This study gauged how superintendents of six states view student press freedom. This study focused on two sets of superintendents. In one set, the superintendents were in states that had passed student freedom laws. The second set of superintendents were in states that had no freedom laws, meaning school administrators had the right to censor school publications. The data strongly suggests that superintendents in states with freedom laws were less likely to favor censorship. However, both sets of superintendents appeared to favor administrative control. / Department of Journalism

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Anthony Comstock was a moral crusader who abhorred all things lewd and obscene, and who was successful in introducing the Comstock Law to help his fight against it. His lifelong battle against vice at the end of the nineteenth-century had an impact on literature and the literary world as it transitioned from Victorian prudery to modernist realism. Comstock’s influence negatively affected publishers, distributers, and writers, in particular, canonical Americans Walt Whitman and Theodore Dreiser. His methods were unconventional, and in the name of morality, Comstock often behaved immorally to achieve his goals of protecting youth from being corrupted by obscenity. The question of the value of censorship was present then, as it still endures today, and centered on the potential harm of viewing or reading obscene materials. Although Comstock presented an impressive record of confiscations and arrests, his crusade did not have a lasting effect beyond the fin de siècle. / vi, 99 leaves ; 29 cm

In 1971, radio station KGBS, Los Angeles, developed a format featuring a male host taking telephone calls from females only who discussed explicit sexual experiences over the air. Many other radio stations in the United States programmed this "sex-talk" format until 1973, when the Federal Communications Commission took steps to eliminate it. This study examines the origin, development, success, causes for eventual demise, and impact upon the broadcasting industry of the sex-talk format. The United States Congress pressured the FCC to act on the sex-talk format, and the study concludes that broadcasters would not have succumbed to government pressure if they had not feared governmental intrusion in programming and Congressional rejection of license renewal legislation.

The identification and examination of cultural information strategies and censorship patterns used to propagate the controversial issue of the caricatures in two separate cultural contexts was the aim of this dissertation. It explored discourse used for the coverage of this topic by one newspaper in a restrictive information context and two newspapers in a liberal information context. Message propagation in a restrictive information environment was analyzed using the English daily Kuwait Times from the Middle East; the liberal information environment of the US was analyzed using two major dailies, the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. The study also concurrently identifies and elaborates on the themes and frames through which discourse was presented exposing the cultural ideologies and premises they represent. The topic was approached with an interdisciplinary position with the support and applicability testing of Chatman's insider-outsider theory within information science and Noelle-Neumann's spiral of silence theory and Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model based in the area of mass communication. The study has also presented a new model of information censorship - circle of information censorship, emphasizing conceptual issues that influence the selection and censorship of information.

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / This dissertation analyzes the critique of charity and philanthropy implicit in Melville’s short fiction written for periodicals between 1853 and 1856. Melville utilized narrative and tone to conceal his opposition to prevailing ideologies and manipulated narrative structures to make the reader complicit in the problematic assumptions of a market economy. Integrating close readings with critical theory, I establish that Melville was challenging the new rhetoric of philanthropy that created a moral identity for wealthy men in industrial capitalist society. Through his short fiction, Melville exposed self-serving conduct and rationalizations when they masqueraded as civic-minded responses to the needs of the community. Melville was joining a public conversation about philanthropy and civic leadership in an American society that, in its pursuit of private wealth, he believed was losing touch with the democratic and civic ideals on which the nation had been founded. Melville’s objection was not with charitable giving; rather, he objected to its use as a diversion from honest reflection on one’s responsibilities to others.