This dissertation asks how the structure of moral authority and media viewership in America has changed over the course of the 20th century. In order to address this question, I examine the ways in which American films are, and have been, labeled inappropriate or appropriate for public viewership. I ask how censorship, regulation and rating systems work to create and manage moral ambiguity, and what types of ramifications moral ambiguity is thought to have on viewers. I also address the types of problems associated with American cinema over time, and propose several analytical dimensions to capture and unpack the processes of censoring cinema. This framework is built on the notions of filth and moral ambiguity, moral repercussion, a process of responsibilization, and the telos for cinema, all of which influences how an organization interacts with movies and morality. In lapses of symmetry between on- and off-screen worlds, moral ambiguity arises in ways that responsibilize either content controllers or audiences themselves. I show the links between these articulations and how the moral repercussions of exposure to cinema are defined. I also argue that where in the past moral ambiguity was commonly perceived as a dangerous aspect of cinema, especially by censors and Hollywood film production regulators, contemporary movie raters present a film’s moral ambiguity as a resource to the viewer. Moral ambiguity, if probed the right way, can lead to greater awareness of one’s moral boundaries, enabling viewers to effectively censor their viewership practices themselves. Greater responsibility of the viewer is also linked with more transparency and less rigid definitions of filth, moral repercussion, and the overall purpose of media consumption. Censoring cinema was a way in which state censors attempted to shape a “good” civil society, but the notion of how such a society might be achieved through media shifted over the 20th century. By examining the work of Hollywood’s Production Code Authority, New York State censors, pioneering sociologists and educators of the 1930s, the Film Estimate Board of National Organization’s monthly film classification decisions, and contemporary movie ratings at Common Sense Media, I develop several sub-arguments that support the larger argument that moral ambiguity has become a resource as opposed to a danger. In doing so, I expose the connections between the efforts of earlier censors and industry regulators to contemporary constructions of moral authenticity in movie reviews, and highlight in particular the responsibilization of parental audiences. To date, parents are charged not only with monitoring what their children watch, but also with instilling critical viewing skills among their children. This contrasts with previous content control techniques, wherein parents were responsibilized to make decisions for their children but were not expected to foster any specific values or skills in them, and earlier techniques, wherein parents were not responsibilized at all. I end by noting that the contemporary approach to pollution management relies on two conflicting discourses, which have influenced strategies to managing media morality throughout the 20th century. The first focuses on media research and its alleged effects on social behavior, the second on free and intelligent choices by children consumers themselves – but as this dissertation also exemplifies, both registers have echoes in earlier sites and examples of cinematic censorship and efforts to clean the screen.

The Internet has revolutionized the way in which people are entertained, communicate and collect information. As people increase their ability to connect with the outside world from inside their homes, they hold the power to become their own gatekeepers filtering information as they see fit. Many question whether this will weaken the power of the traditional media sources that are often seen as elitist and potentially biased. This researcher hypothesized that people who cite high credibility ratings of news media channels are more likely to use traditional media channels such as television and newspapers and people who cite low credibility ratings of news media channels are more likely to use alternate media channels such as the Internet. While the researcher was unable to reject the null hypothesis, a pattern of general mistrust of traditional news media was revealed when nearly three-fourths of respondents gave traditional media channels a "not-credible" rating. / by Katrina Herring. / Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2010. / Includes bibliography. / Electronic reproduction. Boca Raton, Fla., 2010. Mode of access: World Wide Web.

This dissertation analyzes a set of innovative literary practices happening in the popular press in Argentina in the 1920s. It takes its departure from two theoretical premises: that what precipitated the historical avant-garde was the spread of mass culture and that art redraws its limits by incorporating the foreign into it. With these premises in mind, the dissertation shows that the aguafuertes of novelist Roberto Arlt and the women’s columns by poet Alfonsina Storni, because they were written especially for the popular press and because their authors positioned themselves as artists of and in the media, the two—Arlt and Storni—were able to process political, social, and economic changes in a forceful and unprecedented way. Technologically accelerated modernization became their vehicle, and it allowed them to contribute to the democratization of the Argentine cultural field in that decade. Further, analysis of this under-read corpus allows me to assert that it was their journalistic texts in which Arlt and Storni experimented with novel poetics, which “modernized” their own more literary practices. Published in discardable formats that were hardly prestigious in the center of the mass media of the day, these texts have passed largely unperceived by critics, although in their moment they formed part of a broad cultural agitation that they themselves in part created. Their marginal placement doesn’t obscure the same procedures used in them as was used by the classic avant-garde. In their newspaper writings, Arlt and Storni erased the borders between genres, re-used found materials and did not shun low materials, provoked the public and at the same time included the public, transgressed reigning norms for the behavior of women. No understanding of the 20s in the Río de la Plata can dispense with these texts, and others like them. They were an integral part of the cultural network; more than this, they worked through the extreme transformations of the epoch—as this dissertation shows—with a radicality beyond that of the local avant-gardes.

