Search

Le but de la présente thèse est de comprendre pourquoi, dans les opérations de contre-terrorisme, l’exécutif responsable de l’élaboration de la politique stratégique de Washington semble manifester une confiance aveugle envers les drones armés. Faisant appel à la théorie post-structuraliste des relations internationales, nous avons pour objectif de dépasser les conceptions traditionnelles de la formulation de la politique, notamment l’approche bureaucratique, par une démarche fondée sur l’analyse du contenu de discours présidentiels et d’articles médiatiques. La recherche englobe les présidences de George W. Bush, Barack Obama et Donald Trump. Les discours de ces présidents au sujet du terrorisme et de l’utilisation des drones armés seront analysés, ainsi qu’un corpus d’articles médiatiques publiés dans le New York Times et le Washington Post pour la même période. Pour ce faire, nous aurons recours au logiciel NVivo pour nous aider à synthétiser le contenu des discours et articles. Nous proposons que, dans leurs rapports avec les médias et le public, les élites responsables de formuler la politique étrangère américaine se sont enfermées dans un discours identitaire qui agit tel le référent pour expliquer le terrorisme à la population américaine et justifier le recours aux drones armés, limitant ainsi la formulation d’options différentes. La question de recherche à laquelle nous tenterons de répondre est la suivante : pourquoi les décideurs responsables de formuler la politique étrangère américaine privilégient-ils l’usage des drones armés dans la lutte contre le terrorisme? Pour répondre à la question de recherche, nous testerons les hypothèses suivantes : H1 : Le discours identitaire sur le terrorisme, autant dans le langage des élites que dans celui des médias, ne change peu ou pas dans la période à l’étude. H2 : La représentation publique que l’on se fait des drones armés, autant chez les élites que chez les médias, ne change peu ou pas pendant la période à l’étude. H3 : Parmi les solutions envisagées par les élites et les médias pour lutter contre le terrorisme, le recours aux drones armés domine l’espace narratif. L’analyse montre qu’une stabilité discursive consacre l’humanisme des Américains par opposition à une déshumanisation des cibles terroristes. La stabilité de ce discours identitaire est rendue possible par l’utilisation des drones armés, des outils qui seraient extrêmement précis permettant ainsi une utilisation de la force discriminée en respect des droits humains, en opposition à l’utilisation indiscriminée de la violence par l’ennemi terroriste. En conclusion, la thèse souligne l’importance de l’étude du langage pour approfondir notre compréhension de la formulation de la politique étrangère.

Public opinion on salient issues and elite's knowledge of the public are both reliant on framed information, as they often depend on the media as a communication tool. Media tone also influences political behavior by affecting the perceptions that the public has on issues and events. In this study I examine the tone and framing of abortion media coverage by three different media outlets each with a different ideology leaning. I test assumptions made by cascade activation model and the economic theory of news making by answering the question how does partisan media report the issue of abortion? I answer this question by analyzing the tone and framing of 45 abortion articles from Politico, a Liberal leaning news outlet, 65 news articles from The Daily Caller, a Conservative news outlet, and 45 news articles from the NY Times, one that is considered independent. Results found that in accordance with what cascading and economic theory of news would predict, the news outlets are likely to prioritize their audience's ideology in their content by keeping it in line with the continually pushed abortion frames that each side identified with.

This thesis examines three United States newspapers’ (the New York Times, ChicagoDefender, and Montgomery Advertiser) coverage on race issues within the United States,and their coverage on discrimination and race issues from the Nazis from 1933 to 1945. Itcompares and contrasts how these influential newspapers covered these two country’sdiscriminatory laws and ideologies. James Q. Whitman argued in his book, Hitler’sAmerican Model, that leading Nazis and Hitler himself looked at the United States forinspiration for discriminatory methods.After performing a textual analysis of over 140 newspaper articles, this thesisargues that there were differences in how the journalists covered Nazi issues versus localissues. The journalists were quick to be critical of the Nazis, but often shied away fromcriticizing American racism.

