"For years, I’d check for local news even before checking FR. Now, I no longer even look at philly.com - I just couldn’t take all the gay stories. Every.single.day there was some gay story right there on the front page."
Yep. I swear, I wanted to see some sports news on a MSM news feed a few weeks ago... and nine out of ten stories they had were about Sam the gay football player. It's ridiculous.
The library had perhaps 150 current issues of media communications research journals on display, with several back issues behind each one in the racks. Most research journals put the table of contents on the front cover.
Guess what the great majority of every cover I scanned contained? One, two, or three articles on homosexuality, out of ten or twelve articles. Why gays are in the media, why gays are not in the media, how gays are depicted in the media, how media affects gays, why media should do more and better for gays, and on and on.
Neither a digital search, the card catalog or my eyeballing turned up any serious research on what actually happens to the heart rate, the pupils, or the brain waves during various types of media stimuli on a general population, or on any demographic at all, not even gays. This is the state of higher education and well-funded scientific research.