The Colonial rebellions in Kenya (1952-60) and Cyprus (1955-60) provide the focus for this study of the ideological and institutional history of the British mass media in the 1950s. Mass media developments in the colonies are not a major theme in this work. The themes of British power and decline, and of national mythology, precede an examination of newspaper and broadcast coverage of the aforementioned colonial rebellions. A radical deconstruction of a broad range of newspaper comment describes the limits of the imperial debate in the liberal press. A similar process is undertaken for the record of BBC coverage of these colonial issues found in the 'Listener' magazine. The Colonial Office Information Services Department's attitude to influence and control of the press are examined; a counterpoint to the trenchant imperialism of colonial officials and imperialist idealogues worried about popular imperial "education". It is argued that the cautious facilitating role of the Colonial Office information officials actually reflected the stable and anodyne nature of the media colonial "debate". A debate too flexible for the most imperialist sections of the British elite nevertheless strengthened the over-arching assumptions of the broad hierarchical orthodoxy. It is further argued that the mainstream consensus emerged without self-conscious engineering on the part of the elites. An ingenuous attachment to the limits of the orthodox debate suggests the systemic internalisation of ideology not the conspiratorial promulgation of propaganda. The development of self-referential, self-reinforcing mind sets justifying material exploitation and oppression results from an evolutionary process with no necessity for central direction. This provides the theme of the concluding chapter: the threat of hegmonic consensus narrows the future.

This thesis examines the development of campaigning writing in newspapers and periodicals between 1840 and 1875 and its relationship to concepts of Old and New Journalism. Campaigning is often regarded as characteristic of the New Journalism of the fin de siècle, particularly in the form associated with W. T. Stead at the Pall Mall Gazette in the 1880s. New Journalism was persuasive, opinionated, and sensational. It displayed characteristics of the American mass-circulation press, including eye-catching headlines on newspaper front pages. The period covered by this thesis begins in 1840, with the Chartist Northern Star as the hub of a campaign on behalf of the leaders of the Newport rising of November 1839. It ends in 1875, on the cusp of the New Journalism, a year before Stead published his reports condemning Turkish atrocities in Bulgaria in the regional daily, the Northern Echo. I argue that characteristics of New Journalism, such as persuasive writing and sensational revelations, were evident before 1875, particularly in the development of campaigning journalism in this period. Chapter 1 examines the context and definitions of campaigning journalism in relation to Old and New Journalism. Chapter 2 focuses on the genre of investigative writing, examining techniques such as interviewing and undercover reporting and their impact on New Journalism. Chapter 3 considers ways in which campaigning ideas were communicated through networks. Chapter 4 interrogates concepts of ‘popular’, ‘radical’, and ‘commercial’ by analysing three popular Sunday newspapers — the News of the World, Lloyd’s Weekly News, and Reynolds’s Newspaper — and their selection of campaigns. Chapter 5 examines how the press presented the second phase of the movement to repeal the ‘Taxes on Knowledge’, between 1849 and 1869, a campaign that was directly relevant to the economic and regulatory framework in which books, newspapers, and periodicals were produced.

This thesis examines 4070 articles in the British press written between 1985 and 2015. This longitudinal approach captures a timeframe which has been described by scholars as the ‘age of neoliberalism’. In order to understand how the neoliberal paradigm emerged, the thesis outlines a history of ideas about poverty in the UK national press which have developed across key periods characterised by individualism, collectivism, and a return to individualism. Individualism has been linked to neoliberal ideology, placing the individual consumer in the free market at the centre of political, social and economic decision making. This free market ideology undermines the case for the welfare state and is often used to criticise individuals experiencing poverty as failed capitalists or consumers rather than as victims of an unjust system. This thesis examines the extent to which this neoliberal ideology has been reflected in news coverage of poverty and welfare by examining news, politics and ideology. It finds that the press have engaged in a process of institutionalised social exclusion of welfare recipients who they construct as an ‘undeserving other’ who threatens ‘mainstream’ values. In doing so, the press have largely ignored inequality and the risk that poverty presents to many people by constructing it as an issue which only affects ‘others’ with behavioural problems. This behavioural diagnosis of poverty was consolidated in the early days of the commercial press and was used to blame impoverished people for their own poverty. This thesis analyses how the British press have reinforced neoliberal ideology by repackaging a set of claims about poverty and welfare which are rooted in the historical concepts of the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor.

Many authors have pointed to the ways in which newspapers negatively stereotype young people. This thesis aims to engage with and contribute to this debate through a contemporary discursive analysis of newspaper representations of youth, in The Guardian, The Daily Mail and The Daily Mirror during the period 1(^st) January to 30(^th) June 2005. My aim is to make explicit the discourses, both contemporary and historical, that circulated in the press during this period. It is through such discourses that young people were identified, explained and represented at this juncture. It will be argued that those young people deemed problematic by the press are represented in particular classed ways and understood through a discourse of 'underclass'; by which young people are constructed as victims of their families. Further, in 2005, as in the nineteenth- century, the poor working-class (understood as uncultured/uncivilized) are blamed for societies ills and such a discursive configuration has inevitable consequences and effects for both young people and their families.