Kamala Harris made history on November 7, 2020, when she was elected as the first female Vice President of the United States. In addition to being the first woman, she became the first African-American and Indian-American to attain this position. As a result, the media had to grapple with how to cover her historic campaign from the moment she was announced as the vice-presidential selection. This qualitative thematic analysis examined The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal's coverage of her campaign with significant analysis on important events such as the initial buzz surrounding her selection, the convention speech, and the vice-presidential debate. Specifically, this study examines 70 news articles total from both newspapers from August 11-November 3, 2020 to determine the recurring themes from her coverage. Results indicated that although traditional media frames and themes were not a significant focus, Harris's intersectionality brought about a new set of frames to explore, with subtle differences between the two newspapers. Implications of these results and future considerations for the media are discussed.

Using Grunig & Hunt’s models of public relations, this thesis provides a longitudinal content analysis of NASA press materials and New York Times newspaper articles from 1963 to 2011 with regards to various sampled crewed and uncrewed spaceflight missions. Additionally, semi-structured interviews with space industry practitioners, including NASA public affairs officers, journalists, and astronauts, were gathered to provide additional insight to content analysis. From the 1960s up until the 1990s, NASA used a public information model to inform journalists about key facts. After the 1990s, NASA public affairs used a mixed motives model, tailoring to their audiences and messages. While in the beginning, NASA could rely on journalists to share their narrative and instead focused on disseminating the scientific results to the press. Present-day NASA has developed strategies and tactics to support their brand narrative and acknowledge their various audiences that interact with the agency.

Using Grunig & Hunt’s models of public relations, this thesis provides a longitudinal content analysis of NASA press materials and New York Times newspaper articles from 1963 to 2011 with regards to various sampled crewed and uncrewed spaceflight missions. Additionally, semi-structured interviews with space industry practitioners, including NASA public affairs officers, journalists, and astronauts, were gathered to provide additional insight to content analysis. From the 1960s up until the 1990s, NASA used a public information model to inform journalists about key facts. After the 1990s, NASA public affairs used a mixed motives model, tailoring to their audiences and messages. While in the beginning, NASA could rely on journalists to share their narrative and instead focused on disseminating the scientific results to the press. Present-day NASA has developed strategies and tactics to support their brand narrative and acknowledge their various audiences that interact with the agency.

This dissertation explores the role of African media in shaping Africa’s image through both the analysis of newspapers over the course of the 2014 Ebola crisis and an exploration of African films. This methodology redeploys aspects of Africa’s (in)visibility in global politics and discourse on representation in geopolitics. Placing African film and media organizations at the center of analysis in this study is vital, as they add diversity of voices to the conversation about Africa’s image in the media.The dissertation looks at how Africa is framed as perpetually “in crisis.” Specifically, the research engages analysis of African film and media depictions under the premise of crises to advance Africa’s visual culture and representation. I am interested in exploring how coverage of the 2014 Ebola outbreak in The Inquirer, a major English newspaper in Liberia, compares with that in the New York Times coverage of the 2014 Ebola outbreak. Likewise, I explore how African cinema frames and represents crisis through three films – Xala (Ousmane Sembene, 1975); Pumzi (Wanuri Kahiu, 2009); and Les Saignantes (Jean-Pierre Bekolo, 2005).I argue that African films speak to the possibility of positive anticipated outcomes ignored by western scholars, and, therefore, possess the agency to decolonize minds. For instance, Pumzi and Les Saignantes offer an outlook on Africa’s challenges and possibilities through newly imagined futures. Precisely, the selected films first address Africa’s crisis in relation to the political, economic, and environmental struggle as well as gender discourses and, second, offer a prescription of development and progress. How do African filmmakers and media personnel, through their various creative works, reconstruct Africa’s global identity? Finally, I advance that this research gives voice to how Africa frames crisis.This dissertation interrogates an unbalanced global power structure that has been typically Eurocentric. Taking an opposing position, this project foregrounds Africa’s representation of crisis from an African-based perspective. The academic discourse of this dissertation is situated within several disciplines: African Media studies, Cultural Studies, African Film Studies, and Visual and Popular Culture. These disciplines intersect within the ideological debates about Africa’s politicized representations, usually from a postcolonial standpoint, to redefine and reconstruct cultural misrepresentations.The dissertation concludes that though Western media continues to negatively frame Africa as a place of unending crisis, Africa’s media, scholars and journalists are taking equal ownership of its crises and reshaping the continent’s image in the global scene. It confirms that Africa’s media such as the selected films and new media that are analyzed in this study, portray Africa in a way that corrects misconceptions and reshapes the continent's identity for the rest of the world.

