History 2016 Abstracts
Labor’s Rejection: How the National Basketball Players Association blocked management before Congress • Bill Anderson • “Labor’s Slam Dunk” Highlights • Examines how basketball players’ union stopped two leagues from merging. • Explores public relations history from a non-corporate perspective. • Success depended on union efforts and outside factors. • Situates public relations as one of many constructors of meaning.
Two Seminal Events in Motion Picture Public Relations History: How U.S. Court Decisions Twice Changed the Way Movies Are Publicized • Carol Ames, California State University, Fullerton • This qualitative historical study finds that two seminal U.S. court decisions changed entertainment public relations by changing the motion picture industry’s business model. U.S. v. Motion Picture Patents Company (225 F. 800 D.C. Pa. 1915) ended monopoly control of the film business and transformed film public relations from a retail model to the big-business, centralized model of the studio era. U.S. v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. (334 U.S. 131 1948) forced the Hollywood studios to divest their theater chains and ushered in the modern era of specialized PR agencies and independent consultants.
Write on: An analysis of the role of the underground press in three cities • Chad Painter, Eastern New Mexico University • This analysis traced the radical, monitorial, facilitative, and collaborative roles of the underground press in three U.S. cities. Articles were analyzed in 81 underground newspapers published between 1956 and 1983. Publications were analyzed for content and story selection, objectivity, tone, efforts at community building, and relationships to mainstream media. The findings suggest both politics and culture are components of community and democracy. Further, the findings suggest that normative theory previously has been too narrowly conceived.
The Struggle to Describe South Carolina’s Leading Civil Rights Lawyer • Christopher Frear, University of South Carolina • Three events help show how newspaper coverage of the career of South Carolina’s leading civil rights lawyer, Matthew J. Perry, helped create and shape narratives about South Carolina’s African American freedom struggle. The three events significant legally and socially for South Carolina and personally for Perry: the 1963 desegregation of Clemson, Perry’s 1974 campaign for Congress, and his 1979 appointment to the federal bench in Columbia.
Tel Ra Productions & TeleSports Digest: The Unknown Story of American Television’s Early Chronicler and Archivist of US Sports • Daniel Haygood, Elon University • During commercial televisions’ early era, the four television networks featured an extensive offering of sports programming on their prime time schedules. Once the networks began to replace sports programs with entertainment shows, other entities attempted to fill this sports gap. Tel Ra Productions emerged as the leading syndicated producer of television sports programming, beginning in the late 1940s. Its primary program was TeleSports Digest, a thirty-minute show, featuring a wide range of sporting events. Tel Ra also had the rights to some of the most valuable US sports properties, including NFL football, college basketball, Notre Dame football, and others. This research tells the story of Tel Ra Productions, TeleSports Digest, and the portfolio of sports shows created by this Pennsylvania production company. Further, Tel Ra’s role and its significance to sports broadcasting history is explored.
George G. Foster’s Urban Journalism as an Antecedent to Muckraking • Denitsa Yotova, University of Maryland, College Park • This paper examines the writings of George G. Foster in antebellum New York. It analyzes his particular style of social commentary and press criticism as early forms of alternative journalism and muckraking. A review of primary and secondary sources determines that although presented in a more literary, non-fiction style, Foster’s writings demonstrate an analytical and expository approach to journalism that existed long before the most famous muckrakers changed American print culture. By focusing on the work of the largely understudied journalist and litterateur George G. Foster in the context of society, culture, and the press during the mid-nineteenth century, this study demonstrates that such early alternative forms of reporting should be viewed as a compelling journalistic endeavor that engaged both society and the press. Ultimately, Foster’s exposés, as printed in the New York Tribune and later in his books, were aimed at raising the public’s consciousness about the need for moral and social change, and served as a precursor to muckraking.
Full-Court Press: How Segregationist Newspapers Covered an Integrated Virginia High School Basketball Team • Elizabeth Atwood, Hood College; Sara Pietrzak, Hood College • This study explores how newspapers that had opposed school desegregation and supported Virginia’s massive resistance policies covered a local high school basketball team that won the state championship three years after the school was desegregated. Uniquely situated at a nexus of research into community newspapers and studies of sports coverage of racial minorities, this study finds that hometown boosterism trumps racial politics with the newspapers praising the integrated team as a model of cooperation.
Missing the story • James Mueller, University of North Texas • This paper examines coverage of a cavalry fight that blunted a Confederate attack aimed at the Union rear during the decisive third day of the battle of Gettysburg. It studies a sample of major newspapers from both the North and South and suggests that reporters ignored that part of the battle, contributing to a possible misunderstanding of the battle today.
Witness to War: Newsreel Photographer Arthur Menken • Joe Hayden, University of Memphis • In the heyday of American newsreels, Arthur Menken stood at the top of his field. He made a name for himself covering some of the most important events of the 1930s and 1940s. Yet that reputation seems to have slipped into the past. Using contemporary news accounts and many previously unpublished photographs, this study reconstructs the career of an intrepid war correspondent who for a time was the most distinguished documentarian capturing history on film.
