Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2006, Film (Fine Arts)

Mainstream news media organizations have adopted classical Hollywood narrative storytelling conventions in order to convey vital news information. In doing so, these organizations tell news stories in a way that paints political realities as causal agents, delicate international crises as sensational conflicts, and factual profiles of public figures as colorful characterizations. By establishing artificial narrative lines and unnecessarily antagonistic conflict, the press has at times become an unwitting agent of government policy and, in part, altered the course of international events. The classical Hollywood narrative is the storytelling model on which the American media based its coverage of United States foreign policy after September 11, 2001. The sensationalized coverage culminated in a cinematic presentation of events that led to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. Since September 11, a narrative plot unfolded, the characters were defined, and the tension rose. The news media primed the audience as if the American people were watching a well-executed and often predictable Hollywood narrative. And though there was no evidence that proved Iraq had played a role in the September 11 attacks, by March of 2003 the war seemed inevitable and possessing of seemingly perfect narrative logic.

Committee: Adam Knee (Advisor) Subjects:

Master of Science (MS), Ohio University, 2017, Journalism (Communication)

This thesis pertains to media coverage of Israel/Palestine, with emphasis on The New York Times, Israeli publication Haaretz, and BBC Online's coverage of the conflict in Gaza during the Summer of 2014. The thesis quantitatively delves into the material being studied, utilizing measures of bias, as well as indicators of peace journalism to accomplish the objective of thoroughly analyzing the 351 news stories sampled from the three publications at hand. The study employs eleven variables, six pertaining to news bias and five operationalized indicators of peace journalism. The thesis will argue that peace journalism is a partial yet powerful remedy for biased coverage. Although it is considered to be a form of advocacy journalism, it can, when translated onto the pages of conventional news outlets, shed objective light on even the direst and most intractable shades of conflict. The study found that The New York Times and BBC Online favored Palestinians in headlines and photographs, likely due to the dramatic devastation wrought upon Gaza. Haaretz was found to be more evenhanded, likely due to its market of Israelis and Jews throughout the world. BBC Online and Haaretz both relied heavily on official (military and government) sources, while The New York Times relied on experts. Measures of peace journalism were varied among the variables being analyzed.

Committee: Michael Sweeney Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Bernhard Debatin Ph.D. (Committee Member); Jatin Srivastava Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Journalism

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2012, Media and Communication

This dissertation carries out a multi-level analysis of how media reports establish durable narratives of war in both journalism and scholarship, illustrating a multi-dimensional process of the weaponization of media. It draws on a case study of NATO's attack on Yugoslavia in 1999, examining both news coverage and scholarly accounts, and with reference to relevant historical, institutional, economic and political contexts. The author conducts a grounded theory analysis of 1058 news articles appearing in the Associated Press, New York Times, and The Times (of London) surrounding the pivotal events of NATO's military intervention in Kosovo. The ways in which these selected media represent the events and the relationship between their dominant narrative themes and the contexts in which the events occurred, is further examined, comparatively, by means of grounded theory analysis of how 4 major scholarly treatises craft an understanding of NATO intervention in Kosovo. Based on these analyses, this research argues that (a) media content foregrounds (and in various ways privileges) the frames, sources and narratives that correspond with the interests of NATO that drive military intervention and (b) these media narratives exercise a lingering influence on long-term conceptualizations of conflict and have the capacity to shape the contours of cultural memory for years to come. Emerging from this inquiry – which situates the interrelationships between media, power and military conflict within the context of political and economic environment – is the theory of a weaponization of media that moves beyond the scope of existing propaganda theories (and, in the context of propaganda, agenda-setting and framing theories) that explains to what end propaganda works and the ways in which the media system capacitates and enhances processes of propaganda.

