The British Army of the Rhine: Turning Nazi Enemies into Cold War Partners

Between 1945 and 1957, West Germany made a dizzying pivot from Nazi bastion to Britain's Cold War ally against the Soviet Union. Successive London governments, though faced with bitter public and military opposition, tasked the British Army of the Rhine (BAOR) to serve as a protecting force while strengthening West German integration into the Western defense structure. Peter Speiser charts the BAOR's fraught transformation from occupier to ally by looking at the charged nexus where British troops and their families interacted with Germany's civilian population. Examining the relationship on many levels, Speiser ranges from how British mass media representations of Germany influenced BAOR troops to initiatives taken by the Army to improve relations. He also weighs German perceptions, surveying clashes between soldiers and civilians and comparing the popularity of the British services with that of the other occupying powers. As Speiser shows, the BAOR's presence did not improve the relationship between British servicemen and the German populace, but it did prevent further deterioration during a crucial and dangerous period of the early Cold War. An incisive look at an under-researched episode, The British Army of the Rhine sheds new light on Anglo-German diplomatic, political, and social relations after 1945, and evaluates their impact on the wider context of European integration in the postwar era.

Dizer sem falar: a Comissão de Ética, Sociedade e Cultura e a alegada tentativa de controlo da comunicação social por José Sócrates

Dissertação apresentada à Escola Superior de Comunicação Social como parte dos requisitos para obtenção de grau de mestre em Jornalismo.

O casamento real de William e Kate : a cobertura jornalística nos jornais The Daily Mail, The Guardian e The Sun

Dissertação apresentada à Escola Superior de Comunicação Social como parte dos requisitos para obtenção de grau de mestre em Jornalismo.

Tratamiento y presencia de las mujeres em la prensa

Este artículo presenta los resultados de un análisis de contenido sobre la representación de la mujer en la prensa española que forma parte de una investigación más amplia que abarca el periodo de 1974-2000. Nuestra investigación supone una importante contribución a otras investigaciones ya que analiza de forma comparativa, sistemática y longitudinal las representaciones sociales y políticas enfocadas en la prensa. Examinamos como en los medios de comunicación los periodistas utilizan frecuentemente distintas referencias para los diferentes tipos de actores a partir de recursos estilísticos que ayudan a enfatizar sus argumentos. En la mayoría de los casos, estos pasan desapercibidos pero en ocasiones se convierten en generalizaciones que parten de ideas preconcebidas y prejuicios. Nuestros resultados demuestran que los actores a los que los medios de comunicación dedican menos espacio son también los que reciben un peor tratamiento. Específicamente, las mujeres reciben una menor atención como colectivo en los medios de comunicación analizados. Además, aparecen como personajes pasivos, no son enfocadas como representantes públicas y son relegadas a la vida privada. Principalmente, las mujeres son enfocadas realizando actividades deportivas, culturales o de entretenimiento o cuando son víctimas, mientras que sólo una minoría de ellas merecen atención efectuando acciones políticas. Después de exponer este diagnóstico, realizaremos propuestas de estilo, lenguaje y producción de noticias para fomentar que los periódicos muestren de forma positiva una sociedad con igualdad de oportunidades.

As potencialidades da internet no jornalismo digital: Jornal de Notícias vs Diário de Notícias

Dissertação apresentada à Escola Superior de Comunicação Social como parte dos requisitos para obtenção de grau de mestre em Jornalismo.

A Contribuição da Rádio para o Desenvolvimento da Cidadania: um estudo comparado da atuação de rádios do Brasil e de Portugal (2011-2012)

