Philip Merrill College of Journalism

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The collections in this community comprise faculty research works, as well as graduate theses and dissertations.

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    The Ethyl Controversy: How the news media set the agenda for a public health controversy over leaded gasoline, 1924-1926
    (1993) Kovarik, Wiliam J.; Journalism
    This dissertation is a history of the public health controversy surrounding the introduction of Ethyl leaded gasoline between 1924 and 1926. It is the first historical study of the newspaper coverage of the Ethyl controversy and the first time that the news media have been used to establish a more comprehensive history of this controversy. The dissertation includes a content analysis of articles about the controversy printed by New York City daily newspapers between 1924 and 1926. The analysis concludes that the news media invested far more credibility in industry sources than in any other category of source, although Walter Lippmann's World newspaper gave significantly more space to university scientists critical of Ethyl leaded gasoline. The news media did not understand the scientific issues, however, and fell back on seemingly familiar political alignments when forced to decide between conflicting scientific experts of equal stature. Also, the news media failed to evaluate industry scientists' claim that no alternatives to Ethyl leaded gasoline were known to science. Actually, General Motors and Standard Oil Co. (N.J.) had patented and researched dozens of alternatives, and information about this work was available had the news media searched for it. The dissertation also analyzes primary industry documents made public in 1992 concerning the development of leaded gasoline. It concludes that G.M.'s original special motive for developing leaded gasoline was to gradually adapt automotive engines for higher quality alternative fuels of the future (especially ethyl alcohol from cellulose) in anticipation of the depletion of U.S. petroleum supplies. G.M.'s Charles Kettering and others saw leaded gasoline as temporary bridge to non-petroleum fuels, not a permanent part of the fuel supply. Standard Oil, on the other hand, resisted alternative fuels. These private corporate ideas and strategies were not reflected in the public controversy in part because the news media had difficulty understanding scientific and technological issues.
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    Computational methods applied to mass communication research: the case of press release content in news media
    (2013) Golitsynskiy, Sergey; Hanson, Christopher; Journalism; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
    In this dissertation, I apply a variety of computational methods to explore new approaches to investigate the problem of news media's use of press release content. Being used by the public relations industry in an effort to influence the media agenda, press releases often promote the organization's viewpoint on issues. Journalism scholars have expressed numerous concerns over news media using such content as a source, often without attribution. A review of previous research has revealed a number of shortcomings, with the main problem being the lack of a reliable methodology to establish a connection between a press release and an article, which is essential for such research. This deficiency is explained by the need for in-depth textual analysis on the one hand, and the requirement of large representative samples on the other - which is near impossible to achieve using traditional methodological approaches used in journalism research. I propose using computational methods to address this problem. I use computation to extract large amounts of text from web sites, transform loosely structured text into well-formatted data, and reduce a data set consisting of 6,171 press releases and 48,664 related news articles to a sample of 1,643 press release/news article pairs, showing reasonable evidence that each of the press releases has been used as a source by a corresponding news article. Such evidence is established through verbatim text matches of sufficient length. I use the constructed data sample to investigate the extent to which press release content is used by news media verbatim, how such content is used and whether proper attribution is made identifying the true source of the news. Although my findings suggest that the problem of press release content might be not as severe as presented in previous research, due to the limitations of verbatim text matching, it might be also possible that such practice remains undetected, with all content borrowed from press releases appearing in news media in paraphrased form. Finally, my investigation leads to a discovery of a "smoking gun" - a striking example of PR influence in the form of a corporation "manufacturing" statements, getting elected officials to repeat them, and the media reporting them as a regular news story.