Committee: Oliver Boyd-Barrett (Committee Chair); Lynda Dixon (Committee Member); Lara Lengel (Committee Member); Scott Magelssen (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Journalism; Mass Communications; Mass Media

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2019, American Culture Studies

The question of how the Vietnam War has is remembered in American public memory is a difficult one. While a tremendous body of work exists that explains the nuances of and tribulations of American memory of the conflict through examinations of film, memorial sites, and museums, very little work exists that addresses how comic book-based television shows and films or video games access or even influence memory. As more recent American conflicts begin to occupy spaces previously reserved for memory of older conflicts, synergies of disparate memories and memory structures may occur, especially in the realm of entertainment that commodifies memory for mass consumption. This study explores intersections of popular media and the Vietnam War by: 1) consulting and synthesizing memory theory relevant to this area of memory, including work by John Bodnar, Carol Gluck, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Allison Landsberg; 2) contributing new models to theorize memory structures, including intersections of market forces and official memory in the way media is organized for consumers and how anxieties related to older events manifest themselves in media set in later times; 3) how comic-based media are rich texts for memory analysis, particularly as they are adapted for wider consumption; and 4) how modern military shooter video games access and reinforce potentially damaging patterns of American memory.

Committee: Andrew Schocket PhD (Advisor); Jeffrey Brown PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: American Studies

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2014, Comparative Studies

"The Future of American Memory" focuses on media preservation in the United States since the 1930s. It works at the intersection of American studies, critical race studies, visual culture, and media archaeology to trace the historical emergence of the desire to preserve media permanently across three key moments in American history. Part I addresses the 1930s, when scientists carried out the first systematic studies on the causes of deterioration in paper and microfilm records. By the end of the decade, American corporations used knowledge from these studies to build the first two time capsules that aimed to preserve a permanent record of civilization's achievements. Part II addresses the 1950s, when Cold War paranoia about nuclear attacks led government agencies, banks, insurance companies, and other corporations to invest in secure, bombproof, underground storage for their records. Part III addresses the contemporary moment, from the mid-1990s to the present. My case study is the Bettmann Archive of historical photographs, preserved at the Corbis Film Preservation Facility in a securitized, refrigerated vault located 220 feet underground. Corbis, an image licensing company owned solely by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, refrigerates and digitizes the photographs in the Bettmann Archive in order to preserve them for 10,000 to 15,000 years. In my Epilogue, I discuss geographer/artist Trevor Paglen's project, The Last Pictures. Paglen micro-etched 100 images onto a silicon disc, then launched it into outer space on the communications satellite Echostar XVI, where it will orbit the earth, he claims, for several billion years. I conclude that a "preservation complex" has emerged in American culture since the 1930s. This complex is both institutional--a proliferating network of securitized, temperature-controlled spaces for preserving media--and psychic--the anxieties of corporate and state scientists, librarians, and archivists have to some degree become the anxieties of (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Barry Shank Ph.D. (Advisor); Ruby Tapia Ph.D. (Advisor); Kris Paulsen Ph.D. (Committee Member); Hugh Urban Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: African American Studies; American Studies; Ethnic Studies; Film Studies; History; Science History; Technology

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2011, Mass Communication (Communication)

Relying on political economy of media theory and the feminist concept of intersectionality, this dissertation explores the framing of poverty by politicians and news media in the United States during the critical discourse moment of the early 1960s. This dissertation is comprised of three levels of analysis of news articles submitted to the Congressional Record by politicians. First, how was poverty defined? What causes and solutions were offered? Who was the authority on poverty? Second, what was the race, gender, and place of people framed as living in poverty? Third, what were the intersectional identities of people framed as living in poverty? News articles submitted by Congressional representative to the Congressional Record between 1960 and 1964, the War on Poverty, were examined for the way poverty was framed. The questions addressed were how poverty was defined, the causes and solutions offered, who was framed as living in poverty (gender, race, place), and the intersectional identities of individuals in poverty who were quoted in the articles. Findings included a focus on structural causes of poverty paired with governmental solutions to poverty, and a relatively equal number of men and women affected by poverty in the articles. An intersectional analysis was difficult to conduct due to a lack of explicit detail regarding race, gender, and place of people in poverty in the articles analyzed. There were instances of negative frames of African American women living in cities in particular along with negative frames of White men living in Appalachia. White women in poverty in rural America were not quoted in any instances. While the study was exploratory and not intended to provide any basis for generalization, we can conclude that discussions of poverty most often framed people in poverty in a deserving, sympathetic manner. However, the negative frames surrounding African American women in cities predated the common vilification of African American women (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Norma Pecora PhD (Committee Chair); Duncan Brown PhD (Committee Member); Lawrence Wood PhD (Committee Member); Julie White PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: Mass Communications; Mass Media

