Communication
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Item DISINFORMATION THAT ENTERTAINS: THE ALT-RIGHT’S USE OF POPULAR AND POLITICAL CULTURE STRATEGIES(2024) Montgomery, Fielding Edmund; Parry-Giles, Shawn J.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project takes seriously the nested relationship of popular culture and political culture, highlighting how that relationship has promulgated alt-right disinformation in the long Trump era. Throughout this study, strategies of conspiracy, horror, and dog whistles are examined, as well as considering audiovisual concepts like realism and mimesis. Such alt-right disinformation establishes reactionary frames of racism, misogyny, and anti-governance. This work looks at both sides of the popular/political culture relationship, examining cinematic films, political campaign advertisements, and social media posts. I conclude by offering satire as one potential counterstrategy against alt-right disinformation that also resides in the nested relationship between popular and political culture.Item The Textualization of Pat Tillman: Understanding the Relationships Between Person, Discourse, and Ideology(2011) Herbig, Arthur William; Gaines, Robert N; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This project is a critical examination of the ways in which the life and death of Pat Tillman were shaped into a discursive Pat Tillman. This is not a project that examines the life led by the person Pat Tillman. The discursive Pat Tillman can be found in the pages of magazines, on television, invoked by politicians, and even memorialized in song. It is Pat Tillman, the discursive creation, that is my focus. In this project I take for granted that Pat Tillman only existed in places like the pages of books or on film. What is not lost on me and should not be lost on the reader of this project is my own participation in this process. With this project I have entered into the very discourses that I seek to critique. This is an analysis of the existence of a Pat Tillman that many people still know and the ideas that help shape how that existence is communicated. My critique focuses on the existence of a discursive Pat Tillman as a rhetorical phenomenon, drawing upon scholarship that can inform an understanding of how the life of Pat Tillman became the material for public discourse. My analysis interconnects Michel Foucault's (1972) work on knowledge and discourse with Michael Calvin McGee (1990) referred to as rhetorical fragments, in order to provide a foundation for understanding the discursive existence of Pat Tillman. Using how discourse producer connected various facts, stories, and images with conceptions of heroism, masculinity, and the American Dream, I reveal how the life and death of Pat Tillman was used as the material to represent political and cultural positions that exist external to that life. Through an analysis of the various news reports, books, documentaries, blogs, and other mediated texts that were produced in response to the life and death of Pat Tillman, this study presents a clearer picture of what is meant by "fragmentation" in critical analysis.Item Strategies in International Broadcasting: A Grounded Analysis of Communication Values Across Cultures(2006-06-05) Swartz, Brecken Chinn; Cai, Deborah A.; Communication; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This dissertation is a cross-cultural examination of strategic communication values that drive journalistic decision-making. Several issues are addressed: 1) developing tools to engage in systematic producer-centered qualitative media research across cultures , 2) testing a comprehensive grounded category scheme to characterize media producers' strategic presentational values, 3) broadening discussion of the influence of culture on media decision-making by moving beyond national culture and looking also at age, gender, organization, and level of training, 4) working methodologically with a three-tiered inductive approach to structure analysis of interview data, and 5) examining the utility of these qualitative tools cross-culturally by testing the framework with both Western and Chinese international broadcasters. Fifty American, British, and Chinese international feature reporters were interviewed at the Voice of America, the BBC World Service, and state-run Chinese international broadcast agencies (China Central Television, China Radio International, and the Xinhua News Agency) to identify patterns in their journalistic decision-making. Journalists completed semi-structured interviews along with a freelisting task and a selection task to further characterize their strategic presentational values within simulated free and constrained contexts. This study moves beyond classical gatekeeping research to propose a set of ten strategic communication categories (aesthetics, breadth, convenience, depth, emotionality, freshness, germaneness, helpfulness, incisiveness, and justice) that facilitate discussion of content and presentational style beyond the yes/no of story selection based on newsworthiness criteria. The gatekeeping paradigm is extended by comparing the complex decisions driving the production of mediated messages to the multi-faceted process of preparing food for the consumption of others, as both are strategic endeavors that profoundly affect the wellbeing of individuals and communities. This research provides a new direction to debates on cross-cultural differences in mass communication. Data in this study reveal a notable pattern for Chinese journalists (both in China and in the West) to emphasize the value of justice in their responses, although data suggest that Chinese journalists tend to equate this value with complete objectivity and neutrality in contrast with Western journalists' tendency to consider issues of broader social justice. Developments in modern international propaganda broadcasting are also explored.