Blackout!: mediated public deliberation and desegregation in Houston
Abstract
Mediated public deliberation involves professional communicators communicating with the public to ensure that the public's policy preferences are informed, enlightened, and authentic. In a basic sense, good information can lead to informed public decisions, while poor mediated public deliberation appears to do the opposite. The Civil Rights movement was a watershed in this nation's history. People like Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks and places like Little Rock, Arkansas, and Montgomery, Alabama, might come to mind when discussing the Civil Rights movement. Houston, Texas, typically does not. Thomas R. Cole, whose documentary, The Strange Demise of Jim Crow, chronicles the desegregation of public accommodations, says in his film that Houston is typically regarded as a place where "nothing happened" during the Civil Rights movement. However, the movement was really quite active in Houston; interestingly enough, no one knew about it. Three media blackouts occurred in Houston during the 1960s, which prevented coverage of sit-ins and establishment segregation from reaching the public. My thesis focuses on research into how these media blackouts affected mediated public deliberation in newspaper coverage of desegregation and integration in Houston. My research consisted of tracking racial-violence and civil-rights-related coverage during 1960, the year of the first media blackout. By monitoring the coverage over the entire year, I felt I would be able to create a better picture of how the elite press covered the events. I hypothesized: I would find a decline in the amount of coverage that the civil rights movement in Houston received, Houston would receive a relatively large share of the media attention, and local protest coverage would be replaced by positive national racial integration stories. All the hypotheses I selected in my methods section were unsupported by the research for this project. Though there appeared to be significant effects on mediated public deliberation, both the amount of coverage and the types of data needed to support these hypotheses were unavailable. From the available information, though, it is clear that the media blackout was successful -- by chance or design, Houston left little behind to speak of the interesting arrangement that took place.
Description
Due to the character of the original source materials and the nature of batch digitization, quality control issues may be present in this document. Please report any quality issues you encounter to digital@library.tamu.edu, referencing the URI of the item.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 45-47).
Citation
Jacobs, Carrie A (2001). Blackout!: mediated public deliberation and desegregation in Houston. Texas A&M University. Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /ETD -TAMU -2001 -Fellows -Thesis -J33.