Guiding public protest: assessing the propaganda model of China’s hybrid newspaper industry

This dissertation presents an account and analysis of published mainland Chinese media coverage surrounding three major events of public protest during the Hu-Wen era (2003-2013). The research makes a qualitative analysis of printed material drawn from a range of news outlets, differentiated by their specific political and commercial affiliations. The goal of the research is to better understand the role of mainstream media in social conflict resolution, a hitherto under-studied area, and to identify gradations within the ostensibly monolithic mainland Chinese media on issues of political sensitivity. China’s modern media formation displays certain characteristics of Anglophone media at its hyper-commercialised, populist core. However, the Chinese state retains an explicit, though often ambiguous, remit to engage with news production. Because of this, Chinese newspapers are often assumed to be one-dimensional propaganda ‘tools’ and, accordingly, easily dismissed from analyses of public protest. This research finds that, in an area where political actors have rescinded their monopoly on communicative power, a result of both policy decisions and the rise of Internet-based media platforms, established purveyors of news have acquired greater latitude to report on hitherto sensitive episodes of conflict but do so under the burden of having to correctly guide public opinion. The thesis examines the discursive resources that are deployed in this task, as well as reporting patterns which are suggestive of a new propaganda approach to handling social conflict within public media. Beside the explicitly political nature of coverage of protest events, the study sheds lights on gradations within China’s complex, hybrid media landscape both in terms of institutional purpose and qualitative performance.

Kevin Barry and the Anglo-Irish Propaganda War

Most Irish people, when asked what they know of the life and death of Kevin Barry, will pause for a moment while they recall the words of a famously maudlin ballad. A few points will emerge: ‘a lad of eighteen summers’ … ‘British soldiers tortured Barry’ … ‘refused to turn informer’ … ‘hanged him like a dog’ … ‘another martyr for old Ireland, another murder for the crown’. That they know anything at all about Kevin Barry is testimony, among other things, to the power of popular music for the making of political propaganda. Along with Father Murphy, Seán South and Fergal O’Hanlon, Kevin Barry figures in the pantheon of nationalist Ireland’s popular historical heroes, largely because somebody happened to write a good song about him. In many ways this is unfortunate, for Barry and the rest were once living people, and the process of iconographifying them in popular balladry, like all forms of political propaganda, serves not to clarify their roles in the historical events in which they played a part, but rather to obscure and distort them. So it is worth reconsidering the story of Kevin Barry, for a number of reasons. To begin with, his short life reached its climax at a vital moment in the long struggle for Irish self-government, a moment when the violence unleashed in 1916 burst forth again with renewed savagery on both British and Irish sides, involving in the Barry case the deaths of four young men aged between fifteen and twenty.

Nazi Wireless Propaganda: Lord Haw-Haw and British Public Opinion in the Second World War

This is the first book devoted exclusively to the analysis of the Nazis' radio effort against the United Kingdom during the Second World War. It traces the development of the German propaganda service and looks to erode the myth surrounding Lord Haw-Haw -the 'superpropagandist'. Propaganda is presented in context: the purposes behind it, the changing patterns, themes, styles, and techniques employed, and the impact upon the target audience and its morale. An analysis of the Nazi wireless broadcasts to Britain for the whole of the Second World War reveals a sophisticated and intelligent propaganda assault on the social and economic fabric of British society. In the end the British failed to succumb to the stupefying effects of Nazi propaganda and they traditionally congratulate themselves upon the national unity which immunised them against it. The author argues that this traditional view disguises a more complex, less appealing reality. Free CD Includes a CD of 24 German wartime broadcasts to Britain Key Features: *Exposition of organisational structure of Nazi wireless for the UK *Detailed analysis of style and content of propaganda broadcasts *Careful and critical re-appraisal of British domestic morale and national unity *CD insert of 24 recordings of Nazi broadcasters including William Joyce, John Amery, Edward Dietze, Norman Baillie-Stewart, Edward Bowlby and 'Black' propaganda broadcasts

“An Absurdly Quiet Spot”: The Spatial Justice of WW1 Fraternizations

Recent research on WW1 shows that incidents of fraternization across enemy lines took place regularly. However, fraternization remains a taboo in many contexts. The fact that the 2005 film Joyeux Noel by Christian Caron, which explicitly deals with the subject, encountered resistance from the authorities, is an indication of the kind of difficulty associated with the issue. I am drawing my inspiration from the way fraternizations are depicted in the film and in the literature in order to explore the concept of spatial justice. I define spatial justice as the question that emerges when a body desires to occupy the same space at the same time as another body. Defined like this, the question of spatial justice opens up in the dread of No Man’s Land and in particular the exchange of affects, objects and narratives that went on during fraternizations. I trace the movement of spatial justice as one of withdrawal from the asphyxiating atmosphere of the war and the propaganda machine. This withdrawal is not one of unpatriotic stance but of a courageous and difficult detachment from the supposed legality of the war that could only function on the basis of hate and demonization. While fraternizations did not end the war, they allowed for the possibility of spatial justice to emerge, as an opportunity to reorient the space and the bodies within.