[1] He is currently a professor in the department of communication studies and faculty affiliate in public health at The College of New Jersey, where he has taught since 1992.
In that book, using a US multi-city comparative framework, Pollock outlined systematic patterns that link demographic characteristics of communities with variations in media coverage of critical issues.
Second, Pollock and co-authors isolated three major umbrella “hypotheses” or “patterns” connecting community structure and variations in reporting on social change: a) The “buffer” hypothesis expects that higher proportions of privileged groups in communities would be linked with reporting relatively appreciative of human rights claims; b) the “vulnerability” hypothesis expects that reporting on social change will reflect the interests of society’s most “vulnerable” elements (the poor, the unemployed, the uninsured, single-parent families, etc.
Third, Pollock also made community structure theory more sophisticated by including a Media Vector methodological tool for coding both content direction and editorial prominence of articles, then combining them into a single score, thereby introducing a composite measure of both editorial evaluation and article content.
Fourth, Pollock and coauthor findings often challenged the traditional “guard dog” hypothesis by uncovering patterns revealing that media can often reflect the interests of more vulnerable stakeholders.