The fall of the Berlin Wall is widely seen as one of the defining moments of international relations in the twentieth century. The thesis compares and contrasts how the American and German narratives reconstruct and interpret the events of November 9, 1989 and its aftermath. The analysis presented here highlights some of the key distinctions in how American and German newspaper narratives are presented. In the American newspapers, reports focus on anecdotal stories in an effort to humanize the event and connect their readers to something that may or may not impact their daily lives. The German newspapers, in contrast, emphasize the facts and intricacy of the chronology of events. In both the American and German newspapers sample, there is a shift in perspectives between the 1990s and 2009 – in the years immediately following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the articles analyzed here overwhelmingly play into commonly lived memory, comparing the “then and now.” In 2009, however, articles speak of this event in a more metaphorical sense, using it as a moral lesson.

Boxer Cassius Clay exploded unto public consciousness during a time of turbulent change in U.S. politics, race relations, and journalism. This thesis examines a particular subset of news coverage of Clay from his first title fight through his conversion to Islam and adoption of the name Muhammad Ali, on through his refusal to be drafted to fight in the Vietnam War, and finally to his triumphant return to boxing. The author chose to examine the work of two New York Times reporters, Arthur Daley and Robert Lipsyte, as a case study of traditional vs. “new” journalism in their coverage of one of the most colorful and controversial figures of the 1960s and 1970s. Daley, an old-school journalist, saw Clay/Ali primarily as a clown, iconoclast, and threat, while Lipsyte, much younger and an outsider to mainstream journalism in significant ways, saw him primarily as an avatar of positive change. The author examined the stories and columns by these two writers using critical discourse analysis and the Hierarchical Influences Model of media content developed by Pamela Shoemaker and Stephen J. Reese.

This study analyzes the reporting of four issues that have impacted the Native American community. The research begins by addressing historical events that transformed Native American identity and have shaped the media’s representation of Native identity. Framing theory, muted group theory, and tribal critical race theory support this study, with framing theory focusing on examining the news discourse. This study seeks to identify how Native American issues are framed differently in Indian Country Today Media Network and the New York Times, and seeks to identify if the Native voice can be heard in articles written by Native journalists. The results of this study suggest that the sources were the most significant difference between the articles by ICTMN and the NYT. Sources also were the key element in hearing the Native voice.

Most Americans, whether consciously or unconsciously, associate certain defining traits with the contemporary American press: a broad definition of news, an emphasis on analysis, a skeptical tone, and adherence to a specific definition of objectivity. None of these elements characterized American newspapers in 1960, but all were firmly in place by 1980. Remaking the News examines how that remarkable transformation occurred, and how it influenced politics and society. While focusing mainly on two newspapers—The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times—it attempts to analyze the media business as a whole. Chapter 1 describes the rise of interpretive reporting. A response to competition from other news media and to the changing demographic profile of newspaper audiences and staffs, interpretation contributed to the disintegration of the Cold War consensus and to a reappraisal of American journalism’s bedrock principle, objectivity. As Chapters 2 and 3 show, objectivity came under attack simultaneously from the right and the left, launching a debate that has persisted to this day but that, paradoxically, reinforced most news-industry leaders’ faith in the ideal. Chapter 4 examines how newspapers began giving readers what they wanted to know, rather than telling them what (in the editors’ view) they needed to know. This resulted in a greater focus on soft news and service journalism, which helped validate a broader shift in the primary identity of the American public, from citizens to consumers. These changes occurred amid powerful political and social currents in the journalism profession and the country at large. Chapter 5 describes how challenges from minorities and women forced the press to adjust its discriminatory employment practices as well as its dismissive treatment of women and non-whites in news coverage. The social movements and political turbulence of the late 60s and early 70s also led journalists to take a more adversarial approach to news subjects, as Chapter 6 discusses. In addition to providing a novel interpretation of how the press assumed its contemporary form, this dissertation suggests that the evolution of American politics and society since 1960 cannot be understood without considering the evolution of journalism from 1960-1980.