O jornalismo e os meios de comunicação adquiriram uma importância social muito relevante na construção social da realidade. É fundamental discutir o papel dos media como um dos principais fóruns de discussão em sociedades democráticas. Desde o advento da democracia moderna, os meios de comunicação têm assumido grande destaque no que diz respeito à constituição de espaços para o exercício da cidadania. Alguns autores quase que fundem as ideias de espaço público e media, em função de a sociedade se ter tornado extraordinariamente complexa, não sendo mais possível, fisicamente, assegurar um processo “efetivamente” democrático através de espaços físicos comunicacionais (de discussão e interação sociais face a face). Os media, nomeadamente através do jornalismo, podem contribuir para o desenvolvimento da sociedade com a difusão de informações, a troca de opiniões e a promoção de debates. Podem, desta forma, contribuir para a construção da cidadania por meio de ações educativas e informativas que conduzam o sujeito à reflexão e à ação. Partindo da compreensão de que a cidadania é construída no âmbito da relação das pessoas com a sociedade em que vivem, entendemos que a base para o exercício da cidadania é a formulação de opiniões sobre os assuntos relevantes para a vida dos indivíduos. No nosso trabalho analisamos exatamente a relação entre cidadania e rádio. A escolha deste medium deve-se ao facto de a rádio ser um dos primeiros veículos de comunicação de massa e, embora alguns teóricos tenham declarado a sua morte, a rádio sobrevive e continua a ter uma presença importante nas sociedades. Para além disso, consideramos a rádio como um veículo privilegiado para a promoção da cidadania, uma vez que reúne um conjunto de elementos favoráveis a esse fim, dentre eles: a proximidade com o público e a linguagem utilizada. Assim, a nossa intenção foi compreender como a rádio, hoje, manifesta o seu potencial, enquanto parte integrante dos mass media, de modo a prestar o seu contributo ao desenvolvimento da cidadania. A sua programação contribui para o entendimento do mundo indispensável à formação de opiniões sobre questões relevantes ao exercício a cidadania? Para responder a essa questão estudámos as grelhas de programação de rádios em Lisboa e em Brasília, nos anos 2011 e 2012, e realizámos entrevistas com os respetivos diretores. Também realizámos grupos de focos, no contexto de diversas organizações sociais, para compreender a relação dos cidadãos com a rádio. O nosso objetivo foi analisar a contribuição da rádio para o processo de formação de opinião sobre temas sociais relevantes à cidadania, através de um estudo comparado nas cidades de Brasília e Lisboa, assim como verificar se a programação quotidiana das rádios em estudo promove uma aproximação aos cidadãos e se os mesmos reconhecem e definem a programação como correspondendo às suas necessidades de informação. Observámos que a rádio continua a ter um grande potencial cívico, mas neste momento, de um modo geral, a sua programação pouco contribui para a promoção de uma cidadania efetiva – ou, para sermos mais incisivos, ela desmerece mesmo esse seu potencial.

Próteses de sentido: a liberdade totalitária do dispositivo publicitário

O dispositivo publicitário sempre teve uma presença totalitária, no sentido de espaço e tempo, na vida dos indivíduos na sociedade de consumo (fala-se de 200 a 5 mil impactos diários). Nos anos mais recentes, a introdução de ferramentas digitais e a instituição de novos circuitos de comunicação levou a indústria publicitária a uma mudança de paradigma. A grande transformação está a acontecer ao nível das linhas de visibilidade, uma vez que a publicidade tradicional, baseada nos mass media, vem perdendo influência para os circuitos one-to-one. A crescente migração para os equipamentos pessoais e móveis (computadores, tablets ou smartphones) abriu caminho para novas formas de comunicação entre as marcas e os consumidores, com circuitos mais fechados ou mesmo personalizados. A alteração dos circuitos relacionais permite identificar um novo contexto: estamos a viver a era da publicidade invisível. Hoje a mensagem pode ser enviada apenas a públicos específicos, melhor identificados e por isso mais qualificados, passando longe do olhar dos consumidores que não interessa atingir. A introdução dessas ferramentas digitais institui uma nova economia do poder, uma vez que tornou a mensagem publicitária mais eficaz para fazer circular a mercadoria.

Slackers, slashers and sticklers : Hollywood films and audience reception /

This thesis examines the processes through which identity is acquired and the processes that Hollywood :films employ to facilitate audience identification in order to determine the extent to which individuality is possible within postmodem society. Opposing views of identity formation are considered: on the one hand, that of the Frankfurt School which envisions the mass audience controlled by the culture industry and on the other, that of John Fiske which places control in the hands of the individual. The thesis takes a mediating approach, conceding that while the mass media do provide and influence identity formation, individuals can and do decode a variety of meanings from the material made available to them in accordance with the text's use-value in relation to the individual's circumstances. The analysis conducted in this thesis operates on the assumption that audiences acquire identity components in exchange for paying to see a particular film. Reality Bites (Ben Stiller 1994) and Scream (Wes Craven 1996) are analyzed as examples of mainstream 1990s films whose material circumstances encourage audience identification and whose popularity suggest that audiences did indeed identify with them. The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson 2001) is considered for its art film sensibilities and is examined in order to determine to what extent this film can be considered a counter example. The analysis consists of a combination of textual analysis and reception study in an attempt to avoid the problems associated with each approach when employed alone. My interpretation of the filmmakers' and marketers' messages will be compared with online reviews posted by film viewers to determine how audiences received and made use of the material available to them. Viewer-posted reviews, both unsolicited and unrestricted, as found online, will be consulted and will represent a segment of the popular audience for the three films to be analyzed.