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This thesis investigates the cultural and social production of AIDS in popular discourse, particularly film and mass media, and offers a critical consideration of the ways in which the proliferation and dispersion of these discourses function in our current episteme to rearticulate and reinscribe traditional value systems of sexuality, familialism, and nationalism. Taking the lead of the work of Michel Foucault on the body in various historical regimes, the author here will posit a theoretical analysis of the "discursive formation" of AIDS, how the body of AIDS is put into discourse, to provide a matrix for establishing the various disciplinary and regulatory apparatuses structuring the epidemic--that is, the affirmation of certain kinds of pleasures and bodies and the strategic circumvention of other pleasures and bodies. Under what the author refers to as the cultural logic of dis-ease, the investigations that follow will be animated by the central question: Whose pleasure and/or power is served by these representations and discourses of the body of AIDS in popular cultural practices?

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School children have often been regarded as lacking competence when it comes to using media texts. Some researchers refer to them as less active audience or uncritical media users because of their short attention span and because they often perform other activities while using the media. They are not considered as the critical media users a democratic society requires. Children's access to the media has also raised a lot of questions like what and which media they have access to and who selects for them. Their selection and access to the media will relate to their social, economic and cultural background and their race and gender. This research explores the type of media school children have access to and what media texts they select from the range they have access to. This research is premised on a belief that a knowledge of the selection and access of media texts is immediately relevant to education and critical literacy. This will help media educators to assess what learners already know. This research is not intended to judge any learner in relation to their access and use, it aims to get better insight into the types and genres of media learners engage with depending on the race, social class and gender of the learner. I examine the topic against the theoretical understandings of audience reception theory. This discusses how theorists have considered whether the audience are passive or active or critical. The research process involves participation by learners between the ages of 15 and 18 from three different schools of Crawford College in La Lucia, Rossburgh High School in Rossburgh, and Clairwood Secondary School in Clairwood and investigates the nature of media engaged with over a short period of time. Research findings reveal that the type of media accessed by various learners varies in relation to background factors of the learner such as economic background, race and gender. / Thesis (M.Ed.)-University of Natal, Durban, 2001.

The purpose of this study was to examine the claimed racism and lack of transformation in the advertising, marketing and communications industry based on the plenary hearings that were held in parliament in November 2001 to October 2004. The main aims of this dissertation included the exploration of national media communications industry paths in respect of the transformation agenda and the provision of systematic analysis for a smooth transition to real transformation. This study could therefore be classified as being located within the interpretive school of social science (Silverman, 1993), and a mixture of methodologies was appropriate. Using a multiple case study approach, this dissertation particularly focuses on the alleged resistance of this industry to transformation, which sparked the journalists, media owners, the government and non- government organisations to set their focus on how the communications industry conducted their business. The Department of Communications and the Government Communication and Information System (both determined to be catalysts and not meddlers) took the initiative to establish a task force to put together an Indaba of all interested parties and anyone who had even the most remote interest in the issue regarding the claims that the industry was still immersed in the old apartheid mentality. The South African media and communications industry is a world-class industry. In the context of a global industry of over $300 billion in which the USA accounts for 42%, Japan for 11%, UK for 4.5% and SA for 0.3%, SA has distinguished itself when it comes to measuring its creative product against its global peers. In the four major international advertising festivals, SA is invariably in the top 10 best performing countries in the world (Ikalafeng & Warsop, 2002). It was therefore imperative to investigate such claims because it appeared as if the industry was diverting from the national agenda of transformation. Data was collected from three sources (policy documents, expert interviews and industry case studies) using two main tools. These were the face-to-face interviews and web-data mining. The data collected assisted in drawing the conclusions and to form both inductive and deductive reasoning about the research subject. As this study locates the issue of transformation within the corporate social investment (CSI) framework the researcher also had to put the two (transformation and corporate citizenship) in context. By gathering available primary and secondary data this dissertation therefore tries to find answers empirically to explore the issue of perceived or actual lack of transformation in media and how these impact on the individual and organisations. The findings are consistent with other research showing that even though significant strides have been made there is still a long way to go before we can truly claim that the industry is truly representative of the South African demographics. / Thesis (M.Com.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Westville, 2010.

This thesis is an attempt at understanding the theoretical work of Joshua Meyrowitz in communication. The self-proclaimed specificity of his "contextual" media analysis will be recognized as well as its relevance for the development of a general logic of social change. The sources and foundations of Meyrowitz's media analysis will be respectively reconstructed in terms of the schools of thought which informed it and of a metatheoretical typology of the social sciences. The contextual logic of social change will be framed as a type of formal functionalism dealing with self-regulated systemic changes and integrating aspects of a more comprehensive sociology. It will be evaluated in view of recent empirical studies of some (post-)modern transformations in community life. The integrity of Meyrowitz's work in regard to his sources, the contribution of his media analysis to the development of community studies, and the foundations of his logic of social change will be here in question.