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    The iconic news image as visual event in photojournalism and digital media : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Media Studies at Massey University, Manawatu, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2013) Kelly, Samantha Diane
    This thesis shows how the uses and meanings of the iconic news image have changed with the emergence of digital media. Most of the iconic photographs of the twentieth century were produced by photojournalists and published in mass circulation newspapers and magazines. In the twenty–first century, amateurs have greater access to image producing technologies and greater capacity to disseminate their images through the Internet. This situation has made possible the use of iconic news images to support political agendas other than those promoted in the media institutions and beyond the range of censorship imposed by those media. In order to demonstrate the functions and understand this unprecedented situation, this thesis explores how iconic news images produce meaning. I consider formal definitions of iconic news images but adopt Nicholas Mirzoeff's theory of the visual event to explain how the meanings of iconic news images are impacted by historical context, media institutions and viewer responses. This dynamic model of visual communication allows us to see that iconic news images indeed function as events and that there is a political struggle over the creation, staging, publication and interpretation of those events. The thesis develops this argument by analysing a series of historical examples. The images range from the iconic news images of World War II used in the official propaganda for the war effort, through the combination of amateur and professional images used in the 9/11 visual canon, to the activist images of the ongoing Syrian Civil War. The significance of 9/11 is that although some images produced by amateurs did become iconic (for example Holocaust photographs or from the Kennedy assassination) it was not until the 9/11 attacks that the amateur production of the image began to be directly assimilated into mass media. What this means is that the media institutions are no longer the sole arbitrators of the images that represent world events. Instead, using digital media, anyone including the media institutions, activists, military and terrorists create events that are so powerful in their traumatic impact, that they have to be published. Protest and terrorist movements have long understood that their impact depends on media coverage. Now images themselves can be more directly mobilised through digital media to reach viewers. They no longer require the media institutions or their resources.
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    The "manufacture" of news in the 1993 New Zealand general election : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of PhD in Human Resource Management at Massey University
    (Massey University, 1995) McGregor, Judith Helen
    The news media's role in general election campaigns in New Zealand remains mysterious because few indigenous research antecedents inform the debate about the democratic function of journalists reporting election campaigns. This study analyses the creation of news by reporters during the 1993 New Zealand general election campaign and examines the relationships between journalists, politicians and third party sources which impact on political communication. The analysis leads to a discussion of the role of the news media in reporting election news. The notions that news is created by journalists and through relationship between journalists, politicians and third party sources are central to the study. The concept that news is "manufactured" or socially constructed is explained in the introductory chapter and linked to theoretical perspectives in the literature review in Chapter Two. The two broad research questions which the study answers are: 1. how was the news manufactured during the 1993 New Zealand election campaign? 2. what does this mean for the "dialogue of democracy" (Taylor, 1992)? The manufacture of news is examined from three perspectives in the research. These can be called the "doing" perspective which employs action research methodology, the "watching" perspective which uses participant observation methodology and the "measuring" perspective utilising content analysis. The research notes the failure of "any particular holistic paradigm" to sweep the field of political communication and employs "ground-up paradigm building" by carving out broad research problem areas and examining them through the use of appropriate research methodologies (Bennett, 1993, p.182). The objectives of the action research project were twofold. First, to assist an individual political candidate contesting the election to develop systematic processes to use the news media to raise the candidate's profile. Second, to increase the level of understanding by the political candidate of news media processes and news concepts such as newsworthiness, candidate accessibility and news angles so she could utilise the knowledge to generate news and photographic opportunities. The findings revealed that the political candidate perceived that her level of understanding of news processes was enhanced through the action research. The study found, too, that a systematic process of source relationship was cultivated between the political candidate and journalist, which in principle enhanced the democratic function of the news media as a platform for political debate. The action research project, was, however, bound by the prevailing climate of political rhetoric with all its shortcomings. The participant observation methodology explored the nature of the contest between the triumvirate of political candidates as sources, journalists and third party sources such as "spin doctors". A second research question examined whether reporters seek to reassert their role in such a way as to influence the news when traditional journalistic autonomy is threatened. The findings showed a complex, shifting contest for control over knowledge and power in the making of news. This contest was characterised by features such as the increased sophistication of third party sources actively intervening in news processes, by strategic utilisation of "new" news formats by politicians and by journalists vigorously defending their status and enlarging their role. The impact of the findings on democratic journalism were examined using Golding's (1990) suggestion of a revival of the notion of citizenship, "to what degree and in what ways are people denied access to necessary information and imagery to allow full and equal participation in the social order?" (p.98). The third methodology, content analysis, tested Edelstein, Ito and Kepplinger's (1989) theory of news content using a cognitive construct, the problematic situation. The results confirmed a larger interpretive as opposed to purely descriptive role for metropolitan newspaper journalists reporting news in the 1993 general election campaign in New Zealand. Over 70% of election campaign issues in the period sampled were defined problematically and negatively with a high reliance on references to loss of value and conflict. The findings have implications for how political candidates could and should tailor their political messages. Overall the results taken together have fundamental implications for the "dialogue of democracy" (Taylor, 1992). They disclose a powerful dilemma about the manufacture of news in the 1993 New Zealand general election. The expanded influence of the news media has not been accompanied by a reassessment of what it is the news media should be doing in election campaign reportage. Reformative suggestions are made in the final chapter of the study and the implications for political journalism in a democracy are discussed.
