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This monograph is a case study of newspaper competition in New Hampshire between the province's official newspaper and an upstart Whig challenger in the period marked by contention over the Stamp Act (1765-1766) and over the tight oligarchical reign of the Wentworth family. The case study is grounded in the civic republican tradition articulated by Bernard Bailyn and Gordon Wood as well as the revisionist scholarship since the 1960s that takes the role of the “little people” seriously. It maintains that the competition between the two newspapers contributed to, and opened up, the public spaces in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, to a wider compass than might have been predicted if one follows the standard Habermasian argument for the develop of a bourgeois public sphere. In part, these more diverse public spheres grew out of a staple of ritualized communication in the form of effigy demonstration reports and stamp master resignation speeches at both the local and intercolonial levels. The paper traces the provenance of these reports to the rough music of the colonists' English ancestors so beautifully articulated by E.P. Thompson. The Whig challenger also championed a rollicking and irreverent, rhetorical epistolary form that involved status reversals and mocked deference in a highly amusing, yet serious, manner.

Of all the groups negatively impacted by the Exxon Valdez oil spill, in many ways Alaska Natives were the most devastated. The oil spill.. shook the ... cultural foundations of Native life. Alaska Native subsistence culture is based on an intimate relationship with the environment. Not only does the environment have sacred qualities for Alaska Natives, but their survival depends on the well-being of the ecosystem and the maintenance of cultural norms of subsistence (Gill and Picou, 1997: 168), While Alaska's seven indigenous cultural groups are culturally distinct, its 85,000 Native residents do share a common reverence for the land and sea. Indeed, they see themselves as an integral part of nature. As the quote suggests, Alaska Natives also share cultural norms of subsistence. Since statehood in 1959, subsistence has been at the heart of a cultural divide with Alaska Natives on one side and non-Natives and the State on the other. This ongoing dispute has drawn in the federal government as the trustee for Native subsistence practices. David Case, the foremost expert on Alaska Native laws, maintains that "Actions and events which interfere with subsistence inevitably cut across the whole cloth of Native culture. Understandably, Natives perceive threats to subsistence as threats to their cultural survival..." (1984: 276). Federal legislation in the 1980s generally defined subsistence as encompassing three conceptual elements: (a) continued economic or physical reliance, (b) cultural or social value, and (c) custom or tradition (Case, 1984: 275). In dealing with subsistence issues, the State of Alaska has vacillated between recognizing Native cultural values and invoking values of individualism and common use. In 1989, the Alaska Supreme Court ruled that the rural subsistence preference discriminated against urban residents. This decision led to a federal takeover of hunting and fishing regulations on federal lands in Alaska (60 percent of the state) in order to protect Native subsistence rights (McBeath and Morehouse, 1994: 113). The subsistence issue and its rural/urban and Native/non-Native split is replicated on most development issues in Alaska, including those on federal lands. Consequently, when the supertanker Exxon Valdez ripped its hull open on Bligh Reef on March 24, 1989, and spilled nearly 11 million gallons of crude oil in the pristine waters of Prince William Sound, it became a potent symbol of these disparate ideological interests. The interests at stake included those of multinational oil companies, of a heavily oil-dependent Alaskan state government, of a federal government with military and energy interests in oil, of an American public in love with gas-guzzling automobiles, of environmentalists from conservationists to preservationists, and of culturally distinct Alaska Native groups. Given the centrality of land in these ideological differences, it is useful to think of the "Far North" as sites or places of sharp conflict between those desiring to extract valuable natural resources, those desiring to protect threatened species and land, and those striving to maintain the vitality and integrity of unique human cultures (see Young, 1992, 5). In their analysis of public opinion and media discourses, Gamson and Modigliani suggest that on any policy issue it is appropriate to think of multiple discourses interacting in complex ways (1989: 2-3). As they see it, journalists manage this complexity by producing internally structured packages with up to five framing devices that make sense of events and suggest what is at issue (1989: 2-3). Their framing devices include metaphors, exemplars from the past, catchphrases, depictions, and visual images (1989: 3). while all of these framing devices are of course pertinent to the journalistic packaging of the Exxon Valdez oil spill, I have dealt with most of them in previous research' and will here largely restrict my analysis to a particular form of visual imagery. …

