Doug Cumming - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Doug Cumming

Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Jul 1, 2012

This excellently researched and engaging narrative fills a gap in the many historical publication... more This excellently researched and engaging narrative fills a gap in the many historical publications about the Middle East from World War I through World War II. Most published memoirs, partisan tracts, and monographs have focused on specific Western governments that influenced the Middle East or on specific Middle Eastern regimes that collaborated with foreigners. Both Middle Easterners and foreigners have too often been portrayed in Manichean terms. James Barr goes beyond this to show how Anglo-French rivalry and suspicions affected Palestine and Syria, mandates, respectively, of Great Britain and France. Before, during, and after World War II, some French backed Zionist terror against Britain, just as some British backed Arab nationalists and separatists against France. History has long recognized Anglo-French enmities on the spot since the Fashoda Crisis in Sudan at the end of the 1890s, but Barr demonstrates how this enmity rose inside as well as outside the highest political circles in London and Paris. His first part, "The Carve-Up, 1915-1918," describes the partition of the Ottoman provinces in Asia by the British and French, a line having been drawn in the sand from the Mediterranean to the Persian frontier, with the northern part going to France and the southern part to Britain. Ministers made the most important decisions, with the British Empire doing the lion's share of the fighting and taking most of the spoils, but the French managed to take hold of Syria and Lebanon. The main actors on the spot and in London and Paris are vividly portrayed. The second part, "Interwar Tensions, 1920-1939," covers the messy assertions and postwar conferences, as the British vied with the French and others for the oil in northern Iraq as well as the pipelines to convey that oil to the Mediterranean. Though the Christians in Lebanon collaborated with the French no less than the Zionists in Palestine collaborated with the British, some Druze separatists in Syria were backed by the British against France in the 1920s, and some Zionist militants in Palestine were backed by the French against Britain in the 1930s.

In this paper we study the quantum dynamics of an electron/hole in a two-dimensional quantum ring... more In this paper we study the quantum dynamics of an electron/hole in a two-dimensional quantum ring within a spherical space. For this geometry, we consider a harmonic confining potential. Suggesting that the quantum ring is affected by the presence of an Aharonov-Bohm flux and an uniform magnetic field, we solve the Schrödinger equation for this problem and obtain exactly the eigenvalues of energy and corresponding eigenfunctions for this nanometric quantum system. Afterwards, we calculate the magnetization and persistent current are calculated, and discuss influence of curvature of space on these values.