This research examines media integration in China, choosing two Chinese newspaper groups as cases for comparative study. The study analyses the convergence strategies of these Chinese groups by reference to an Role Model of convergence developed from a literature review of studies of cases of media convergence in the UK – in particular the Guardian (GNM), Telegraph Media Group (TMG), the Daily Mail and the Times. UK cases serve to establish the characteristics, causes and consequences of different forms of convergence and formulate a model of convergence. The model will specify the levels of newsroom convergence and the sub-units of analysis which will be used to collect empirical data from Chinese News Organisations and compare their strategies, practices and results with the UK experience. The literature review shows that there is a need for more comparative studies of media convergence strategy in general, and particularly in relation to Chinese media. Therefore, the study will address a gap in the understanding of media convergence in China. For this reason, my innovations have three folds: Firstly, to develop a new and comprehensive model of media convergence and a detailed understanding of the reasons why media companies pursue differing strategies in managing convergence across a wide range of units of analysis. Secondly, this study tries to compare the multimedia strategies of media groups under radically different political systems. Since, there is no standard research method or systematic theoretical framework for the study of Newsroom Convergence, this study develops an integrated perspective. The research will use the triangulation analysis of textual, field observation and interviews to explain systematically what was the newsroom structure like in the past and how did the copy flow change and why. Finally, this case study of media groups can provide an industrial model or framework for the other media groups.

This study investigates whether Internet technology and New Media innovations have been homogenizing British and Chinese press journalism, and, if not, in which ways and why they have responded differently. The basic assumption of the thesis has been raised from Fidler's mediamorphosis theory and it argues that the transformation of mass media is normally brought about by a complex interplay between many variables (1996). To do this, the study examines the complex processes through which news organizations have been repositioning their brand identity and value, and through which journalistic professionals have been redefining the notion of their craft and their work practices in the UK and China. It first takes a historical perspective identifying the commonalities and differences between press journalism of the two countries as well as social and economic conditions that have in uenced the ways in which newspapers have responded to the development of communication technologies. The thesis then selects four well-established newspapers from the UK and China and compares the commonalities and differences between the online content they produced, their editorial organizational patterns, established journalistic culture in the four selected newsrooms. This study in the end discusses the impacts of the complex interplay between historical journalistic traditions, commercial drives and organizational structure as well as journalistic practices upon the ways in which newspaper organizations in the two countries have responded to Internet technology and New Media innovations. This study finds that although all newspapers claim to be multi-platform content providers, the two British newspapers, the Guardian and the Daily Mail, have enhanced their brand value on the Internet by extending their journalistic values and good practice online, while the two Chinese newspapers, the China Youth Daily and the Southern City Daily, have faced a decline in brand credibility, a decrease in journalistic integrity and an erosion of self-satisfaction among Party journalists. This study identities the changes in organizational structure, as well as the negotiations between the Internet's social and technical dimensions with newsroom culture; and it goes on to evaluate how newspapers have managed to achieve a good online strategy and excellent online journalistic practice, and have enhanced journalists' self-perception. However, the findings have also shown that there is a danger of deterioration in the quality of journalism, and the reasons have been identified as: 1. requirements for multimedia skills; 2. increased competition between 24-hour news channels, online news portals and social media platforms; 3. the replacement of traditional editorial judgments and journalistic practice through the availability of various technical supplements. The study makes two contributions to knowledge. First, the comparison between the UK and China is a starting-point in seeking a new approach to the understanding of media convergence and New Media phenomena, and a new way of reasoning as to how the interplay between technological, cultural, commercial and political pressures might shape journalism in terms of newsroom practice/routines and organizational structure in different countries. Second, it is the first doctoral study in the UK and other English{speaking countries to compare how newspaper organizations practice online journalism in the UK and China as responses to the development of Internet technology and New Media innovations, not only by providing empirical evidence, but also by providing quantitative content analysis of newspapers' online websites and a comparison between each newspaper's online and onine versions. It will bring the understanding of Chinese journalism up-to-date.