Master of Science (MS), Ohio University, 2024, Journalism (Communication)

This study explores the portrayal of the Spanish Civil War in the U.S. through innova-tive media. In this conflict, new styles of interpretative reporting were for the first time on a large scale paired with innovative technological mediums such as photography, newsreels, and radio. A qualitative content analysis of news outlets of Time Inc. reveals that reporting often focused on the common people's experiences, especially aerial bombardments. While some reports tried to evoke compassion, others emphasized geopolitical implica-tions, sometimes dehumanizing victims and justifying violence. The coverage used new media to create immediacy, drama, and emotional engagement. This constructed the war as a consumable spectacle. The study provides insights into the foreign perception of the Spanish Civil War and the impact of new media on war reporting.

Committee: Niklas Venema (Committee Chair); Olaf Stieglitz (Committee Member); Bill Reader (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; History; Journalism

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.), Bowling Green State University, 2024, American Culture Studies

This dissertation explores the role of democracy promotion in US foreign intervention with a particular focus on the weaponization of media and civil society by two important US democracy promotion institutions, the National Endowment for Democracy (NED) and US Agency for International Development (USAID). Focusing on these two institutions and building on scholarship that takes a critical Gramscian Marxist perspective on US democracy promotion, this study brings media imperialism and deep political scholarship into the conversation. Delimiting the study to focus on US activities, I trace historical patterns of intellectual warfare and exceptional states of violence and lawlessness pursued by the US government in case studies of foreign intervention in which democracy promotion has played an important part since 1983. I survey the evolution of elite US Cold War conceptions of managed democracy as well as transformations of covert Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) media and civil society operations into institutionalized, pseudo-overt US democracy promotion that became a foundational pretext and method for US interventionism post-Cold War. Case studies include the Contra War in 1980s Nicaragua, Operation Cyclone in 1980s Afghanistan, the 2000 overthrow of Yugoslavian president Slobodan Milosevic, the 2002 military coup against Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, the 2004 coup against Haitian president Bertrand Aristide, and the 2014 Euromaidan Coup against Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovych. I dedicate the penultimate chapter to US-led intervention in the Syrian Civil War that began in 2011, demonstrating how USAID provided instrumental monetary, media, and civil society support to primarily sectarian, theocratic, Salafi rebels against the Ba'athist government. Throughout the dissertation, I argue that the NED and USAID represent important engines of intellectual warfare in US foreign intervention, mobilizing communications and organizational resources to reinf (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Cynthia Baron Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Oliver Boyd-Barrett Ph.D. (Committee Member); Radhika Gajjala Ph.D. (Committee Member); Alexis Ostrowski Ph.D. (Other) Subjects: American History; American Studies; East European Studies; History; International Relations; Journalism; Latin American History; Mass Communications; Mass Media; Middle Eastern History; Military History; Military Studies; Modern History; Peace Studies; Political Science; Public Policy; Regional Studies; World History