While the threat of climate change grows stronger along with the consensus of scientists about the certainty of anthropogenic causes, researchers observe an opposite effect in the public’s acceptance of climate science. While climate change is a salient topic in society, the media’s presentation of climate change has varied over time and the public remains politically divided on the issue. This content analysis of 134 New York Times’ climate change articles between 2001 and 2013 identified six different types of media frames associated with climate change coverage and investigated the presentation of scientific information within those frames. This study also investigated the congruence between scientific consensus regarding climate change, the public’s perception of current scientific knowledge and the way climate change is talked about in the media.

While the threat of climate change grows stronger along with the consensus of scientists about the certainty of anthropogenic causes, researchers observe an opposite effect in the public’s acceptance of climate science. While climate change is a salient topic in society, the media’s presentation of climate change has varied over time and the public remains politically divided on the issue. This content analysis of 134 New York Times’ climate change articles between 2001 and 2013 identified six different types of media frames associated with climate change coverage and investigated the presentation of scientific information within those frames. This study also investigated the congruence between scientific consensus regarding climate change, the public’s perception of current scientific knowledge and the way climate change is talked about in the media.

This dissertation examines the development of relationships between the U.S. press andthe Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) during the Cold War, from shortly before the official creation of the CIA in 1947 to the major congressional investigations of the CIA in 1975-76. This dissertation seeks to answer four related questions. First, what was the nature and origin of the relationships that developed between the press and the CIA? Second, to what use did the CIA attempt to put such relationships? Third, what was the actual impact of press/CIA relationships on reporting? Finally, how did the CIA’s relations with the press affect the development of the agency? The efforts to answer these questions involved two main methods. The first method was an extensive examination of the product of domestic newspapers and journals from 1945 to 1976 that examined the activities of the CIA and the development of the U.S. intelligence system. The second method was archival research in private and institutional collections. I conclude that there was no single relationship formed between the CIA and the press. The CIA did have a program of operationally using reporters, though details remain difficult to determine. More important than paid relationships, though, were personal connections that ranged from casual contact to collaboration with the CIA to achieve CIA goals. These positive relationships depended heavily upon a shared ideological worldview. The CIA sought to use these relationships both to conceal information and also, at times, to promote itself and secure a strong position within the hierarchy of the U.S. governmental bureaucracy. While early reporting on the CIA was often positive, and the CIA was successful in keeping its activities out of the press when desired, the positive press environment of the late 1940s and 1950s was more the result of the Cold War consensus environment than the result of deliberate CIA action. Even at their most positive, relationships between the press and the CIA did not succeed in preventing entirely criticism of the CIA, or the publication of some details of CIA activities. As U.S. society and views on the Cold War changed, the press atmosphere became more challenging for the CIA. Ultimately, the press played an important role in the development of the CIA, both in the agency’s early years as the press was more helpful and in later years as the agency struggled to adapt to a changing political environment.

In 2004, CBS 60 Minutes II broadcast a collection of horrific pictures, depicting torture at Abu Ghraib, a U.S. military run prison in Iraq. This study explores the media response to the scandal, and contains analysis of a total of 274 articles from the New York Times and the Washington Post. The goal of this study is to better understand how media in the United States act, or fail to act, as a critical balance to government action. Using symbolic convergence theory and fantasy theme analysis, the researcher identified three fantasy themes prevalent in this newspaper coverage: 1) Soldier as a Victim of Circumstance; 2) Saddam “Tortures,” Bad Apples “Abuse”; 3) U.S. as Responsible. These themes combine to turn this event into a blameless blunder, and one that, today, most Americans have forgotten.

