In December 2004, an enlisted soldier challenged the Secretary of Defense on international television and caused a media crisis situation in Kuwait and Washington D.C. that created a historic opportunity for military public affairs professionals to react to the press with electronic news gathering (ENG) technology. This case study examines how the Army responded from Kuwait and subjects these events to models of response generated by Coombs (1995) and Hale et al (2005). The intent is to examine the media crisis response strategies employed by the Coalition Forces Land Component Command (CFLCC) and to compare them with strategies that have been identified and addressed in contemporary crisis management literature.

In December 2004, an enlisted soldier challenged the Secretary of Defense on international television and caused a media crisis situation in Kuwait and Washington D.C. that created a historic opportunity for military public affairs professionals to react to the press with electronic news gathering (ENG) technology. This case study examines how the Army responded from Kuwait and subjects these events to models of response generated by Coombs (1995) and Hale et al (2005). The intent is to examine the media crisis response strategies employed by the Coalition Forces Land Component Command (CFLCC) and to compare them with strategies that have been identified and addressed in contemporary crisis management literature.

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Courts have ruled for decades that student journalists at public colleges and universities are entitled to constitutional protection. As a result, higher education officials are faced regularly with dilemmas that pit the free campus press against what the administration sees as the greater good of the institution at large. With a summary of relevant case law as its backdrop, this qualitative study describes how public college administrators balance the First Amendment rights of the campus press and the broader interests of their institutions. A number of authors have suggested that open dialogue and mutual understanding are crucial for a healthy relationship between college administrators and campus press stakeholders. This study is important because it will help generate that discussion. Furthermore, this study fills a gap in the literature. No qualitative research investigating this issue of balance has been published since a federal court’s ruling in Hosty v. Carter (2005), the most recent — and perhaps most controversial — decision concerning First Amendment protection of the collegiate press. Using a sampling strategy that maximizes variation among the participants, the researcher conducted in-depth interviews with nine public college administrators in the Southeast. Theoretical saturation was reached at about the seventh interview. Four thematic strategies emerged from the data that describe how the participants perform the balancing act at focus in this study. Consistent with the grounded theory approach, these findings constitute a theoretical framework that helps explain the phenomenon being investigated: (1) supporting a free campus press, (2) keeping the lines of communication open, (3) knowing how to manage controversy, and (4) resolving that they may have to intervene.

The purpose of this study was to explore preferences by younger news audiences of backpack journalism in local television news. Local television news has to compete with Internet and other media to attract viewers. The theoretical foundation for this study, uses and gratifications, proposes audience members will actively seek news information using television as a primary source. The focus of the study centered around technology’s influence on television newsgathering techniques and if the techniques delineated the quality of journalistic presentation. Four hundred and ninety three college students were surveyed about their media use, news gratification, and preferences of production quality criteria associated with news stories produced by traditional two person crews and backpack journalists. Respondents were shown eight randomly selected videotaped news stories from a television market that employed both traditional two person news crews and backpack journalists. Four stories were chosen by each newsgathering method. Each news story was judged on perceptions of pacing, camera composition, lighting, voice narration, interviews selected, and script production. Findings suggested that younger audience members indicated a preference toward newsgathering methods by traditional news crews rather than backpack journalists. Anecdotal evidence suggests a shift in the newsgathering paradigm is currently taking place in the local television news. However, the results of this study propose the audience acceptance of this newsgathering technique is slow to be accepted by the younger news audience.

An informed electorate is crucial to an effective democracy. It is the duty of the Fourth Estate to inform this electorate with the utmost objectivity. Pure objectivity, however, is impossible. Journalists are human and words incontrovertibly reflect a perspective. In order to be as informed as possibly, the limits of objectivity — or contexts influencing journalists — must be well understood. This thesis explores four different contexts that influence journalists and, thus, the content they produce.

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This project examines the struggle journalists, editors, and their news outlets faced navigating multiple and changing boundaries between supporting their nations' fight and their need to uphold professional integrity in reporting the news during the 1944 Allied invasion of France, from D-Day (June 6) to the liberation of Paris (August 25), in three key western democracies: Britain, France, and the United States. Viewed holistically, these case studies exhibit how democratic states believed they needed to exact greater control over the press to better control the wartime narrative and ensure the public's belief in the legitimacy of their nation’s fight. Looking at the tensions between state-sponsored propaganda, wartime censorship offices, and the press in these three cases, one of which was bifurcated and therefore even more complicated, we can learn a lot about how state agencies and actors perceived citizens' dedication to the national wartime cause. The two in-tact democracies, Britain and the US, enacted significant control over the press to protect, even shape public morale and support. In Britain, with the war so ever-present, censorship consisted of a partnership between the Ministry of Information and journalists who worked together to protect national security and promote unity. For the US, because the war was so far away, Roosevelt's administration felt it had to control the narrative to overcome long standing isolationist sentiment. France, no longer a democracy but with a deep democratic tradition, highlights how important it was for the government to control the narrative to maintain the people's support and ensure its own legitimacy. Late in the war, the Vichy regime struggled to control the press, particularly as underground, resistance newspapers provided a hopeful counternarrative. In Britain and the US, the public, including journalists themselves, believed in the government's legitimacy and the war’s aims. As a result, news outlets were more willing to follow the rules and do their part for their nation’s wartime cause.

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