Undergraduate Honors Program, Malone University, 2023, Honors Thesis

High school football rivalries are a quintessential part of adolescence and community life, although they are not often the focus of academic scholarship. This paper seeks to fill that void. Rivalries exist throughout the United States, but of focus is one of the most storied rivalries in Ohio between two perennial football state champions: Saint Ignatius High School and St. Edward High School. Saint Ignatius High School, an all-boy Catholic high school founded in 1886, is located in Cleveland's Ohio City neighborhood. St. Edward High School, situated in the nearby suburb of Lakewood and founded in 1949, is the second all-boys Catholic school in this classic rivalry. In 1952, the young football program for the St. Edward Eagles faced off against the much more experienced Saint Ignatius Wildcats on the gridiron for the first time. It was the first game in the rivalry – a rivalry that would bring together what could feel like the entire West Side of Cleveland for the yearly match-up. The annual game, played at least once a year every year since 1971, creates an atmosphere of high school football that few other high school football rivalries match. Details and outcomes of the games remain vivid in the memories of players and fans alike for generations, as fathers, sons, nephews, and friends replenish collective memory banks when they take their places on the field or in the bleachers. Alumni from both schools carry their reminiscences everywhere – from local boardrooms to conversations with passers-by in a grocery store. There is a sense of pride and purpose that continues from generation to generation, and the game, the rivalry, and the storied history spills over into every area of life. The players, the fans, and alumni celebrate each year's victory and vow to avenge any loss when the next match-up is scheduled. Such is the intensity of the competitiveness that exists between the St. Edward Eagles and the Saint Ignatius Wildcats. And this rivalry is rath (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Jacalynn Stuckey (Advisor); Mark Bankert (Committee Member); Scott Waalkes (Committee Member) Subjects: History; Recreation; Sports Management

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2023, Mass Communication (Communication)

Studies of media coverage and framing of armed conflict in Africa routinely focus on the roles of Western media. In the post-independent periods, foreign media provided in-depth news as some African countries degenerated into armed conflicts. As Africa's newest country became dangerous for journalists, South Sudan's post-independence government imposed restrictions on local journalists' coverage of the third civil war (2013-2020). In neighboring Kenya, the East African (TEA) became a de facto regional African media covering the conflict during this period. This dissertation focused its qualitative examinations of TEA archives to explore the newspaper's coverage and framing of the conflict as an African newspaper. This research further examined TEAs' role in agenda-setting and framing theoretical frameworks. Among other conclusions, the dissertation found that TEA shaped the news agenda by using officials' news sources' narratives and framings. The study also concluded that as an African newspaper, TEA did not offer unique coverage or news framing; instead, it followed the traditional journalist practice of using and relying on officials as news sources. This dissertation is limited to the East African newspaper as a case study.

Committee: Steve Howard (Advisor) Subjects: Mass Communications; Mass Media

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 2023, Media and Communication

Media affect audience cognition and impact public and foreign policy decisions. People are influenced by the news narratives, and the sources from which the media obtain their information to report on political, economic, social, and security events influence what audiences internalize from the news. This study examines news narratives surrounding the Russia-Ukraine war from four media outlets within the two political camps: NATO allies (US and UK) and non-NATO allies (China and India). Through a document analysis of official government announcements for government positions and content analysis of news articles (n =230) examined for their news framing and source attribution strategies within the New York Times (US), Guardian (UK), China Daily (China), and The Times of India (India), the study finds that media objectivity remains a myth to news reporting and the unavailability of competing frames in the news report on the war across the media is an evidence of news reporting bias. The higher use of pro-Ukrainian sources within NATO ally media and pro-Russian sources within non-NATO ally media showed that political alliances influence media portrayal. Attribution of the cause of the war differed significantly across media with NATO ally media attributing the cause of the war to Russia/Putin whereas Chinese media made attributions to NATO and its allies (especially the U.S.). The research finds that the New York Times, the Guardian, and The Times of India used more provocative narratives against Putin/Russia in their news report, whereas China Daily's use of provocative narratives targeted only NATO. This research confirms the indexing and media propaganda hypothesis in reporting political and security events. The research also finds that news framing of the Russia-Ukraine war across both the NATO ally and non-NATO ally news outlets corresponded with the news media's home government's position of the conflict with US and UK media being pro-Ukrainian and China and Indi (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Louisa Ha Ph.D. (Committee Chair); Lara Martin Lengel Ph.D. (Committee Member); Yanqin Lu Ph.D. (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; International Relations; Journalism; Mass Communications; Mass Media