This thesis employs keyword-based searches in digital newspaper archives to identify recurrent patterns and themes in reports concerning human skin between the years 1840 and 1900 in Britain. The thesis argues that Victorian newspapers used the skin to foster three main Victorian social campaigns: the sanitation movement, which aimed at improving health and disseminating awareness about the importance of personal hygiene and cleanliness; the anti-Poor Law campaign, which created opposition to the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act, in particular to the establishment of deterrent workhouses; and the campaign to abolish flogging in the military, a movement started earlier in the century which was to see its greatest achievement in 1881 with the official suppression of the practice after a long series of legal reforms. Regular news coverage of stories related to the human skin fulfilled two more purposes, the epistemological and the commercial. It enhanced the popular understanding of dermatology and attracted revenue in the form of advertisements from the booming skin products market. The thesis is broken down into six main chapters. Following the literature review and a methodological section, the third chapter shows the two main trends that dominated the media portrayal of the skin within both advertisements and news. The subsequent chapter explores how the idea of the skin as a stratified organ was disseminated through the news coverage of a flogging inquest by The Times newspaper. The fifth chapter continues examining The Times but moves from the anti-flogging campaign to the anti-Poor Law campaign. This section explores how the paper covered cases regarding the mistreated skin of the poorest classes and cases of death by starvation and neglect. The final chapter looks at the local and national news coverage of occupational skin diseases, with a focus on coal miners and chimney sweeps. The thesis proposes a new perspective on the history of journalism: it looks at the news coverage of a specific aspect of human anatomy and shows how this fitted the Victorian newspapers regarding four main social issues: public health, poverty, the conditions of soldiers and the condition of the working class.

In this research the production process of news pictures at Thomson Reuters international multimedia news agency is examined along its ‘local’ and ‘international’ key moments and sites, and the career of Reuters photographs- from the moment they are conceived as ideas to their purchase- is followed and explored at the ways that at every stage they are used, chosen, sold and processed as 'Reuters' products. Based on an extensive fieldwork that includes participant observations in the field, the Jerusalem bureau and the global pictures desk in Israel, Singapore and the UK, indepth interviews with significant Reuters pictures professionals and observations conducted at the Guardian’s pictures desk in London, the findings in this project point to a wide cultural production infrastructure hidden from- and yet also nurtured by- the consumer's eye. From the camera's lens to the daily work of the photographer, the editor, the producer, the chief of the department, administrators, graphic designers, sales and marketing, the international news agency, the different news outlets, different media and other organizations and their audiences, who are all responsible for the representation of one reality and the production of another. Focusing an ethnographic eye on the production processes of news pictures at Thomson Reuters, and drawing from cultural studies and approaches of the political economy of communication, this is an attempt to uncover what news is in its photographic form, and the ways that such unique process of production illustrates the overall production of newsworthiness.

This thesis is a study of the interaction of print culture and the practice of politics in Britain during the first half of the eighteenth century. The thesis also concerns itself with methodological problems, examining how historians have previously used newspapers in political, intellectual, and cultural history, and suggesting some new ways to go about matters. It focuses on the newspapers owned by Nathaniel Mist, a Jacobite printer, variously called the Weekly Journal or Saturday's Post, Mist's Weekly Journal , and Fog's Weekly Journal. The study is divided into three. The first section deals with the contents of the newspapers, news reporting, editorial comment and other miscellany, and advertising. This section is based on a detailed examination of the newspapers to allow numerical analysis, a database was constructed of the precise details of the contents of every third newspaper, including how many lines of type each paragraph took up. This provides the context for the second section, where I reconstruct the political identity of the newspaper, examining its civil, ecclesiastical and cultural politics in turn. The third section is an extended study of the 'Persian Libel' crisis of 1728, when Mist published a seditious libel attacking George II and Sir Robert Walpole and setting up the Stuart pretender as the rightful king. To escape the displeasure of the ministry, and prosecution for high treason, Mist fled to France. Meanwhile, his entire household was taken into custody and his press destroyed. Rather than just treating this as an unfortunate incident in the story of the growth of the liberty of the press, I seek to place it in the wider context of British print culture, particularly the nature of writing, publishing and censoring texts in early modern England. I also discuss the relationship between the British state and the practice of sedition.

Despite growing interest in British-East German relations in recent years, little academic attention has thus far been paid to the British perception of the German Democratic Republic (GDR) during its existence. This thesis therefore aims to broaden this still rudimentary academic discourse by exploring the image of the second German state in the British quality press between 1972 and 1989. As an active contributor to the shaping of the GDR’s image in Britain, the press has thus far been predominantly ignored by academic scholars. Using discourse analysis, it will be demonstrated that the substantial level of British press coverage was able to present a more detailed picture of the GDR, and with it, a more multifaceted image of the country than was detectable in other discourses of the time. In particular, the inclusion of several newspapers with differing political biases helps to show the range of opinions which existed in British society. This study investigates the five main subject areas that received the most attention from the press: identity, foreign policy, opposition, the Wall and sport. In order to offer a comprehensive picture of the press discourse, this thesis additionally investigates the working conditions of British journalists in the GDR. For this purpose, qualitative interviews with nine journalists who reported for British quality newspapers and the news agency Reuters have been conducted.