Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2020, Journalism (Communication)

In Western world, government intervention via media policy is supposed to help correct market failures such as the existence of external cost/benefit on third parties, the lack of public goods, or the abuse of monopoly power (Rolland, 2008; Hoskins et al., 2004; Picard, 1989). In communist nations, government intervention is more often viewed as to protect political ideas (Lee et al., 2006; Silverblatt & Zlobin, 2004; Siebert et al., 1978). However, in the post-communist era, communist governments were steered towards a market economy with a socialist orientation, leading to the ambiguity of their media policies' goals and subsequently, their policy outcomes. In this study, I choose to analyze media policies in Vietnam, a still communist nation, to understand its current policy goals and to evaluate the effectiveness of the policy on news quality and financial performance of Vietnamese press organizations. The study is done based on Freedman's (2008) definition of media policy, normative analyses and the public interest theory outlined by Hoskin et al. (2004), and financial commitment model developed and tested by many media economists (Lacy, 1989; Martin, 2003; Lacy & Martin, 2004). Three research questions are asked as following: (1) What changes in press laws have occurred in Vietnamese history in terms of Freedman's identified key policy tools, such as regulations regarding ownership, subsidies, taxes, advertising and content restrictions?; (2) Can the current, state-run news media policy be justified on the grounds of market failures according to the economic theory of government intervention?; and (3) How do news organizations perform under the current news media policy, assuming the positive relationship between media competition, as a result of changes in market structure, and media performance, including financial performance and news quality? A qualitative document analysis of 270 legal documents drawn from the Ministry of Information and Communication Arc (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Hugh Martin (Committee Chair) Subjects: Journalism

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD), Ohio University, 2018, Journalism (Communication)

The Rocky Mountain News and Denver Post fought for dominance of the Denver, Colorado, newspaper market for more than a century, enduring vigorous competition in pursuit of monopoly control over a lucrative market. This frequently sensational, sometimes outlandish, and occasionally bloody battle spanned numerous eras of journalism, embodying the rise and fall of the newspaper industry during the twentieth century in the lead up to the decline of American newspapering and the death of the News, which ended the country's last great newspaper war. This historical analysis charts the course of this competition throughout the lifetime of the News, which was founded in 1859. It begins by examining the Denver market's early history, in which the News battled the city's earlier newspapers for control in the decades before the Post's founding. It then turns to document the 116 years of competition between the News and Post, drawing on manuscript collections scattered across the United States as well as oral histories with executives, managers, and journalists from the two papers. In particular, this dissertation interrogates these sources to better understand the strategies employed by the two newspapers in their competition with one another and against other challenges, such as widespread economic uncertainty and the decline of the newspaper industry. It explores the joint operating agreement entered into by the Post and News in 2001 to better understand its causes, conditions, and results in serving the goals of the two newspapers and the Newspaper Preservation Act of 1970. Additionally, the dissertation investigates the News's closure in 2009, critiquing the rationale for closing the paper offered by its parent, the E.W. Scripps Company. These questions are evaluated in light of the modern media ecosystem, one in which news organizations tangle with one another on the Internet as well as their native platforms as they compete for the strained attention of their audie (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: Michael Sweeney (Committee Chair); Aimee Edmondson (Committee Member); Katherine Jellison (Committee Member); Greg Newton (Committee Member) Subjects: American History; Communication; Economics; History; Journalism; Labor Relations; Law; Mass Communications; Mass Media; Modern History; Multimedia Communications

Bachelor of Arts, Wittenberg University, 2021, Business

This paper analyzes the role of social media in politics through the lens of emotional economic decision-making and hypothesizes that Donald Trump's short and impassioned tweets generate an instant emotional reaction from stockholders stemming from a sustained sense of uncertainty and anxiety about political and economic stability which results in immediate, but short-term, volatility within the stock market. This study categorizes Trump's tweets based on high-level content to analyze whether short-term, intraday change in the S&P 500 responds more significantly to time-lag value indicators or the category of content of Trump's tweets. A series of multiple linear regressions analyzing the relationship between minute-level intraday S&P 500 data and policy-related tweet content categorizations were run with results generally yielding little statistical significance. Despite a lack of substantiated results to support the overarching hypotheses, the prevalence of emotion in economic decision-making cannot be ignored.

Committee: Ed Hasecke (Advisor); Rachel Wilson (Advisor); James Allan (Committee Member); Di Wang (Committee Member) Subjects: Economic Theory; Economics; Finance; Political Science; Technology

Doctor of Philosophy, The Ohio State University, 2016, Economics

In the first chapter, I develop a theoretical model to investigate why and how information senders are biased. In this paper, a rational Bayesian consumer decides whether or not to purchase a new product. His utility from purchasing depends on the quality of the product and his idiosyncratic preference for the product. Before making his decision, the consumer can receive a signal of the product's quality by actively choosing an information sender. An information sender would like to attract more consumers by providing more accurate signals, but it is costly. In the paper, an information structure consists of a probability of recommending the product when the quality is high and that of not recommending it when the quality is low. An information sender's bias is defined as the difference between the accuracy of the signal in the high quality state and that in the low quality state. On the other hand, the sender's overall accuracy depends on the sum of the accuracy of the signals. A consumer does not have direct utility from biased information but it is shown that his expected utility from an information sender is increasing in the sender's bias when the consumer subscribe to a like-minded information sender holding the sender's overall accuracy constant. The indirect demand for information bias gives an incentive to the sender to be biased. As a result, no matter how many information senders are in the market, they have an incentive to be biased. Moreover, as more information senders are potentially able to enter the market, overall accuracy is weakly increasing and bias is weakly decreasing due to competition effects. In the second chapter, I explore a rational social learning model in which a consumer can observe other consumers' ratings for a product and past purchase decisions. In this paper, I demonstrate how ratings work as an additional information source in a social learning model, and investigate whether or not additional ratings information improves learn (open full item for complete abstract)

Committee: James Peck (Advisor); Paul J. Healy (Committee Member); Huanxing Yang (Committee Member) Subjects: Economics

Bachelor of Arts (BA), Ohio University, 2012, Political Science

In the aftermath of the Arab Spring revolutions in early 2011, academics and political pundits alike have attempted to discern the causes and factors that led to the success (or failures) of these movements. While each country has faced its own specific set of political, social, and economic problems, a common thread that academic observers have detected is the increasingly common use of social media for purposes of revolution. While social media outlets such as Facebook and Twitter undoubtedly played a role in the numerous revolts in the Middle East, there are widely varying opinions on the importance of that role to the success of the revolutions. Many Middle Eastern experts protested that, while social media had facilitated the uprisings, the impetus for these events were varied and complicated. In their eyes, the underlying factors unique to each nation were the true causes of successful revolution, even if Facebook and Twitter assisted the social movements. To others, however, the novelty of social media was an alluring news story and a potential cause of the MidEast revolutions. Pundits and news anchors drew on Facebook and Twitter accounts of citizens on the ground to illustrate the dire situation of the protestors. Even politicians and other decision makers relied heavily on social media, as state controlled conventional media ignored the actual conditions on the ground.

Committee: Maria Fanis (Advisor); James Moshter (Other) Subjects: Political Science