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2023, Mass Communication (Communication)

Although peace journalism is growing as a field of study, there is only a limited number of empirical studies that have systematically tested its effects. This study attempts to fill this lack by testing the effects of peace journalism interventions. The context for this study comes from Sri Lanka, where the ethnic cleavage between the Sinhala and Tamil people are sustained even after the end of the almost 30-year-long civil war. Media, a political propaganda machine during conflicts continue to hold influence in post-conflict societies with its power to disseminate and sustain narratives. Therefore, this study set out to find whether peace journalism values can help reduce the identity gap, which is operationalized as the distance between in-group and out-group attitudes. This research approaches the question innovatively through a role-playing experiment design. This 2 x 3 (Sinhala and Tamil primes x War, Peace, and Control Treatments) completely between-subjects study primed U.S. participants to take on the role of Sri Lankan ethnic identities. The results show that peace interventions are effective in reducing the identity gap among Tamil-primed participants. Findings suggest that the effectiveness of peace journalism interventions rely on minority-majority relations in ethnic asymmetries with power imbalances. This experiment also advances role-playing experiments as a methodology that opens avenues to explore questions among inaccessible populations and/or volatile environments.

Committee: Jatin Srivastava (Committee Chair); Hans Meyer (Committee Member); Myra Waterbury (Committee Member); Steve Howard (Committee Member) Subjects: Behavioral Sciences; Ethnic Studies; Journalism; Mass Communications; Mass Media; Peace Studies; South Asian Studies

Master of Arts (MA), Bowling Green State University, 1941, English

Committee: Gay W. Allen (Advisor) Subjects: American Literature

Doctor of Philosophy, University of Akron, 2021, History

World War I saw the deployment of visual media propaganda on an unprecedented scale. British propaganda was far more nuanced and voluminous than the other belligerents during the conflict. Government agencies in Britain utilized the mechanism of visual presentation to bombard the civilian population in cities across the Isles, preying on themes of masculine military duty and feminine national sacrifice to compel the population to enlistment and rationing. The development of various propaganda narratives found life in a torrent of propaganda posters that demanded a masculine national response to both the German enemy and civilian malaise. Propaganda enticed service to the nation through gendered imagery in posters, unflinching painted canvases of shell pitted hellscapes, and staged action in the newly minted technology of film. Through an examination of the psychological language of propaganda, and a thick analysis of government agencies involved in the development of visual media propaganda, the rhetoric of the image will foster examination, analysis, and deconstruction. By blending both art history with historiographical research, psychological analysis and semiotics, a more thorough accounting of the creation, messaging, and audience for visual media propaganda is possible. The tools of artistic deconstruction and examination work in conjunction with notions of visual representation, class dynamics, gendered language, and national identity to provide a multi-disciplinary approach to propaganda studies in the 21st century.

Committee: Martin Wainwright (Committee Chair); Gedimas Gasparavicius (Committee Member); Timothy Scarnecchia (Committee Member); Michael Graham (Committee Member); Stephen Harp (Committee Member) Subjects: Art History; European History; History; Mass Communications; Modern History

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2020, History (Arts and Sciences)

World War II was a media war. Most previous scholarship on the press focuses on censorship, propaganda, or the adventures of war correspondents. This dissertation takes a new direction and shows how the press and public opinion influenced the conflict. U.S. military leaders attempted to use the press as a weapon to improve morale, build public support for national strategies, assist Allied relations, confuse the enemy, and inspire soldiers. The media and public opinion, however, also began shaping military actions on the battlefield. Commanders in Europe and the Pacific competed with other Allied forces for prestige objectives, waged public relations campaigns to have their theaters receive priority for supplies, and vied with each other for headlines. This influence of the press on the battlefield demonstrates how the media was an essential, though previously overlooked, component of total war. Nevertheless, the media-military relationship formed during World War II did not translate well into later limited wars.