Americans, whether they work in the health care industry or not, have a variety of sources available to them to learn about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (ACA). Newspapers, magazines, television advertising or broadcast news, industry mailings, friends, family and neighbors all offer explanations and opinions on components of the health care act. For the purposes of this project, I focused on three national newspapers and three of the most widely read industry journals. I set out to assess coverage of the ACA in three nationally-distributed newspapers with the highest circulation: New York Times, USA Today and Wall Street Journal and to compare their coverage with that of the three of the most widely read health care trade publications among the top health insurance companies in the United States: Modern Healthcare, Managed Care, and American Journal of Managed Care. I polled the Communications or Media Relations departments of the largest health care insurers—Aetna, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Cigna, and Humana— to determine their top trade publications by subscription. I extracted every article published between March 1, 2013, and Oct. 1, 2013, that mentioned the ACA in those six publications for a total of 436 articles. I chose those dates because the three-year anniversary of the 2010 Affordable Care Act occurred in March and the state, federal and partnership exchanges were scheduled to open for individuals’ enrollment at the beginning of October this year. I set up the project as a four-part, long-form health care trade publication series that is targeted to a professional audience with moderate to extensive healthcare industry knowledge. • Part One provides background on the act and a brief overview. • Part Two examines coverage of ACA provisions in mass media versus health care trade publications, identifies the top and bottom five ACA provisions by the frequency in which they appeared in the articles examined and discusses the top five in-depth. • Part Three further discusses ACA coverage in the six publications by looking more closely at positive versus negative portrayals. • Part Four examines the ACA’s impact by focusing on who, according to the publications, wins and loses.

Within the context of the Progressive era, this dissertation offers an in-depth analysis of the state of intercollegiate athletics around the turn of the twentieth century, the transformations it underwent, and the media's role in that process. The National Collegiate Athletic Association was founded in 1906-in the middle of the Progressive era-after a public outcry for football reform came in 1905, a year that produced eighteen deaths and one hundred forty-nine reported injuries.Using framing theory and the concept of collective memory, this study seeks to explore the coverage of college athletics by popular mass circulation magazines from 1896 to 1916 and the coverage of the National Collegiate Athletic Association by the New York Times and the evening edition of the New York World from 1906 to 1916.Four media frames were found in popular magazines from 1896 to 1916 focusing on college athletics, including Call for Reform, Muscular Christianity, Evils of College Athletics, and Methods in Strategy. The most dominant frame, "Call for Reform," emphasized the constant debate occurring within the pages of these magazines as to whether the benefits of competitive college athletics outweighed their possible evils. The primary examples were commercialism, professionalism, football rule changes, and alumni issues. The "muscular Christianity" frame reiterated the importance and benefits of college athletics as a key to defining men as men worthwhile, stressing a martial mentality. Even though primarily focused on manhood, examples of this frame applied to women's athletics as well, and it was the only one to highlight women's athletics.To combat the tendency of educators and sporting advocates to oversell the benefits of college athletics, popular magazines published articles noting the "evils of college athletics," namely the win-at-any-cost mentality and the hero culture surrounding popular athletes. The most common example of this frame focused on the shift in focus from academic scholarship to athletics. The "methods in strategy" frame provided vivid details to readers as to the ways in which to develop and make an intercollegiate team as well as the proper training for certain sports.Close examination of the New York Times and The Evening World reveals the dawning of the NCAA's evolution into a dominating and powerful regulator of intercollegiate athletics as these newspapers charted the progression of its growing influence over college athletics. As more institutions joined and as the most prestigious institutions gave up their resistance to join, the NCAA began its transformation into the largest and most influential governing body in the field of intercollegiate sports, and the struggle for control of intercollegiate athletics is highlighted throughout this analysis.

The sport industry came to a standstill after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Major sporting events were postponed or canceled in lieu of the tragedy and for a week, while the nation mourned, the country went without sports. For many of the leagues it was the first extended hiatus for a non-labor dispute in nearly a century. On September 17, Major League Baseball returned, the first sport to resume, and when the games did recommence there were noticeable changes. Throughout this period, the New York Times, one of the country’s most prestigious newspapers, produced a sports section in every edition. The purpose of this study was to examine how the New York Times framed sport’s response to 9/11.Framing theory provided the theoretical framework of this examination, which incorporated a textual analysis of each article printed from September 12, 2001 to December 31, 2001. Additionally, four journalists from the Times were interviewed to provide supplementary context to the framing of sport’s response to tragedy. The culmination of this methodological procedure produced five frames: diminished significance of sport, sport as a distraction, united community symbolically moving onward, logistical understanding, and loss of innocence. Each contributed to the overall framing, or understanding, of 9/11. Diminished significance of sport defined the re-evaluated importance of sport in contrast to the tragic realities illuminated by terrorism. The sportswriters often referred to sport as a couple hours away from reality, assuming the role of a distraction. Many of the sporting events following the attacks held ceremonies or tributes that were heavily reliant on the use of symbolism, which was representative of the nation’s feelings. There were also logistical measures described in order for sport to navigate the upheaval of scheduling caused by 9/11. Finally, there was a demarcation of pre- and post-9/11 infused with loss that shaped the loss of innocence frame.The conclusion was an understanding that sport was less important comparatively to the tragedy, but through symbolism and distraction did play a distinctive role in the recovery. There were logistical challenges in resuming and when the games did return, they were not the same.