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    Patents, pills, the press and the poor : discourse and hegemony in news coverage of the global 'access to medicines' dispute, 1997-2003 : a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Communication and Journalism at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealan
    (Massey University, 2012) Owen, Thomas
    In the mid‐1990s a transnational civil society campaign emerged to advocate greater essential medicines access for the majority world. The campaign mobilised on a variety of fronts, but in particular around the argument that intellectual property protection was the central impediment to equitable medicines access. The campaign argued that strong patent protection created artificially high medicine prices, and that, in the case of global HIV/AIDS, such prices prohibited medicines access for the vast majority of those in need of it. The major pharmaceutical companies disagreed, arguing instead that absolute patent protection was essential for new medicine development. When a coalition of pharmaceutical companies sued the South African government over generic medicines access in 1998, the dispute became crystalised into a dramatic mediatised conflict. This thesis examines press coverage of the medicines access dispute in key United States, British and South African news outlets over the years 1997 to 2003. Adopting Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory as a macro‐theoretical guide, the thesis conceptualises the media space as a field of contestation between opposed political projects seeking to hegemonically articulate their particular discourse. Prior commentary on the medicines access dispute has suggested media coverage was a key driver in publicising the civil society campaign’s message. This thesis contributes previously missing empirical data to such claims, addressing the questions: did the news media discourse on HIV/AIDS medicines transform to better reflect the civil society campaign’s arguments over those of the major pharmaceutical companies? If so, what were the principal factors influencing this transformation? Through corpus‐assisted discourse analysis of a sample of a 1,113 newspaper articles, and consideration of personal testimonies from key journalists and activists, the thesis argues the media discourse did indeed transform in favour of the civil society campaign. However, while the campaign was successful in promoting a patentbased definition of the crisis, the solution most widely adopted was one that increased aid funding and decreased medicines prices, but which left the intellectual property infrastructure largely intact. In this way, the thesis documents both the successful articulation of a counter‐hegemonic discourse within the news media, as well as the process by which this challenge was reabsorbed into pre‐existing power structures.
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    Plagiarism and fabrication: dishonesty in the newsroom : a thesis presented in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Management (Communication) at Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand
    (Massey University, 2009) Samson, Alan Michael
    This first comprehensive study of New Zealand news media plagiarism proceeds from the observation that plagiarism, if not demonstrably increasing, is more common than many practitioners would care to believe. It affirms that, contrary to conventional opinion, plagiarism cannot be understood or dismissed simply or entirely as the product of dishonest or lazy journalists. The study findings support indications of an underlying culture of copying within news media organisations—a professional ideology encouraging, if not overtly justifying, copying, and discouraging clear authorship attribution. The findings emanate from responses to a survey distributed to all New Zealand’s journalists, followed by in-depth interviews with five journalists identified as having personal experience with aspects of the practice identified in the survey, and a sixth with a journalist against whom a complaint of plagiarism was upheld by watchdog body, the NZ Press Council. The research analysed the just four complaints related to plagiarism brought before the Press Council since its 1972 inception, as well as another five much-publicised examples of the practice written about in the news media, to the present day. Of the nine cases examined, three reflected the most serious type of dishonesty associated with Jayson Blair of the New York Times—calculated theft of words as well as outright interview fabrication. The others can be categorised in a perceived less blameworthy variety of plagiarism, bedevilled by confusion of terms and newsroom pressures. But because much run-of-the-mill plagiarism is likely to have gone unrecorded and unnoticed beyond the newsroom involved, the true extent of any sort of plagiarism here could not be judged. What was possible in this research, was to gauge a sense of prevalence by asking working journalists not of their own sins, but of their experience of being plagiarised by others. Suddenly the numbers of plagiarism cases rocketed, not in a usefully quantifiable way, but clearly demonstrative of an extent sufficient to warrant analysis of nature and origin. These experiences were set against an American model that identified four antecedents of plagiarism behaviour, two individual—journalistic rationalising of dishonesty and problematic techniques—and two situational—definitional ambiguity and reporter aversion to attribution. What became clear in these analyses was that, though all news media organisations view plagiarism very seriously, few if any acknowledge their own role in perpetrating the practice, that journalism is an industry that proceeds from an ideology of matching and copying.