Committee: Ingo Trauschweizer (Advisor); John Brobst (Committee Member); Pach Chester (Committee Member); Sweeney Michael (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; European History; History; Journalism; Mass Communications; Mass Media; Military History; Military Studies; Modern History; Political Science; World History

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2019, Music

For members of the United States Armed Forces, communicating with one's loved ones has taken many forms, employing every available medium from the telegraph to Twitter. My project examines one particular mode of exchange—“audio letters”—during one of the US military's most trying and traumatic periods, the Vietnam War. By making possible the transmission of the embodied voice, experiential soundscapes, and personalized popular culture to zones generally restricted to purely written or typed correspondence, these recordings enabled forms of romantic, platonic, and familial intimacy beyond that of the written word. More specifically, I will examine the impact of war and its sustained separations on the creative and improvisational use of prosthetic culture, technologies that allow human beings to extend and manipulate aspects of their person beyond their own bodies. Reel-to-reel was part of a constellation of amateur recording technologies, including Super 8mm film, Polaroid photography, and the Kodak slide carousel, which, for the first time, allowed average Americans the ability to capture, reify, and share their life experiences in multiple modalities, resulting in the construction of a set of media-inflected subjectivities (at home) and intimate intersubjectivities developed across spatiotemporal divides.

Committee: Ryan Skinner (Advisor); Danielle Fosler-Lussier (Committee Member); Barry Shank (Committee Member) Subjects: American Studies; Cultural Anthropology; Music

PHD, Kent State University, 2018, College of Arts and Sciences / Department of Political Science

Since the Abu Ghraib scandal in 2004, the treatment of prisoners at U.S. military detention centers as part of the Global War on Terror has been a widely-covered issue, and the framing of such treatment in the media has become a focus for many scholars. However, most researchers have ignored Guantanamo Bay prison in favor of the more publicized Abu Ghraib case. This study examines how the mainstream media and government elites framed prisoner treatment at Guantanamo Bay, and it seeks to explain whether the media relied on the government's frames or acted more autonomously in reporting on the issue. With the use of QDA Miner with WordStat, this project employs a mixed-methods content analysis and process tracing of frames used in statements made by elite government actors and portrayals of prisoner treatment in mainstream news coverage during the two largest hunger strikes. The first began in August 2005 and continued until February 2006, and the second lasted from February to August of 2013. The findings show that the media used primarily critical frames of prisoner treatment, the two most common being indefinite detention and torture across the two hunger strikes, and that the news media were not always dependent on frames from government sources to describe prisoner treatment at the facility. The results show that in both hunger strike periods the news media chose to reflect the views of government elites at times and to challenge them at others. This suggests that a new model of press-government relations is needed, and this research proposes a model that accounts for press calculations in deciding when to reflect government frames and when to challenge that portrayal by employing counterframes and including sources outside of the government.

Committee: Julie Mazzei (Committee Chair); Michael Ensley (Committee Member); Steven Hook (Committee Member); Paul Haridakis (Committee Member) Subjects: Communication; Political Science

Master of Arts (MA), Ohio University, 2015, Political Science (Arts and Sciences)

This thesis examines the process of sectarinization that challenged the perception of the Syrian national identity within the context of the Syrian-Uprising-Cum-Civil-War. I provide necessary background for understanding the importance of the political and economic dynamics rather than the dominant ethnic/sectarian narrative in instigating the massive protests in Syria. The purpose of this review is to contextualize the Syrian conflict within its socio-political and socio-economic conditions that gave momentum for the emergence of collective identities and the reconfiguration of cultural and religious identities in a society characterized by a weak national identity. I review major theories about causes of war in the Balkans to examine episodes of extreme violence between ethnic, national, or religious groups and to analyze what factors facilitated the emergence of new collective identities that challenged the weak Syrian national identity in the context of war. The visibility of sectarian identities, as a form of collective identity, and the politicization of cultural affiliations were conditioned by the transformation of political and social spheres. I review, discuss, and explain democratization theories and theories of nation and nationalism to bridge the gap between multiple interrelated factors: social movement, state's institutions, economic development, political entrepreneurs, political violence and processes of shaping collective identities. To understand what forces contributed to the transformation of power relations and the process of sectarian reconfiguration as well as the production of extreme violence in Syria following the "Arab Spring," I consider a hybrid approach. This hybrid approach combines critical constructivism, instrumentalism, and symbolic politics as a theoretical framework to analyze the role of social media and mainstream media in promoting sectarian groupness. Methodologically, this research is based on data and discourse analysis of (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Nukhet Sandal (Advisor); Judith Grant (Committee Member); Myra Waterbury (Committee Member) Subjects: Political Science