The study seeks to answer whether or not there was imbalance in news reporting in the three newspapers with the largest circulation in the country during the healthcare reform debate: USA Today, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times. The results of this study show that a majority of the 986 articles reviewed were found to be neutral in terms of news reporting. In the remaining articles, however, articles in the USA Today and The New York Times were found to lean slightly toward the pro-reform/liberal perspective, while articles in The Wall Street Journal leaned slightly toward the anti-reform/conservative perspective.

This study aims to examine cases of newspaper framing that have not been researched exhaustively or in a comparative manner. By using framing to compare cases that involve indicted athletes of various ages and races, this study analyzes content of how newspapers framed athletes amid allegations that they committed violent crimes. This can be accomplished by analyzing media coverage from a common national newspaper and through various newspapers local to the athlete’s team or the area where the alleged crime took place.The overarching research question of this study is the following: To what extent do prominence, proximity and orientation affect newspaper framing of indicted U.S. athletes? For the purpose of comparability, only violent crimes that implicate famous athletes, or college athletes attending a prestigious institution, are examined in this study. “Violent crime” is defined as murder, rape or any type of assault or domestic violence.This case examines the 2000 murder indictment of professional football player Ray Lewis of the Baltimore Ravens, the 2006 rape indictment of three members of the Duke University lacrosse team, and the 2004 assault indictment of professional basketball player Ron Artest, who contributed to a brawl between fans and players during a National Basketball Association game between the Detroit Pistons and the Indiana Pacers.The Duke lacrosse case, as mentioned, has drawn some scholarly attention, but Lewis’ murder indictment and Artest’s assault charge have largely been forgotten, underreported and less researched. That justifies the relevance of this study, which compares collegiate and professional athletes of differing ages and races who have been charged with different types of crimes. Time has elapsed since the criminal proceedings ended, and one of the premises here is that newspapers presented frames that either heavily emphasized or neglected to mention the criminal charges from the last decade.

Relying on framing theory, this study used The New York Times to explore how Chinese news was depicted before, during and after the Beijing Summer Olympics. The research regarding how the Chinese government tried to leverage the Olympics to enhance its image is often deliberated. However, there have only been a 3 few studies on the evaluation of the effects the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games had on the image of China, as depicted by The New York Times. This study generated an understanding of the impact the presentations of The New York Times had on the soft power used by China through the Beijing Summer Olympic Games. The study examined how the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics were associated with the depiction of Chinese news in The New York Times during the pre-, mid-, and post-Olympics years. Specifically, world and business sections within The New York Times were mainly influenced by the effects of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. In addition, there were no direct associations found between the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics and how China was depicted photographically in The New York Times. In terms of the above factors; this study showed that China's national image did not improve in the New York Times after the 2008 Bejing Summer Olympic Games.

Throughout the United States occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934, the U.S. government and its supporters were forced to defend the legitimacy of American action. In order to justify it to the American public, officials and journalists created a dichotomy of capacity between an inferior Haiti and a superior U.S., and they presented the occupation as a charitable civilizing mission. This vision of Haiti and Haitians was elaborated in a racialized discourse wherein Haitians were assigned various negative traits that rendered them incapable of self-government. In examining how the New York Times, the National Geographic Magazine, and the Crisis represented Haiti, I demonstrate how race was the primary signifier, and how these representations were used to either perpetuate or challenge the American racial social hierarchy.

