Analyses of war coverage address its relation to historical fact, propaganda, and bias, but I see a great need to position war coverage within the context of the industry that produces and distributes news content. To divorce televised war coverage from the entertainment industry is to decontextualize it in the most fundamental way. This dissertation investigates the way in which Cable News Network (CNN) and Fox News Channel (FNC) positioned and packaged the U.S. military’s invasion of Iraq in March 2003 for a domestic audience. I place those two networks and the 2003 invasion of Iraq within the context of post-classical Hollywood filmmaking, one offshoot of which is high concept. I argue that high concept—a filmmaking practice inextricably linked to conglomeration, new technologies, and an incessant, self-preserving drive to market— can be applied productively to the study of television news. When infused with critical theory, high concept is a valuable way to understand the politics and construction of entertainment-driven war coverage. The industrial development of television news has yielded a media artifact that mimics the practice of high concept filmmaking narratively, stylistically, ideologically, and commercially. By using high concept as an alternative approach to television news, I propose that studies that disregard or marginalize visuals, sound, narrative, and the industry that profits from the spectacular packaging of those elements cannot fully capture the thrust of television news. By stripping television news of its stature as somehow divorced from and above the rest of television programming, I aim to re-insert it into the entertainment industry. My intent is to bring together theoretical and practical insights from different disciplines so that I can contextualize contemporary television news in a unique and compelling way. In doing so, this dissertation aims to contribute to the pursuit of democratic media. / text

Foreign Bodies: Military Medicine, Modernism and Melodrama traces how representations of warfare in the modernist novel, girls' romances, nursing memoirs, and war films dramatize the humanitarian disaster of war through the figure of woman. My analysis focuses on the visual and literary poetics of violence as troped in and through the bodies of combat nurses. The "uncanny" serves as a lens to explore the complex links between gendered war work and the radical transgression of the boundaries of the nation state and the body experienced during wartime. To establish the unique explanatory power of the uncanny for gender issues, I trace how feminist and postcolonial theorists have revised Freud's analysis of the uncanny. I trace medical metaphors of wounding and infection in the novel and various cinematic adaptations of A Farewell to Arms (1932, 1951, 1957, 1996). I read the letters and diaries of World War I nurse Agnes von Kurowsky against the censored memoirs of American nurses Mary Borden and Ellen La Motte. I show how the uncanny aesthetic adopted by Ernest Hemingway in A Farewell to Arms is subverted by these women writers. I explore how these uncanny aesthetics also manifest in adolescent nursing romances from Sue Barton to Cherry Ames. With the onset of World War II, I trace how the discourse of foreign bodies in relation to the metaphor of malaria in the South Pacific. Focusing on the portrayal of the Japanese foreign body, often encoded through off-screen sound, I demonstrate how medical metaphors of malaria operate in films portraying nursing in the South Pacific such as So Proudly We Hail (1943) and Cry Havoc (1943). Turning to the Korean and Vietnam Wars, I explore the representation of post-traumatic stress disorder in M*A*S*H (1970) and in nursing memoirs such as American Daughter Gone to War (1992) and Home Before Morning (1983). I bring this history of nursing representation to bear on media texts concerning the war in Iraq including Baghdad E.R. (HBO, 2006).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2006. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (MA)--Macquarie University (Division of Society, Culture, Media & Philosophy, Dept. of Media), 2006. / Bibliography: leaves 176-188.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2004. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 115-122). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Missouri-Columbia, 2004. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 115-122). Also available on the Internet.

Thesis (MA)--Macquarie University (Division of Society, Culture, Media & Philosophy, Dept. of Media and Communications), 2006. / Bibliography: leaves 176-188. / Precursors -- An imperfect war -- Interregnum -- The perfect war -- Conclusions. / This thesis explores how war reporting on Australian television has been dramatically reshaped over the last 40 years, particularly by new technologies. Specifically, it seeks to answer these questions: 1. How did differing cultural, social, political and professional contexts, available technology and battlefield experience affect the attitudes, editorial content and narrative forms of two generations of television correspondents - in Vietnam and Iraq respectively? 2. How did technological and other industry changes over the 30 years between Vietnam and Iraq reshape the power relationship between the war correspondent in the field and his news producers and managers? What impact did these changes have on the resulting screened coverage? What are the longer-term implications for journalism and for audiences? / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / 192 leaves ill. (some col.)