Rozprawy doktorskie na temat „Mass communication”

Over the years, local television news stations across the nation have seen a dramatic decrease in viewership. Much like newspapers, fewer people are relying on television news for several reasons. Two of the biggest culprits are the age of new technology and social media. These two factors alone have reprogrammed people's daily habits, changing the landscape of television news viewership and resulting in uncertain times at local television news stations. Few studies have been done on the future of local television news. Of the studies that have been conducted, it is clear to see that local news is still relevant even in times of change, uncertainty and evolution, but can it make enough of a profit to survive? The million dollar question TV executives are trying to answer is: How will local TV news stations stay afloat in these uncharted waters? In an attempt to answer this question, qualitative research in the form of ethnography and interview was conducted. The findings in this study reveal television news stations must stay on the cutting edge of technology in order to engage their viewers. They must also think of creative ways to generate revenue besides the traditional way of advertising. Without healthy news ratings, local television news organizations are forced to lower their advertising rates to those seeking to spend money on commercial time. This, in turn, has resulted in a loss of millions of dollars a year for TV stations. The end result will be evident to both stations and viewers. The future of local television news and the direct impact to viewers is discussed.

The current study included a content analysis of PG-13 movie trailers to evaluate the content of risk behavior, related consequences and gender variables. The sample consisted of trailers representing the top ten blockbuster films from each year between 2008 and 2012. The sample was selected to represent the most popular films because they reach the largest audience. The risk behavior variables included violence, tobacco use, alcohol, sexual conduct and body modification. They were chosen based on risk behaviors cited by the CDC and previous research.

The purpose of the study was to investigate an antecedent of Social Cognitive Theory. The results indicate higher levels of risk behaviors in comparison to their related consequences. Male characters were found to be more likely to engage in risk behaviors than women, with the exception of sexual conduct.

Given the increasing popularity and effect of online media, especially Twitter, as news sources, this study was designed to examine Saudis’ behaviors toward Twitter with regard to newspapers and information delivery and the role that Twitter plays in getting news updates. It investigated if Saudi Twitter users perceive Twitter as a credible source for news and rely on it to read the news more than legacy newspapers and their online counterparts. This research conducted an online survey and distributed it among Saudis who use Twitter to get news updates. The sample of this study had been drawn online by using the “SnowBall” sampling method through Survey Monkey and, the sample was collected during December 2015 and January 2016. A total of 3,003 Saudi Twitter users completed all questions in the survey. The results showed that Saudis consider Twitter as a newsgathering tool; therefore, they read news on Twitter more than reading legacy newspapers because it is easier and the fastest way of getting news, which indicated that the area of legacy newspapers in Saudi Arabia is at stake. Moreover, Saudis positively rated Twitter as a trustworthy and credible source for getting news updates. Thereby, they concurred that using Twitter has changed the path that people deal with legacy newspapers. Furthermore, non-legacy newspapers’ Twitter accounts received the lion's share of Saudis trust, especially Sabq newspaper, that was at the top as the newspaper account with the highest following. In regard to age groups, young Twitter users in Saudi Arabia trust non-legacy newspaper Twitter accounts more than older users, while old Twitter users were more likely to trust legacy newspaper Twitter accounts. The disbelief in the fairness of legacy newspapers could also be referred to the Saudis’ understanding that the government has a sweeping power to direct the media.

This dissertation makes the connection between the human drive, as described by psychoanalysis, to construct God and the construction of the technological entity, Google. Google constitutes the extension of the early Christian period God to the twenty-first century. From the examination of significant religious and theological texts by significant theologians (Augustine, Thomas, Luther, Calvin, etc.) that explain the nature of God, the analogous relationship of God to Google will open a psychoanalytic discourse that answers questions on the current state of human mediation with the world. Freud and, more significantly, Lacan’s work connects the human creation of God, ex nihilio, to Google’s godly qualities and behaviors (omniscience, omnipotence, omnipresence, and omnibenevolence). This illustrates the powerful motivation behind the creation of an allencompassing physical / earthly entity that includes the immaterial properties of God.

Essentially, Google operates as the extension or replacement of the long reigning God in Western culture. Furthermore, the advent of science and technology through rationalism (as outlined by Nietzsche) results in the death of the metaphysical God and the ascension of the technological God. Google offers an appropriate example for study. Moreover, the work of Jean Baudrillard and Marshall McLuhan will further comment on Google as the technological manifestation of God, particularly in its media formulations. Finally, this dissertation concludes with a review that highlights future research with an exploration that foresees the death of Google from the same rational method of inquiry by which the death of God occurred at the end of the nineteenth century.

