Profile: Cynthia-Lou Coleman

A former reporter turned professor studies mass media, uncovering values and mores that lurk beneath the construction of news stories. "Math is fun," Professor Cynthia-Lou Coleman declares, and soon all her students agree.

An Associate Professor of Communication, Coleman analyzes how values surrounding science, health and the environment play out in news controversies. Most recently she examined those annoying advertisements that entice the viewer to "Talk to your doctor" about allergies or impotence. Proponents of the ads claim they inform consumers, but Professor Coleman argues that those types of information claims are really just disguised propaganda.

Similarly, science was disguised as truth in news coverage of Kennewick Man, a 9,300 year-old skeleton that survived an eight-year court battle between scientists and American Indians. In writing for the journal Science Communication, Professor Coleman and co-author Erin Dysart (a PSU alumnus) demonstrated that Indian claims were dismissed as "unscientific." Professor Coleman's research on news coverage of American Indians also has been published in American Studies and Media Culture & Society, and the books Dressing in Feathers: The Construction of the Indian in American Popular Culture and Communication Ethics and Universal Values.

Recently Professor Coleman was named editor of the journal of the Northwest Communication Association. The journal publishes peer-reviewed scholarship from a spectrum of communication topics. The current journal features a range of research from communication of twin siblings to Jewish identity in cinema.

Professor Coleman's students report that she brings three elements to the classroom: enthusiasm, intensity and panache. Her passion for theory and research is evident as she encourages communication students to embrace their quantitative sides: "Math is fun," she declares, and soon all her students agree. By throwing two over-sized dice on the table, she demonstrates how communication researchers use probabilistic statistics to measure their results.

Professor Coleman brings flair, says one of her students. Her experiences living in Europe and the Middle East afford colorful class examples, like the communication faux pas advertisers made by trying to sell refrigerators in a Moslem country using pictures of a huge white refrigerator chock full of ham. "She urges us to think and dig deeper," said another student. "Her mantra is 'tell me more'."