Marginal/minority popular music : the concept of the "third space" and the case for "hybridities" of cultures/identities /

The topic of this thesis is marginaVminority popular music and the question of identity; the term "marginaVminority" specifically refers to members of racial and cultural minorities who are socially and politically marginalized. The thesis argument is that popular music produced by members of cultural and racial minorities establishes cultural identity and resists racist discourse. Three marginaVminority popular music artists and their songs have been chosen for analysis in support of the argument: Gil Scott-Heron's "Gun," Tracy Chapman's "Fast Car" and Robbie Robertson's "Sacrifice." The thesis will draw from two fields of study; popular music and postcolonialism. Within the area of popular music, Theodor Adorno's "Standardization" theory is the focus. Within the area of postcolonialism, this thesis concentrates on two specific topics; 1) Stuart Hall's and Homi Bhabha's overlapping perspectives that identity is a process of cultural signification, and 2) Homi Bhabha's concept of the "Third Space." For Bhabha (1995a), the Third Space defines cultures in the moment of their use, at the moment of their exchange. The idea of identities arising out of cultural struggle suggests that identity is a process as opposed to a fixed center, an enclosed totality. Cultures arise from historical memory and memory has no center. Historical memory is de-centered and thus cultures are also de-centered, they are not enclosed totalities. This is what Bhabha means by "hybridity" of culture - that cultures are not unitary totalities, they are ways of knowing and speaking about a reality that is in constant flux. In this regard, the language of "Otherness" depends on suppressing or marginalizing the productive capacity of culture in the act of enunciation. The Third Space represents a strategy of enunciation that disrupts, interrupts and dislocates the dominant discursive construction of US and THEM, (a construction explained by Hall's concept of binary oppositions, detailed in Chapter 2). Bhabha uses the term "enunciation" as a linguistic metaphor for how cultural differences are articulated through discourse and thus how differences are discursively produced. Like Hall, Bhabha views culture as a process of understanding and of signification because Bhabha sees traditional cultures' struggle against colonizing cultures as transforming them. Adorno's theory of Standardization will be understood as a theoretical position of Western authority. The thesis will argue that Adorno's theory rests on the assumption that there is an "essence" to music, an essence that Adorno rationalizes as structure/form. The thesis will demonstrate that constructing music as possessing an essence is connected to ideology and power and in this regard, Adorno's Standardization theory is a discourse of White Western power. It will be argued that "essentialism" is at the root of Western "rationalization" of music, and that the definition of what constitutes music is an extension of Western racist "discourses" of the Other. The methodological framework of the thesis entails a) applying semiotics to each of the three songs examined and b) also applying Bhabha's model of the Third Space to each of the songs. In this thesis, semiotics specifically refers to Stuart Hall's retheorized semiotics, which recognizes the dual function of semiotics in the analysis of marginal racial/cultural identities, i.e., simultaneously represent embedded racial/cultural stereotypes, and the marginal raciaVcultural first person voice that disavows and thus reinscribes stereotyped identities. (Here, and throughout this thesis, "first person voice" is used not to denote the voice of the songwriter, but rather the collective voice of a marginal racial/cultural group). This dual function fits with Hall's and Bhabha's idea that cultural identity emerges out of cultural antagonism, cultural struggle. Bhabha's Third Space is also applied to each of the songs to show that cultural "struggle" between colonizers and colonized produces cultural hybridities, musically expressed as fusions of styles/sounds. The purpose of combining semiotics and postcolonialism in the three songs to be analyzed is to show that marginal popular music, produced by members of cultural and racial minorities, establishes cultural identity and resists racist discourse by overwriting identities of racial/cultural stereotypes with identities shaped by the first person voice enunciated in the Third Space, to produce identities of cultural hybridities. Semiotic codes of embedded "Black" and "Indian" stereotypes in each song's musical and lyrical text will be read and shown to be overwritten by the semiotic codes of the first person voice, which are decoded with the aid of postcolonial concepts such as "ambivalence," "hybridity" and "enunciation."

Will the "fight" ever end? : a critical reading of the metaphors and discourses that construct HIV/AIDS in an African context

In this thesis, I critically examine the discourses that inform how we conceptualise HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa as they are produced in a sample of Canadian news articles, two nonfiction texts - Stephanie Nolen's 28 Stories of AIDS in Africa and Jonathan Morgan and the Bambanani Women's Group's Long Life ... Positive HIV Stories - as well as two literary texts - John Le Carre's popular fiction novel The Constant Gardener and an anthology of stories and poems from Southern Africa titled Nobody Ever Said AIDS, compiled and edited by Nobantu Rasebotsa, Meg Samuelson and Kylie Thomas. Paying particular attention to the role of metaphor in discursive formation, I have found that military metaphors, usually used in conjunction with biomedical discourses, continue to dominate what is said about HIV/AIDS. However, the use of military metaphors to conceptualise HIV/AIDS contributes to stigma and limits the effectiveness of responses to the pandemic. I argue that accessing alternative metaphors and discourses, such as biopsychosocial discourse, can lead to a more layered - and more beneficial - conceptualisation of HIV/AIDS, encouraging a more active response to the pandemic.

