John C Pollock Author of Evaluating Organization Development
FEATURED AUTHOR

John C Pollock

Professor, Communication Studies, Public Health
The College of New Jersey

John C. Pollock (PhD, Stanford), is professor, communication studies and public health, The College of New Jersey. Books include Tilted Mirrors: Media Alignment with Political and Social Change (2007); Media and Social Inequality: Innovations in Community Structure Research (2013); Journalism and Human Rights: How Demographics Drive Media Coverage (2015); Making Human Rights News: (2017), and COVID-19 in International Media (2021). He advances community structure theory in health communication.

Biography

John C. Pollock, Ph.D.
Professor, The College of New Jersey

[email protected]

John C. Pollock, Professor in the Communication Studies Department and Affiliate in Public Health, The College of New Jersey (TCNJ), received his B.A. from Swarthmore (political science), M. (I) P.A. from the Maxwell School at Syracuse (international public administration) and Ph.D. from Stanford (comparative politics/Latin America). He also studied at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies as a Ph.D. candidate. His current teaching and research interests include Health Communication, Human Rights, Journalism, International Communication, Mass Communication, and Research Methods.

Dr. Pollock has taught at Rutgers University and the City University of New York (Queens College) and has conducted research in India and Latin America (Colombia), serving as director of the Latin American Institute at Rutgers. Dr. Pollock serves on five editorial boards –Journal of Health Communication, Communication Theory, The Atlantic Journal of Communication, Journal of Media Sociology, and Mass Communication and Society. He has authored, co-authored, or edited five books, among them: Tilted Mirrors: Media Alignment with Political and Social Change – A Community Structure Approach (Hampton Press, 2007); and Media and Social Inequality: Innovations in Community Structure Research (Routledge, 2013). Both books were selected as finalists for the Jane Jacobs Award for best book in urban communication by the Urban Communication Foundation. The two most recent are Journalism and Human Rights: How Demographics Drive Media Coverage (Routledge, 2015); (co-edited with Morton Winston) Making Human Rights News: Balancing Participation and Professionalism (Routledge, 2017); and  (co-edited with Douglas A. Vakoch) COVID-19 in International Media: Global Pandemic Perspectives. Dr. Pollock has published scholarly and professional articles in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Journal of Health Communication, Social Science and Medicine, Mass Communication and Society, Communication Research Reports, Society, Newspaper Research Journal, Journal of International Communication, Mass Communication Review, International Encyclopedia of Communication III, and Communication Yearbook IV, as well as The New York Times, The Nation, Industry Week and the Public Relations Journal.

Former president of the public opinion research subsidiary of a leading public relations firm, Dr. Pollock is the recipient of a Silver Anvil, the “Oscar” of the Public Relations Society of America. He has appeared on the TODAY show and Nightline and has testified before congress on his survey results. Former president of the New Jersey Communication Association, Dr. Pollock has received research grants from the Social Science Research Council, National Cancer Institute and the United Nations Foundation. He was a spring, 2010, Senior Fulbright Scholar in Buenos Aires, Argentina.

Past chair of The College of New Jersey Marketing Advisory Council and the Arts & Sciences Curriculum Committee, Dr. Pollock received the first award for “Mentoring Student Research” from The College of New Jersey in February, 2002. He also received the 2003 national “Advisor of the Year” award from the National Communication Association (NCA) for his work with the TCNJ Chapter of Lambda Pi Eta, the national communication student honor society. He was given the 2012 “Distinguished Educator” Award by the Mass Communication and Society Division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. He authored the proposal winning the 2013 NCA “Rex Mix Program of Excellence” award recognizing TCNJ for having among the best undergraduate departments of communication studies in the nation.  Dr. Pollock co-chaired The College of New Jersey Public Health Task Force, a collaborative effort involving every School at TCNJ, to launch baccalaureate, certificate and MPH programs in public health.

Education

    Phd (comparative politics/Latin America), Stanford, CA, USA
    PhD candidate, Johns Hopkins SAIS, Washington, DC
    M(I)PA (intern. pub. adm.), Maxwell School, Syracuse, NY
    BA, poli. sci/intern. relations, Swarthmore, Swarthmore, PA

Areas of Research / Professional Expertise

    Public Health, Health Communication. Health Communication Campaigns (Social Marketing Approaches), Human Rights, Community Structure Theory, content analysis, survey research, research methods

    A Wikipedia entry on the Community Structure Theory I have developed can be found at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Structure_Theory

Personal Interests

    skiing, tennis, classical music (I grew up along the Front Range of the Rockies near Denver, Colorado, graduating from Golden High School.).  I enjoy volunteering on a monthly basis at meetings of mid-career job-seekers, helping them find new opportunities for professional growth and employment.  I am also committed to co-authoring articles, chapters and even a book with undergraduates, helping them write papers for presentation as refereed papers at state, national, and international scholarly conferences, as well as encouraging students to seek admission to leading graduate or professional schools in their areas of interest.