One of the richest areas of current research in mass communication involves framing theory. Originally developed by Erving Goffman (1974), framing is used by the media to organize content. As such, it has implications for the values, beliefs, and actions of those exposed to that content. This study attempts to apply framing theory to a controversial issue and event profusely covered by American mass media: the case of Terri Schiavo. To accomplish this, coverage of her final month by two print newspapers, The New York Times and the New York Post, was analyzed for prevalence (present or absent), level of substance (substantive or ambiguous), and valence (positive, neutral, or negative) of frames. Each paper was also coded for the type and valence of sources cited. Significance was found to support the presence of certain frames in each newspaper, with a leaning toward keeping Terri Schiavo alive found in frame valence in New York Post and a leaning, with stronger significance, toward removing her feeding tube in The New York Times.

Although it is widely recognized that Muslims and Middle Easterners were negatively portrayed in the media after the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, few scholars examine the long term media presentations of Islam in the United States. The studies that have explored the relationship of the portrayal of Islam by the media have used short term, limited sampling techniques, which may not properly reflect the popular media as a whole. The current research uses data from the New York Times from 2000-2008 in order to determine whether the popular media was portraying Islam in a disparaging manner. The analysis includes the use of noun phrases in the publications in order to establish if the media portrays Muslims and Islam negatively. In particular, I am interested in the trends of this media's representation of Islam, if the publications promoted a stigma towards Islam, and if the trend continued from 2000 to 2008. The results of the analyses are presented and discussed. The need for additional research in this area is also discussed.

On December 24, 1966, Harrison Salisbury became the first mainstream American journalist to report from North Vietnam during the Vietnam War. From his position behind enemy lines, the New York Times reporter revealed that America's bombing campaign was causing many more civilian casualties than the Johnson administration had acknowledged. Additionally, he challenged how Americans perceived their enemy by portraying North Vietnam's culture and political ideology as legitimate. Evaluation of governmental and public responses to his stories reveals the significance of these reports. They sparked controversy that undermined American and international confidence in the Johnson administration's credibility, decreased support for U.S. policies towards North Vietnam, and put increased pressure on the Johnson administration to increase efforts towards peace. This thesis analyzes those effects, the Johnson administration's complicated relationship to the journalist, and the broad debate among journalists over the proper boundaries of wartime reporting.

Terrorism and conflict is ongoing, and in today’s world it appears to be increasing, however, numerous people have blamed the swell in violence on specific sources. In regards to September 11 and similar terrorist incidents, for example, it is quite easy for the media, as well as other sources, to place responsibility in the hands of a specific group or religion. In this case, Islam, Arabs or the Middle East region seems to be connected to these violent incidents. The reality of the situation may place responsibility in some sources within this region, however, an overgeneralization in regards to a diverse religion and culture may be occurring due to “overall, ideological judgments” by various entities including the news media. According to numerous perspectives, it has become possible for a few carefully chosen words within the media to trigger racially-driven prejudices and actions by agencies, institutions, and the public. Our language seems to be powerful enough to let a single phrase spin a news story into a national warning against a certain group. In other words, the power of association, in particular here between words and perceptions, allows the public to believe in their mind something that may or may not be true. In this case, various studies have shown the tendency for the public to associate Arabs with violence, particularly terrorism. The combination of negative media framing and common ethnic schemas of Arabs and Muslims have resulted in a long history of socialization and activation in the American and perhaps, wider culture. Therefore, this study will mainly focus on an assumed semantic implication of word associations in the media based on shared ideological and socially shared knowledge, rather than measure any explicit statements of racial and ethnic schemas.

Through content analysis, the thesis examines how print media frame the Palestinian-Israeli conflict that assists in the expression of a pro-Israeli bias. More specifically it investigates the New York Times and the Associated Press coverage of the Palestinian and Israeli deaths reported during the second Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006 (July 12, 2006-September 8, 2006). The study found that both news sources expressed their pro-Israeli bias through legitimatizing and de-legitimizing Israeli and Palestinian killings. The New York Times generally justified Israeli killers and killings, condemned Palestinian killers and killings, and assigned more prominence to the Israeli side of the conflict. The Associated Press generally justified Israeli killers and killings, condemned Palestinian killers and killings, and assigned more prominence to the Palestinian side of the conflict. Both news sources displayed non-coverage bias in that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict was overshadowed by the war occurring in Lebanon between Israel and Hezbollah.