American Journalism, 2012

American Journalism, 2005

The unanimous decision is seen as liberating the modem press by clamping a tight band around libe... more The unanimous decision is seen as liberating the modem press by clamping a tight band around libel suits that public officials may bring against news organizations. After Sullivan, to win a libel case, politicians would need to prove not only that a news item concerning them was inaccurate and harmful, The 1964 Supreme Court case ofNew York Times v. Sullivan, which gave American news organizations strong protection against libel suits from public officials, grew out ofthe civil rights turmoil in the Deep South. One aspect of that background was the simmering resentment that white Southerners hadlongfelt towardoutsiders who passedjudgment on the South in racial matters. This sore spot in the Southern psyche became a specialtyfor certain editors in the 1950s, such as Grover C. Hall Jr., of the Montgomery Advertiser. Hall's editorial campaign against the "hypocrisy" ofoutside coverage of the South's racial troubles is examined here as part of the context out ofwhich the Sullivan case emerged The paper looks at how built-up resentment exploded when the sit-in movement of 1960 triggered a series ofevents in Montgomery that led Police Commissioner L.B. Sullivan tojile his $500,000 libel suit against the Times. It argues that the theme ofSouthern editorial resentment against "Yankee" coverage helped shape the way the Alabama courts favored Sullivan, which. conversely. helped push the Supreme Court toward a resounding, unanimous ruling against Alabama.-Summer 2005 • 7 but also published maliciously-that is, the news organization lied or recklessly failed to seek the truth. This new burden of proof was necessary, Justice William Brennan famously wrote for the Court, in order to ensure that public debate remain "uninhibited, robust, and wide-open.'? The timing was significant. Just as the social revolutions of the 1960s were coming to a boil, Sullivan checked Southern politicians who were trying to stop coverage of the civil rights movement by national news organizations, particularly the New York Times. In the hands of such authorities, the Court said, libel was a modern form of seditious libel, the English common-law crime that was prosecuted by the crown to muzzle dissent or merely inconvenient facts.' According to this now-standard interpretation, Sullivan brought the First Amendment's free-press clause to fulfillment 175years after the framers wrote it, thus constitutionalizing the tort of libel. "The term 'seditious libel' may sound antique now, but the concept is certainly familiar to the twentieth century," Anthony Lewis wrote in his book about the Sullivan decision. "It is the standard practice of tyrannical governments to use the criminal law to insulate themselves from disagreement.?' But a closer look at the case's beginnings in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1960, throws some curious facts against the idea that Sullivan was primarily a battle between a free press and state authorities. The alleged libel, which appeared in a full-page fundraising advertisement in a New York Times, originally stirred indignation not from public officials but from the editor of the Montgomery Advertiser. The editor, Grover Cleveland Hall Jr., wrote that the advertisement was full of "lies, lies, lies."? Hall later volunteered as the first witness to testify for the plaintiff, Montgomery County Commissioner L. B. Sullivan." Roland Nachman, the attorney for Sullivan and other plaintiffs suing the Times, was also the attorney for the Montgomery Advertiser, and had defended Hall's newspaper against libel suits. Yet Hall gave Nachman permission to represent the plaintiffs against another newspaper.' Hall's actions might seem to be merely the parochialism of a local newspaper backing its community against attacks from a major national publication. But Hall was not the parochial type. He often, and fiercely, defended freedom of the press and had recently tangled with Sullivan in his newspaper over police handling of antiblack violence. A respected writer among fellow editors, at least in the South, Hall aspired to national attention and journalism awards." Yet he took sides with the plaintiffs in Sullivan, and did so with a passion fueled by his long-burning resentment of what he saw as 8 • American Journalism

Journalism History, 2014

This is the twelfth in a series of articles on archival collections of interest to mass communica... more This is the twelfth in a series of articles on archival collections of interest to mass communication historians. Readers of Journalism History are invited to suggest collections that they would like to see appear in future articles, and the editors would welcome volunteers to write such articles.

Choice Reviews Online, 2009

Encyclopedia of Journalism

Journal of American History, 2012

Journal of Magazine Media, 2006

Tom Wolfe ambles from the rear of this enormous ballroom in Boston where about 500 journalists, m... more Tom Wolfe ambles from the rear of this enormous ballroom in Boston where about 500 journalists, many of them star writers or future star writers for a variety of American newspapers and magazines, wait in silence. He is a familiar figure to this crowd, though at 74, his sharp-nosed prep-school looks have turned a bit wizen and one shoulder of his trademark white-suit jacket drapes, cape-fashion, over his left arm, which is in a sling. He rises to the lectern to kick off this Harvard conference on narrative journalism, and delivers the day's keynote address. These are not just journalists, but practitioners of a strand of news writing that consciously claims a literary pedigree going back to the nineteenth century, at least. In its ordinary guise in your local paper, it is merely feature writing, the soft lead, or one of those Sunday stories that runs on and on. But this tradition of American journalism has its occasional outbreaks of revolutionary fire, and one of those was led by Tom Wolfe in the 1960s and '70s under the banner of the New Journalism. The techniques used by Wolfe and his critter company in Esquire, New York, Harper's, and Rolling Stone became absorbed into the bloodstream of magazine and newspaper writing in the 1980s and '90s. These techniques, beneath the surface razzle-dazzle, were a handful of methods borrowed from fiction. Wolfe defined the New Journalism by identifying four of these: scene, dialogue, point-of-view, and status detail. The difference-and Wolfe repeatedly claimed this made it superior to contemporary fiction-was that it was all true. This required more than basic fact-gathering. It required what he called "saturation reporting," vacuumcleaning every last detail. Okay, but how can a reporter know what was going on inside someone's head for point-of-view writing? Simple, Wolfe said. You ask them.