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2015, History

This dissertation examines the development of relationships between the U.S. press and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the Cold War, from shortly before the official creation of the CIA in 1947 to the major congressional investigations of the CIA in 1975-76. This dissertation seeks to answer four related questions. First, what was the nature and origin of the relationships that developed between the press and the CIA? Second, to what use did the CIA attempt to put such relationships? Third, what was the actual impact of press/CIA relationships on reporting? Finally, how did the CIA's relations with the press affect the development of the agency? The efforts to answer these questions involved two main methods. The first method was an extensive examination of the product of domestic newspapers and journals from 1945 to 1976 that examined the activities of the CIA and the development of the U.S. intelligence system. The second method was archival research in private and institutional collections. I conclude that there was no single relationship formed between the CIA and the press. The CIA did have a program of operationally using reporters, though details remain difficult to determine. More important than paid relationships, though, were personal connections that ranged from casual contact to collaboration with the CIA to achieve CIA goals. These positive relationships depended heavily upon a shared ideological worldview. The CIA sought to use these relationships both to conceal information and also, at times, to promote itself and secure a strong position within the hierarchy of the U.S. governmental bureaucracy. While early reporting on the CIA was often positive, and the CIA was successful in keeping its activities out of the press when desired, the positive press environment of the late 1940s and 1950s was more the result of the Cold War consensus environment than the result of deliberate CIA action. Even at their most positive, relationships between (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Peter Hahn PhD (Committee Chair); Robert McMahon PhD (Committee Member); Jennifer Siegel PhD (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; History

Master of Fine Arts, The Ohio State University, 2011, Art

After returning from the war in Iraq I became increasingly aware with how the printed media in America is portraying our military's actions in Iraq and Afghanistan, especially the inconsistency of what I remember and what is being depicted in the news. Untitled Media Images explores how the civilian population of the United States experience war through mediated media. The original source images are taken from major printed media outlets such as the New York Times, LA Times, USA Today, etc. Through the exploration of thousands of images from the war, I came to the understanding; the media was printing three distinct archetypical images. After two years of research I have yet to find an image that doesn't fit into these categories: The first image titled “Benign Intervention” shows U.S. and coalition forces interacting with locals or in empty spaces normally occupied by locals. The gestures of the coalition soldier are not aggressive, but instead defensive or casual. The second image “Abstracted Explosion” shows how the war is being fought by the US and coalition forces, this image creates great distances between the viewer and the death that would normally be associated with this type of arsenal use. Typically denoted are buildings already exploded, pictured from a couple hundred yards distance. The third image “The Sacrifice,” shows the tragic loss of life. Only Afghan's/Iraqi's are illustrated in these sacrifices and almost always inflicted by other local nationals. The sacrifices are presented in a sustainable and acceptable quantity. Pasted onto the walls these images will be subject to removal with the audiences assistance. Participants can use fingernails, coins, or other objects in there possession to scrape the images off of the walls. The essence of these photographs cannot be removed from the walls and our memories, although the clarity of reality is constantly being degraded and in flux. Remnants of the images will lay on the floor as they are left by th (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Robert Derr (Committee Chair); Maurice Stevens (Committee Member); Todd Slaughter (Committee Member) Subjects: Art Criticism