"Canada's toughest neighbourhood" : surveillance, myth and orientalism in Jane-Finch

This study examines coverage of lane-Finch in popular Canadian newspapers in 2007. It explores the often-negative representations of the community through conceptual frameworks based on the work of Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and Edward Said. The question it attempts to answer is: What knowledge and power relationships are embedded within depictions of lane-Finch in popular Canadian newspapers in 2007? The methodology is a version of critical discourse analysis based on Foucault's The Archaeology of Knowledge. It finds that predominantly-negative connotations of the neighbourhood are reinforced through the perpetuation of dominant discourses, the use of "expert" knowledge sources, and the discounting of subjugated knowledges or livedexperiences of residents. The study concludes by suggesting where further research within the realm of popular culture and community identity can be directed.

News in the age of empire : two war scandals

This thesis argues that the motivations underpinning the mainstream news media have fundamentally changed in the 21 sl century. As such, the news is no longer best understood as a tool for propaganda or agenda setting; instead it seems that the news is only motivated by the flow of global network capitalism. The author contrasts the work of Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman with that of Gilles Deleuze. Chomsky and Herman's 'Propaganda Model' has been influential within the fields of media studies and popular culture. The 'propaganda model' states that the concentration of ownership of the media has allowed the media elite to exert a disproportionate amount of influence over the mass media. Deleuze, on the other hand, regards the mass media as being yet another cog within the global capitalist mechanism, and is therefore separate from ideology or propaganda. The author proposes that 'propaganda' is no longer a sufficient word to describe the function of the news as terms like 'propaganda' imply some form of national sovereignty or governmental influence. To highlight how the news has 'changed from an instrument of propaganda to an instrument of accumulation, the author compares and contrasts the· coverage of the Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal with that of the Haditha Civilian Massacre. Although similar in nature, the author proposes that the Abu Ghraib Prison Scandal received a disproportionate amount of coverage within the mainstream press because of its exciting and sensational nature.

"The whole earth as village" : a chronotopic analysis of Marshall McLuhan's "Global Village" and Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner

Marshall McLuhan's "global village", and his theories on communications and technology, in conjunction with Patrick McGoohan's television series The Prisoner (ATV, 1967-1968) are explored in this thesis. The Prisoner, brainchild of McGoohan, is about the abduction and confinement of a British government agent imprisoned within the impenetrable boundaries of a benign but totalitarian city -state called "The Village". The purpose of his abduction and imprisonment is for the extraction of information regarding his resignation as a government spy. Marshall McLuhan originally popularized the phrase "the global village" in The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making o/the Topographic Man (1962), asserting that, "The new electronic interdependence recreates the world in the image of a global village" (p. 31). This thesis argues that valid parallels exist between McGoohan's conception of "village", as manifested in The Prisoner, and McLuhan's global village. The comprehensive methodological stratagem for this thesis includes Marshall McLuhan's "mosaic" approach, Mikhail Bakhtin's concept ofthe "chronotope", as well as a Foucauldian genealogicallhistorical discourse analysis. In the process of deconstructing McLuhan's texts and The Prisoner as products of the 1960s, an historical "constellation" (to use Walter Benjamin's concept) of the same present has been executed. By employing this synthesized methodology, conjunctions have been made between McLuhan's theories and the series' main themes of bureaucracy as dictatorship, the perversion of science and technology, freedom as illusion, and the individual in opposition to the collective. A thorough investigation of the global village and The Prisoner will determine whether or not Marshall McLuhan and/or Patrick McGoohan visualize the village as an enslaving technological reality.

Deconstructing a discourse : broadening understandings of teenage girls' "resistance"

Popular culture has a strong influence on youth, and the creation of meanings associated with youth. Representations within popular culture, specifically film, branch beyond entertainment and become discourses that construct how we perceive our world. Youth resistance is commonly represented in films geared towards the teenage gene{ation. Yet, the discourse of resistance has positioned females as non-resistors. This thesis addresses representations of teenage girl resistance within popular culture due to the strong influence film has on teenage girls today. This thesis will specificaIJy examine three films directed at North American teenage girls: Thirteen, Ghost World and The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants. Through a feminist poststructurallens utilizing discourse analysis, this thesis will examine teenage girl resistance as it is represented in the aforementioned films. This thesis repositions teenage girl resistance as a multi-dimensional concept, allowing for resistance to branch beyond the traditional meaning associated with it.