Beginning with the arrival of Russian fur traders in 1741, Alaska natives have faced repeated threats to their territorial sovereignty and subsistence practices. Their struggles to maintain their cultures have taken place against the backdrop of a white discursive hegemony that has defined the terms of the conflicts as well as the very identity of the people. To reveal a piece of this symbolic terrain, the authors examine the work of Presbyterian missionary Sheldon Jackson and The North Star, a newspaper he established in Sitka in the late nineteenth century. An analysis of Jackson's concepts of indigenous cultures as embodied in his educational and ethnological activities reveals his aim of erasing indigenous cultures to civilize and christianize the natives. A critical reading of The North Star shows how it was used as a publicity device to enlist the support of influential Eastern readers in the mission's work.

Students of the news will welcome Deepa Kumar’s analysis of coverage of the 1997 UPS strike. Media coverage of that strike was notable for its departure from standard narratives concerning labor-management disputes. Most often, strikes are framed as disruptive, inconvenient to the public, and harmful to the economy.While news reports about the UPS strike often reflected these pro-business sentiments, they also, at times, represented labor’s point of view. Kumar presents a comprehensive examination of why this coverage was anomalous. Kumar adopts a ‘‘domination/resistance’’ model of media power, following Gramsci’s notion of hegemony. Based on this model, she argues that the news media are contradictory institutions that most often uphold the status quo by an over-reliance on official sources, and by unreflectively reproducing a professional ideology congruent with values and beliefs of the country’s power structures. She takes liberal apologists of the news media to task for their easy acceptance of the marriage of capitalism and democracy, criticizes the Chomsky-Herman model of political economy of the media for its overemphasis on the engineering of consent, and skewers postmodernist versions of cultural studies for their valorization of textual reading as resistance. Kumar maintains that, for the last third of the twentieth century, neoliberal strategies of globalization have given rise to a whole series of working class issues that were not unique to UPS: part-time employment, stagnant wages, subcontracting, speedups, diminished safety and health protection, and the pension grab. The heart of her book resides in her textual/framing analyses of network television in chapter 3, and mainstream newspaper coverage by USA Today, the New York

This article charts and analyses the place of community radio among rural-based Native Alaskans. The introduction of community radio received major financial support during the War on Poverty in the 1960s, but since has had to struggle and compromise on principles of control for existence. One of the outcomes of this struggle was increasing cultural self-awareness and willingness to engage in collective actions by Alaska Natives. The analysis of this development leans on Carey’s notion of a ritual view of communication, and the authors contend, in conclusion, that the cultural integrity of Native peoples in Alaska requires restoration of local control over community radio.

Despite Wright's optimistic claim in 1974 that func tionalism was alive and well, it seems that both con ceptually and empirically, functionalism has been o f little value... Mass communication theory needs a comprehensive research approach which takes into consideration producers (including vested interests) and consumers, as well as other definable groups and intervening social processes and relations.... What is needed is a theory of society that embraces not only the control mechanisms serving to maintain the social order but which also deals with the conflict ual processes that resist or attempt to subvert the "equilibrium"....

The researcher who opts for the phenomenological approach must further explore the methods he/she employs in order to identify their ad hoc nature.

Television was introduced to remote areas of Alaska in the 1970s through a series of government sponsored experimental projects in low‐power television transmission, bicycled videocassettes, and satellite delivery. Using a participatory model of development, the state attempted to involve users in planning systems and selecting programs. A review of projects reveals that the power and autonomy of consumer committees were weakened by technical and temporal imperatives.

“Objectivity”; has been a traditional ideal for American journalism despite recent characterizations of the principle as “biased toward the status quo, against independent thinking, and against countenancing questions of morality and responsibility.”; This article explores the role of traditional objectivity in newspaper coverage of the nomination in Alaska of a socialist commissioner of environmental conservation and the subsequent “framing”; of public discussion. The human qualities of sensitivity to history, to civil liberties, and to questions of morality appeared in editorials, but professional norms of objectivity denied reporters the right to exercise their creativity and public responsibility. Reportorial sensitivity to diverse sources is necessary, supplemented by a fundamental and far‐reaching examination of how reportorial language encodes public and private questions in ways that further established positions of power and privilege.