Mass Communication Mass Communication Mission   Our Mass Communication programs are liberal arts curricula that seek to achieve excellence in research and in educating students in the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to develop into competent and ethical mass communicators and to pursue careers and/or advanced study. Specifically, faculty teach and research the arts and social sciences of audio, visual, written, and multimedia communication with emphasis on encoding and disseminating messages transmitted from a single channel to multiple receivers.   We expect to produce graduates who are theoretically sound communicators with skills to create messages for a variety of media, able to demonstrate competence in communication both orally and in writing, and capable of expressing themselves accurately, clearly, creatively, and with grammatical proficiency. This is achieved by teaching and researching theories that aim to:   Describe means of effectively creating meaningful messages in a variety of settings for all media that disseminate audio, visual, written, or media messages. Explain effects of variant audio, visual, written, or media messages on message consumers’ behavior, attitudes, and aspects of consciousness. Explain effects of social and cultural variables on individual media workers, organizations, and industries, including production, dissemination, exhibition, & consumption processes. Explain ethical decision-making for production, dissemination, exhibition, and consumption of media messages.   Our programs are consistent with Educating Illinois and committed to acquiring and maintaining state-of-the-art laboratories that are responsive to technological advances in a converging media world. We intend to enable students to practice audio, visual, written, and multimedia message production. We are committed continual improvement of our mediated communication channels - TV10, WGLT radio, WZND, and attendant web sites. Our faculty will maintain a supportive environment for knowledge expansion by involving students in research activities that create knowledge about mass communication, transmitting that knowledge to students and other constituencies, applying that knowledge in a philosophically and theoretically sound manner, and seeking research funds from internal and external sources.