Books

Featured Title
 Featured Title - COVID-19 in International Media - Pollock - 1st Edition book cover

News

New Book on COVID-19 in International Media Finds Many Countries Trust Social Media to Confront the Virus

By: John C Pollock
Subjects: Communication Studies, Health and Social Care, Media Communication, Media and Cultural Studies, Media, Journalism and Communications, Other

New Book “COVID-19 in International Media” Finds Many Countries Trust Social Media to Confront COVID-19

New Publication by John C. Pollock and Douglas A. Vakoch Reveals International Social Media Success Promoting Pandemic Precautions

July 21, 2021 15:14 ET | Source: John C. Pollock

Princeton, NJ, July 21, 2021 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- How much do social media undermine collective civic responsibility, and how much do they encourage it? A book to be published August 13, 2021 explores this question.

Social media platforms are sometimes criticized for the role they play during the pandemic for spreading exaggerated claims about the impact of state lockdowns on personal liberties, generating misinformation about the dangers of vaccination, or challenging the good faith efforts of government and health officials to confront COVID-19. Yet a new book edited by John C. Pollock and Douglas A. Vakoch, “COVID-19 in International Media: Global Pandemic Perspectives”, illuminates social media as constructive forces countering the spread of COVID-19. According to senior editor Pollock, “Essays on social media’s role in confronting COVID-19 reveal that multiple countries regard social media as responsible platforms amplifying science-based pandemic precautions. Social media can function as trusted stewards of civic responsibility.”

Co-leading one of the first efforts to unite an international team of scholars investigating how media address critical social, political and health issues connected to the COVID-19 outbreak, book co-editor Vakoch notes that “The collection combines contributions from scholars in a broad range of countries, large and small, industrialized and developing, dictatorships and democracies.”

The collection reveals several patterns. The first is that governments of several democracies have been effective in deploying social media to promote precautionary pandemic behavior. One leader of a small island democracy has made informal appearances on a Facebook app nightly in sweatshirt or pajamas reminding fellow citizens to practice safety precautions and “stay in bubbles”, resulting in some of the lowest COVID-19 numbers worldwide.

Similarly, in the UK, a public health information campaign was launched on January 31, 2020, to advise the public how they could mitigate the spreading coronavirus. Public Health England (PHE), like the CDC in the US, detailed UK government social media policy to inform the public about COVID-19 incidents on its website. Social media shared information and engaged with other platform users, allowing the public to post responses or ask questions. Encouraging social media engagement came with a strict code of conduct. Officials closely monitored posted comments and questions, and the same page detailed a list of prohibited behavior and deleted social posts. The UK government utilized several social media platforms -- Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, SlideShare, and their own blog (Public Health Matters) -- to reach the public with specific health concerns.

The second pattern is that leaders can employ a wide range of role models and cultural influencers to promote personal safety. Foregrounding nationally recognized icons has been effective in energizing support for COVID-19 safety campaigns. Twelve days after Spain declared a State of Emergency on March 13, 2020, the media covered a patriotic initiative: The tennis player Rafael Nadal and basketball player Pau Gasol (one from Mallorca, the other from Catalonia, both sporting icons in Spain), launched an initiative on Twitter with the Spanish Red Cross to raise money to fight the coronavirus. “You, the people of Spain, have never let your sports players down. . ., and we cannot let you down now either,” said Nadal on his official account. Soon, hundreds of professional sports players and athletes came on board and donated to the project. Similarly, the leader of one of the world’s largest democracies rallied that nation’s entertainment community, in particular famous actors, to help make the case for personal COVID-19 safety measures.

The third pattern the book illustrates is that although social media platforms are used as instruments of cooperation and representation to popularize lifesaving social norms, they can also serve as instruments of resistance to control or regulation.

Social media are employed as instruments of caution and resistance to official regulation or disinformation. One government employed official or social media allies to attack non-official journalists, “netizens”, who questioned the official narrative that the government had responded swiftly and appropriately to the threat of COVID-19. Netizens were also attacked by another government’s social media platforms for any lockdown measure criticism. Contrary to anti-science behavior of some social media users during COVID-19, Russian-speaking bloggers in the diaspora actively refuted rumors and opposed misleading and unreliable information. They fact-checked, criticized destructive behavior, and encouraged followers to embrace WHO precautionary guidelines.

Whether social media play primarily constructive or constraining roles in the pandemic, book chapters suggest their influence has been limited by pre-COVID social inequalities and disparities, particularly in healthcare access. For example, resource and health information access “asymmetries” and inequalities persist between the Global North and Global South. According to the book, inequality -- digital divides, knowledge gaps and variations in social support -- in social media and health information access continue to separate populations.

The book outlines three civic responsibility lessons from social media experiences of many countries confronting the pandemic. First, leaders and government institutions can effectively enlist social media platforms and tools to convey nonpartisan, health-promoting messages that benefit everyone. Second, responsible health behavior role models are abundant, especially in sports and entertainment communities, to set examples if authorities mobilize them creatively. Third, disparities in access to economic and social resources, as well as social media, hamper health promotion efforts, but expansion of social media has proliferated channels for lifesaving pandemic messages.

Senior Editor John C. Pollock (Ph.D., Stanford; MPA, Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs - Syracuse; BA, Swarthmore) is Professor of Health and Human Rights Communication at the Departments of Communication Studies and Public Health, The College of New Jersey.

Co-editor Douglas A. Vakoch, PhD, is President of METI, a research organization dedicated to Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence and sustaining civilization on multigenerational timescales.

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Social media can function as trusted stewards of civic responsibility.

New Publication Reveals International Social Media Success Promoting Pandemic Precautions