The Espionage Conviction of Kansas City Editor Jacob Frohwerk: “A Clear and Present Danger” to the United States • Ken Ward, Ohio University; Aimee Edmondson • In 1918, German-language newspaper editor Jacob Frohwerk was convicted under the Espionage Act for editorials critical of World War I. He appealed to the Supreme Court, where his case was considered alongside landmark First Amendment cases like Schenk. Despite the impact of the case, Frohwerk has been overlooked by historians. This historical analysis utilizes archival documents, newspaper articles, and court and prison records, providing the first thorough consideration of Frohwerk’s career, trial, and lasting impact.
Cowboy Songs from the Cold War Adversary: Listening to RIAS as portrayed in the East German Press • Kevin Grieves, Whitworth University • For much of the Cold War, East Germany attempted to block Western media. This study analyzed East German press’ treatment of East Germans listening to the U.S. Government-run station RIAS Berlin during the period 1946-1953. The analysis points to ambiguity and the conflicted nature of East German attitudes towards outside propaganda messages. These attitudes – competing with enemy media, engaging in counterpropaganda, educating citizens about propaganda, or blocking messages seen as threatening – remain relevant today.
A Genuine Sense of Helplessness: Newsroom Ethnography and Resistance to Management Change at The New York Times in 1974 • Kevin Lerner, Marist College • “In 1974, the management scholar Chris Argyris published an ethnography of the New York Times, though the paper was ineffectively disguised as “”The Daily Planet”” and its editors and business executives each identified only by a single letter. Argyris had unprecedented access to the 40 top editors and executives at the paper, and his book, once decoded by a journalism review called (MORE), provides insight into the un-self critical nature of newsrooms and a reluctance to respond to outside press criticism.
This paper draws on Argyris’s book, cross-referenced with the article from (MORE) that identified major publishing and editorial staff at The Times, as well as the institutional archives of The New York Times, particularly those of its top editor at the time, Abe Rosenthal. Argyris secured access to the Times via its publisher, Arthur “Punch” Sulzberger, but Rosenthal’s papers provide the most thorough portrait of the editorial staff’s oppositional stance toward Argyris. It places Argyris’s failure to effect change at the Times in the context of Wendy Wyatt’s discursive theory of press criticism as well as theories of anti-intellectualism developed by sociologist Daniel Rigney out of the work of historian Richard Hofstadter.”
War of Words: A Comparative Contextual Analysis of newspaper coverage of the Battle of Kontum • Kris Boyle, Brigham Young University • This study compares newspaper coverage of the Battle of Kontum in the Stars and Stripes and The New York Times. The textual analysis revealed the Times appeared more skeptical of the U.S and South Vietnamese success in the battle. The Stars and Stripes was more optimistic and favorable in its coverage. Additionally, the approach used by the Stars and Stripes in reporting the conflict – usually based on first-person accounts – differed from the Times’ big-picture approach.
The Aesthetics of Historiophoty: Ken Burns and the Origins of Visual Effects in the Historical Documentary • Kyle McDaniel, University of Oregon • This study examines the origins of visual effects in the historical documentary film, and investigates how such aesthetic practices and tools engage with historiophoty. Here, historiophoty was explored through visual analyses for archival photographs in the early films of historical documentarian Ken Burns. As such, the significance of this research is to understand how visual effects have the ability to subvert or reinforce aspects of historiophoty and therefore, affect photography’s indexical ties to the past.
Saving Face: How The University of Georgia Survived the Integration Crisis and Maintained Its Image through Stakeholder Management • LaShonda Eaddy, The University of Georgia • Few studies have explored higher education desegregation in the nation’s first state to charter a state-supported university, Georgia. The present study documents the University of Georgia’s integration communication with various groups based on Freeman’s stakeholder theory as well as the University’s public relations response and strategy. The study examines the University’s public relations function and the analysis shows how the public relations strategy was to save face when addressing issues raised by its stakeholder groups.
News Ecosystem During the Birth of the Confederacy: South Carolina Secession in Southern Newspapers • Michael Fuhlhage, Wayne State University; Sarah Walker; Nicholas Prephan; Jade Metzger • This study uses content assessment to examine 822 newspaper articles covering secession in the weeks before, during, and after South Carolina’s secession convention in four Southern newspapers: the Charleston Mercury, New Orleans Picayune, Alexandria Gazette, and Macon Telegraph. The study examines the role of four media of dissemination — telegraphic reports, exchange newspapers, letters, and staff correspondence — in the creation of emergent Confederate nationalism, coverage of disunion, and the spread of secessionist ideas and symbols.
“Russian Journalists and the Great Patriotic War” • Owen V Johnson; Rashad Mammadov • The paper focuses on the role of Russian journalists and their reporting during World War II. We argue that, generally, the historical trajectory of journalism and the press in Russia significantly diverges from the often cited “norm” of the West. We look at the press in Great Patriotic War, and judge them on the basis of institutional culture and on how journalists themselves understand the role of journalists in a particular time and place.
