Theses and Dissertations from UMD
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New submissions to the thesis/dissertation collections are added automatically as they are received from the Graduate School. Currently, the Graduate School deposits all theses and dissertations from a given semester after the official graduation date. This means that there may be up to a 4 month delay in the appearance of a give thesis/dissertation in DRUM
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Item THE CHANGING LANDSCAPE OF TELEVISION NEWS AT A TIME OF DEREGULATION: A CASE STUDY OF PRACTITIONERS IN THREE MAJOR MARKETS.(2013) Swift, Kevin Patrick; Beasley, Maurine H.; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Broadcast news has undergone monumental changes since 1980. Longstanding rules regarding ownership and practices began to be loosened at this time, forever changing the practice of local broadcast television news. The Telecommunications Act of 1996 stimulated groundbreaking changes as rules of ownership were significantly relaxed. The result was a buying frenzy of television stations by major corporations in some places where small group and local ownership once dominated. The way broadcast news operated was changed dramatically in the years following these changes in policy. The purpose of this research was to gain qualitative knowledge regarding the effects of changes in FCC deregulation policy on practitioners of local broadcast television news during a time of great technological change and audience fragmentation. I examined what effects took place as a result of expanded corporate ownership and policies during this time of an already shifting landscape. To complete this research, which was conducted from 2007 to 2009, broadcast news professionals who had been in the business a minimum of fifteen years were interviewed. I interviewed a total of ten news professionals in three separate large broadcast markets, Washington, D.C., Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Baltimore, Maryland. What I found was that broadcasters felt they had been affected negatively by the changes and were unhappy about the state of the broadcast news business. Practitioners said they were doing more with less, supervising inexperienced help, struggling with unstable work routines and working in newsrooms where morale was at an all-time low. Many experienced reporters were being told to learn how to shoot and edit their own video or quit. The practitioners also described a split in philosophy with ownership. Negative changes, said many of the practitioners, were partially the result of expanded corporate ownership, which was allowed by deregulation. While deregulation did not dictate how news should be produced it was mentioned repeatedly as one of the factors that paved the way for a period of major change in the broadcast news landscape. Other factors, such as rapidly changing technology, internet expansion and an economic downturn were also mentioned among the many changes that practitioners said they had experienced. During the time of a shifting media landscape broadcast deregulation allowed expansion of media ownership which resulted in further changes that affected practitioners. This case study gave a voice to a sample of those practitioners and allowed them to explain the challenges it meant for them as professionals.Item Constructing Private Social Responsibility Standards: A Social Movement's Struggle to Regulate Global Capitalism(2012) Dean, Paul; Collins, Patricia H; Sociology; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In the last several decades, increasing corporate abuses against labor, human rights, and the environment have sparked an explosion in the discourse around what corporations' responsibilities are to society. One form of this discourse has been the production of specific sets of standards by the social responsibility movement to hold businesses accountable to society. While many in the movement continue to target the state to advocate for laws and regulations, the movement has also increasingly targeted corporations directly in an effort to create private standards to which they expect businesses to adhere. Relying on contentious outsider pressure against corporations, advocates work through institutional channels and with corporations to promote social change in a way that traditional social movement theories have largely ignored. This study examines socially responsible investing and social certifications as two particularly important sites for the development of private standards that function outside of the state. Each of these sites are conceptualized as social movement fields in which actors compete to define standards, and which have their own unique rules, opportunities, and constraints. Specifically, I ask: how are private social responsibility standards constructed? Within each field, I draw upon qualitative, in-depth interviews to examine multiple cases, or sets of standards, to understand how advocates translate their expectations into specific standards and what field-level mechanisms shape the standard-setting process. I compare standards across time, and within and across fields to identify causal mechanisms that shape standards in similarly patterned ways. My findings show how power, culture, and institutions shape standards by including or excluding certain criteria and raising or lowering thresholds of socially responsible practices. By examining standard-setting within these fields, we can better understand how meanings are assigned to the different claims of social responsibility, the opportunities and constraints of these fields for the global governance of capitalism, and the relationship between outsider and insider strategies within social movement theory.Item History Limited: The HiddenPolitics of Postwar Popular Histories(2009) Christiansen, Erik; Gilbert, James B; History; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation examines popular history and collective memory in the mid-20th century. Each chapter studies a different source of politicized history, exploring who created the history to be disseminated, what their goals and motivations were, why the historical trope particularly suited their needs and objectives, how they managed to convey ideologies through representations of the past, and how this popular history related to contemporary social and political issues. All of these "historians" - DuPont's radio and television show, Cavalcade of America; the History Book Club; CBS's historical news program, You Are There; the American Heritage Foundation's "Freedom Train"; and the Smithsonian Institution - attempted to mold collective memory into an ideological foundation for their agendas. During a tumultuous period, at home and abroad, the past became a safer forum for political discourse, and reexamining these sources of historical information and interpretation sheds new light on postwar politics. Surprisingly, deep ideological divisions persisted well into the age of apparent consensus. However, despite significant differences, the key people in all of these cases shared the same basic assumption about the relevance of history to contemporary society. The widespread acceptance of a strong relationship between past and present in postwar American society contrasts with later attitudes toward the past. The new technologies that enabled the communication of particular historical representations and interpretations changed too, and rapidly matured into forms less suited to the dissemination of historical lessons. As these attempts to control the public's views of the past began to fail, popular history was increasingly driven by marketplace considerations and was less confined to perspectives carefully chosen by a particular group of elites.