"A Degree of Disillusion": News Media,Photojournalism,and Visual Narratives of the Vietnam War.
详细信息
- 作者：Wade ; Walter Patrick.
- 学历：Ph.D.
- 年：2013
- 导师：Hariman, Robert D.,eadvisorRay, Angela G.ecommittee memberEttema, James S.ecommittee memberBaldwin, Kate A.ecommittee member
- 毕业院校：Northwestern University
- Department：Communication Studies
- ISBN：9781267989185
- CBH：3556672
- Country：USA
- 语种：English
- FileSize：61457811
- Pages：258
文摘
In this doctoral dissertation, I examine the changing conventions of combat photography in the Vietnam Era as a means of investigating critical questions about the performance of the press during the conflict. A scholarly consensus suggests that the press largely followed public opinion in its reportage, only turning critical after the U.S. public had itself turned against the war. Such literature offers little valuation, however, of the performance of photojournalists alongside the decline of support for the war during the escalation period, between 1965 and 1967. In the first chapter, I introduce the overall conceptual and historical problems motivating the dissertation project by reviewing debates about the role of the press during the war. In the second chapter, I examine the articulation of the Cold War consensus to contain communism in elite business, government, and press discourse, showing how messages about the Cold War world were presented to public audiences with implications for the extension of the Cold War to Asia. In that chapter, I also track the importance of the visual narratives of World War II, Cold War, and Korean War photojournalism in making the Cold War consensus visually coherent for public audiences. In the third chapter, I track the emergence of tragic conventions for the visual representation of war in the photojournalism of Larry Burrows, focusing particularly on his photo-essay "One Ride with Yankee Papa 13." I argue that Burrowss photo-essay functioned as a rhetorical prototype, ripe for emulation and transformation by future combat photographers. In the fourth chapter, I track the circulation of realistic, ironic, and romantic conventions for the representation of war across the work of a number of prominent photojournalists between 1965 and 1967. I argue that the juxtaposition of romantic and ironic conventions for telling tragic stories allowed Vietnam photojournalism to produce a wide variety of polarized responses, contributing to the larger development of controversy during this period. I argue that news and general interest magazines visual representations of the Vietnam War played an important role in changing how the U.S. public saw and understood both the conflict itself and Americas larger role in the world.