Silent Spring, Loud Legacy: How Elite Media Helped Establish an Environmentalist Icon • Perry Parks, Michigan State University • Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring is widely credited with altering Americans’ environmental consciousness and changing people’s relationship with nature, science, and government. One means by which the book, which chronicled the dangers of pesticides, attained and reinforced its symbolic status in collective memory is through newspaper coverage, which remained persistent through five decades. This study of fifty years of Silent Spring in two elite newspapers traces how news media can help elevate a situated artifact into an enduring icon with contemporary power.
Framing Barry Goldwater: The Extreme Reaction to His 1964 “Extremism” Speech • Rich Shumate, University of Florida • This study examines the extreme reaction by political and media elites to one of the most noteworthy political speeches of the 20th century—Barry Goldwater’s acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican National Convention, in which he said, “Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” Using a textual analysis of coverage of the convention, this paper posits that frames employed by elite media triggered a negative response to Goldwater’s speech, irrespective of its actual content.
The Social Awakening and The Soul of News • Ronald Rodgers, University of Florida • The long conversation about the role and responsibility of the newspaper a century ago was often hinged to a commonplace conceit of the age – the “social awakening.” A derivative of that conceit was the notion of the “soul of news,” which was at the center of an argument about the newspaper as a public utility whose role as society’s servant trumped the demands of the market and its constraints on journalistic conduct and content.
Ada Patterson: “The Nellie Bly of the West” • Samantha Peko, Ohio University • In 1896, Ada Patterson was making headlines as the St. Louis Republic’s “Nellie Bly.” From climbing the St. Louis City Tower to riding with the St. Louis Fire Chief for a story, Patterson took on any challenge. She was one of many “stunt girls” who used the Bly formula as an opportunity to transition from the society pages to the front pages. This paper explores Patterson’s life, and how her “stunts” helped progress her career.
Is This the Best Philosophy Can Do? Henry R. Luce and the Commission on Freedom of the Press • Stephen Bates, University of Nevada, Las Vegas • After spending $200,000 on it, Time Inc. editor in chief Henry R. Luce renounced the Commission on Freedom of the Press. Many accounts ascribe his stance to financial self-interest: the Commission’s report, A Free and Responsible Press (1947), castigated American journalism. Based on previously unavailable documents, including Luce’s handwritten notes, this paper argues that much of his disenchantment stemmed from Christian metaphysics blended with personal pique.
The Sponsor’s Fight for Audience: A 1930s Radio Case Study • Stephen Perry, Regent University • This study examines the practices of General Foods in areas of stunting, gimmickry, and the use of celebrities to attract, keep, and rebuild an audience for the Byrd Expedition broadcasts, aired on CBS, between 1933 and 1935. The exploration finds evidence that the sponsor was very aware of the need to attract the largest audience possible in order to maximize the positive image of the sponsor’s product through its association with a program. Understanding the purposes and manner in which a sponsor undertook promotion of its program suggests a re-consideration of where rivalry existed in the sponsorship era of broadcasting. Understanding how the mediated representation of exploration was promoted for the benefit of Byrd’s expedition and the program sponsor also sheds light on how future areas of exploration might benefit from well-planned media promotion and programming. The study finds that, when nothing exciting was happening in the process of exploration, hype was used through stunts and gimmicks to attract and maintain the audience. Celebrities were also used, but seem to have been included in the program when other events made it convenient rather than specifically during times of low levels of adventure.
Decade of Deceit: English-Language Press Coverage of the Katyn Massacre in the 1940s • Timothy Roy Gleason, University of Wisconsin Oshkosh • The Katyn Massacre of Polish officers and intelligentsia by the Soviet Union was one of the worst military atrocities of modern European warfare. Often overlooked because of the vicious Nazi genocide of Jews during World War II, Katyn deserves more attention from scholars. This paper uses original sources—English-language press reports and intelligence documents—to better understand what the public was told and what the Allied governments knew about Katyn.
‘They Couldn’t Bring Me Down’: Gender and Agency in the Careers of Midwestern Women Broadcasters • Tracy Lucht, Iowa State University; Kelsey Batschelet, Iowa State University • This study uses in-depth interviews and historical analysis to uncover common threads of experience in the careers of Midwestern women who worked in broadcasting before and after feminist activism of the 1970s. The findings illustrate how gender influenced women’s careers at a regional level and show how these women exercised agency to make their way in an industry that did not always welcome their full participation.
Who Has Authority? The Construction of Collective Memory in Hong Kong Protest • Yin Wu, University of Wisconsin-Madison • Over 1,000 people gathered recently in memory of Occupy Central movement in Hong Kong a year ago. The one-year anniversary of Occupy Central movement is of particular interest for this study.Using theoretical framework of collective memory, this study compared three types of local press in Hong Kong: the pro-government press, the pro-democracy press, and the local-based press. The results reflect a competing sets of cultural values on pro-government and pro-democracy press, and a local-interest-focused coverage on the local newspapers in the construction of collective memory.
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