Reporters, most likely influenced by the culture in which they live, shape their reports around stories that are as old as the written word. These ancient characters and plots are often relied upon to provide familiar structures and context to unprecedented events. With this in mind, a quantitative and qualitative content analysis was used to examine coverage of Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor appearing in the New York Times, from December 7, 1941, to July 7, 1942. A sample of 432 articles was selected from the population, representing 20.78 percent of the 2,078 articles recovered. The quantitative study was based on comparing the narrative forms found in news articles to those found in myth. This morphology was used to measure the resemblance between the narrative structures of myth and news. Jack Lule's Seven Master Mythsserved as a basis for the myths examined and their narrative structuring, while Vladimir Propp's Morphology of the Folktaleinspired the comparison of forms. The qualitative analysis focused on a close reading of select articles. The attack was initially discussed in terms of the Flood myth, but was later put into terms of the myth of the Hero. The Hero, the Other World, and the Scapegoat myths were the most numerous, while the Flood and Hero myth were the most prominent. Those who dissented against the government and commanders of U.S. forces at Pearl Harbor were portrayed as Scapegoats while the Japanese were discussed as Tricksters. Foreign lands were often discussed in terms of the Other World myth. The results of this study are only applicable to the population of articles; however, one observation that emerged contradicts an assumption of previous qualitative researchers. Myth was most often associated with hard-news stories rather than soft-news stories, which contradicts the notion that soft news is a more fertile breeding ground for myth. This, however, could be due to the large number of hard news articles found in war coverage. War censors and Times'correspondents played powerful roles as mythmakers. Functions of myth were found in 23.8 percent of the 432 articles examined.

This dissertation examines and quantifies how a race-based grammar permeates elite U.S. news coverage of white and non-white Americans. A weighted random sampling of one year's coverage of Latinos, African Americans and Native Americans by The New York Times and Los Angeles Times was conducted, with 121 articles gathered. Subsequent analysis of all verbs and clauses within sentences containing racioethnic referents [e.g. Mexican(s), black(s), Indian(s), white(s), Sioux] employed systemic functional (Hallidayan) linguistics and focused on verb transitivity and the passive voice. The results indicate that U.S. racioethnic minorities were systematically portrayed as far more passive, and dominant-group members were portrayed as possessing more initiative and energy. (The New York Times, by several measures, ascribed less agency to people of color than did the Los Angeles Times.) Also characteristic of this coverage was what can only be described as a strong aversion to acknowledging either Native American nations or their sovereignty, and a virtual absence of coverage of African Americans in business spheres. Across all corpora, the privilege of implicit actorship (non-agentive passive voice) was reserved for dominant-group members and was most commonly employed when journalists described activities of dominant-group government. Since many of these governmental activities could be judged as socially negative, the non-agentive passive often functioned to shield government actors from explicit accusations. Subsequent qualitative explorations of the coverage about each group produced descriptions of a narrative frame for African American coverage; patterns of interracial interaction via verb choices for Latinos and Anglos; and a consideration of journalistic choices between available collective referents to describe Native Americans. This dissertation offers broad, statistically based evidence to support case studies by critical theorists studying race and power in Western journalism, and especially for work that has identified transitivity and the non-agentive passive voice as ideologically responsive syntactic elements. The results may prove useful in newsrooms interested in raising sensitivity among copyeditors and writers to the subtle semantic power of agency in sentence structures, thus enabling them consciously to create more representative views of American society.

The aim of this research is to compare and contrast the coverage of the state of affairs in the United States in the two month periods following the attack on Pearl Harbor (December 7, 1941) and the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon (September 11, 2001) as reflected in the primary news articles and OP/ED/Letters pieces in the New York Times. The comparative examination is carried out by means of quantitative contents analysis as well as qualitative observations of the news, graphic, and advertising content of the New York Times for the periods examined. The study is supplemented by an analysis of the claims made by high ranking governmental officials regarding the nature and urgency of the threat of terrorism to the national interest of the United States. The study reports on the construction of reality via mass mediated news narratives during times of national crisis.