceived conflicts, not just on television news but also in the real world. Now, at the time that we were doing this, what was probably the most popular theoretical approach then was Gerbner and Gross' Cultivation Theory. Namely, that people perceive the world through television, they emphasize violence. But, in general, the idea that people perceive the world via the media, via television. Our research was conducted in five countries. We also surveyed people asking them how they perceive specific conflicts in their environment and on television. What we found is that people are able to make the distinction between the real world and the way things are presented on television. Basically, based on Media Dependency Theory, that is the closer they are to the real conflict, the less dependent they would be on television for their perception of what the conflict was all about, how complex it was, how intense it was, how solvable it was. Another comparative study with 11 countries was a study that ended up also in a book called "Global Newsrooms, Local Audiences". Now that, to my mind, is one of the most interesting studies I've ever done. It was a study on the European Broadcasting Union's news exchange service. Most people know the European Broadcasting Union or the EBU because of the Eurovision Song Contest. We analyzed how the different stories were developed, and treated, and presented on the news of that day in the 11 different countries. What we discovered was that to a large extent, the news items became domesticated for the local audience. We also did surveys of audiences in several of the countries to understand what sense they make of the story and to what extent they feel that the stories in fact are domesticated for them.
What other research projects are you particularly proud of?
My very good friend, Pamela Shoemaker, invited me to join her in a project that she was developing, dealing particularly with newsworthiness. She developed two main concepts having to do with newsworthiness: deviance and social significance. And claimed that the combination of those two variables will determine the level of newsworthiness of news stories. It ended up as a book called "News Around the World: Content, Practitioners and the Public". One of the things that we did that was very interesting there is that we looked at how the news was presented in a composite week on television, newspapers and radio. And then we did focus groups in all the 10 countries of the project. Using cards in which the names of the topics of the news stories that appeared in the real days that we analyzed, they were asked to arrange the cards, which they received in random order, according to the newsworthiness that they would have set them up if they were the editors of the local newspaper. What we found was that there was a high degree of correspondence in all countries, except in India where it was a little less significant, between what journalists and public relations practitioners and the public considered what the level of newsworthiness was. But they all disagreed with what appeared in the real newspapers of those particular days.
I'm looking at the list of books and I see that you wrote your first book with Itzhak Roeh, Elihu Katz and Barbie Zelizer. It was published in 1980. And the title includes the intriguing words, "Almost Midnight". Tell me about this book.
Television began in Israel in 1968. One of the last Western countries to introduce television. And Elihu, by the way, was the person who was in charge of the commission that set up television in Israel. And there was a newscast at eight o'clock, I think 85 to 90 percent of adults would watch almost on a nightly basis. Itzhak Roeh, my colleague who was also a broadcaster, came up with the idea one day of developing a newscast later in the evening. Not a very formal, strict hard news program, but something more intellectual, soft literature, music, cartoon. Things that would be of interest to people who go to bed later at night, namely people of higher education, who don't have to get up early in the morning and so on. The Israel Broadcasting Authority at the time agreed to develop such a program. And they also agreed that a team of researchers would follow throughout the process. My share of that project was to do five surveys over a period of a little over a year in which we survey the audience, in terms of its interests, satisfaction, or lack thereof, in the program. So that project, start to finish, was a unique formative research program.
Thinking about TV news that people watched decades ago and TV news people are watching today, what would you say has changed and what has remained the same?
Let me talk from the perspective of the Israeli public first. There was one TV channel in the late 60s and throughout the 70s. It was very hard news, very formal. There was very little live coverage. It was expensive to do. But what has happened over the years is the competition between several commercial channels has led to a commercialized format of news. It shouldn't be a show. It's a newscast. And today it's a show. The newsworthiness is very low, if at all. I think this general situation has occurred in many other places around the world.
So let's talk about your professional highlights. What would you say your highlights have been?
The fact that I was elected ICA president was a highlight for me. I remember Ellen Wartella, who is now producing this whole series, and I sitting on the steps of the Chicago Hilton in May of 1991 when ICA had its conference in Chicago, and she said to me, "Why don't you run as president elect? "And I said, "Come on, you're kidding." And she said, "No, I'm serious." So it was really Ellen who persuaded me to agree to run as a candidate. A second highlight was the fact that I was elected Fellow, I was very surprised. I was sitting in the audience of the general ICA business meeting when Jim [James W.] Carey, who was chair of the fellows that year, got up on the stage and announced the names of the people who had been elected fellows and he included me in that list. I had no idea that I was a candidate. Other highlights of my career, I would say, the opportunity to go places, change your environment, meet with people.
Since this podcast series is titled Architects of Communications Scholarship, what would you say you have built?
I think that I helped put Israeli communication scholarship on the world map. I am today one of the elder faculty of the Israeli community. Back in 1988, I convened a symposium at Hebrew University, which we called "Future Directions in Television News Research". To which we invited people like Bill Gamson, Doris Graber, Brad Greenberg, Hans Mathias Kepplinger, Mark Levy, Sonia Livingstone, Paolo Mancini, Jack McLeod, Zhongdang Pan, Byron Reeves, Pamela Shoemaker, and Joe Turow. We had an exceptionally good program where we dealt with the start-to-finish notion dealing with control of news, content of news, and cognition. And then the other thing was, of course, the fact that in 1998, ICA met in Jerusalem for the first time and I was the one who presented the proposal to the ICA board. And the last two things I would mention very briefly is the fact that I contributed, when I was chair of the program in Jerusalem, to the creation of the BA program, an undergraduate program, in communication. It was a big debate going on, whether we should have a BA in communication or not. Some thought that communication is not a discipline that should be studied for the undergraduate degree. Some of us felt differently and we pushed it through the university authorities and finally ended up creating the program.
It has been a pleasure. Thank you so much for taking the time to share your experiences and insights.
My pleasure too, Ori. And thank you.
This episode of Architects of Communication Scholarship Podcast Series is presented by the International Communication Association Podcast Network and is sponsored by the Wee Kim Wee School of Communication And Information at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. Our producers are Troy Cruz and Sharlene Burgos. Our executive producer is DeVante Brown. The theme music is by Humans Win. For more information about our participants on this episode, as well as our sponsor, be sure to check the episode description. Thanks for listening!