A crisis can threaten the existence of an organization, and in this social media age, information is spread at lightning-fast speeds forcing crisis communication managers to work quickly to quell any unflattering press. Companies in crisis situations attempt to mitigate damage and repair reputations using crisis communication strategies, such as Coombs’ Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT). This thesis explored social media as a crisis communication channel for these strategies, by studying an organizational crisis that played out almost entirely on social media, through the lens of SCCT.

This thesis used six statements made by The Honest Company during a 2013 crisis where stakeholders accused the company of bullying a working mother over trademark rights. The company’s crisis communication messages were retrieved, and by using discourse analysis the messages were examined through the guidelines of the SCCT model, which allowed categorization of the messages according to SCCT, analysis of their effectiveness, and the defining of SCCT challenges in analyzing this organizational conflict aggrandized through social media.

This study found that even though The Honest Company did not strictly adhere to SCCT’s guidelines, it was able to flourish and surpass consumer expectations after the crisis ended. The examination of this crisis offered insight into SCCT’s lack of clarity and direction concerning its crisis types, strategies, and guidelines. It also offered suggestions for more specific crisis types and the expansion of crisis types for SCCT.

The National Football League is more than just the most popular sports league in America. Dominant American discourses that surround American patriotism and popular culture have a parallel in the NFL. This parallel is due to the fact that football is a game uniquely rooted and structured like war. Additionally, many products of the American neo-liberal era are flourishing on the NFL stage. These products include: corporatism, commercialization, consumer culture, and aggressive competition. The violent nature of the game invites notions of militarism and war that fit seamlessly with the game’s identity. Militarism, being a symbol that protects the nation, fits perfectly with an American civil religion that is largely devoted to Reagan’s ideal redemptive America. The NFL, through active and skillful branding, has meshed its identity with foundational aspects of American identity. Now the NFL has to navigate through the popular and traditional logics that are ingrained in American society while maintaining their business.

In recent years, concerns over video game addiction have increased. Both individual factors (such as impulsivity and reward sensitivity) and content features in video games (such as reward and punishment features) play a role in the development of video game addiction. In the current study, a content analysis coding procedure is developed in order to categorize the reinforcement schedules of three existing commercial video games from three different genres. Our findings indicate that the reward features in the game The Mighty Quest for Epic Loot resembles a partial reinforcement schedule while the reward features in the games Team Fortress 2 and Destination Sol resemble a continuous reinforcement schedule. This key finding demonstrates that the reward content features in commercial video games can be classified along a theoretically meaningful dimensions put forth by Operant Conditioning Theory. Furthermore, in this study we pilot tested several outcome measures related to video game addiction that will be crucial to our conceptualization of video game addiction in the future including a measure of playing time, game enjoyment, trait impulsivity, a measure of behavioral impulsivity, and the game addiction scale. We found that the video game with a partial reinforcement schedule was significantly more enjoyable than the video games with a continuous reinforcement schedule.

Many advertising, marketing, and communication professionals look for ways to increase consumers’ engagements with their brands. In doing so many have begun to use social networking sites, such as Pinterest. Consumers can engage with brands through participation in these sites. Through this brand engagement, businesses can hope for positive customer satisfaction towards their specific brand, which can lead to the development of brand attachments. The purpose of this study was to show the association between brand engagement and the elements of uses and gratifications theory, specifically through the use of the virtual brand community of Pinterest. Statistical tests were conducted to determine the relationship between individual and multiple elements of the uses and gratifications theory and brand engagement.

Utilizing ethnographic methods, this work examines how attendees of computer gaming events held by the Gaming@IU club form a community which uses technology to bring people together rather than isolate them and analyzes the ways attendees perform a unique forms of Whiteness and "nerd masculinity." Known as LAN parties, these computer gaming events are social functions where approximately 200 participants collocate their computers and play videogames with and against each other for up to twenty-four hours straight. Drawing years of fieldwork, this work uses participant observation and in depth interviews to examine how this group uses the computer gaming events to create a third place away from work and school where friendships can be created and maintained.

Based on this data, I examine the ways in which the statements of the LAN party attendees draw on a discourse of racial colorblindness to avoid dealing with the overwhelming Whiteness of these events which is not reflective of the racial and ethnic diversity of the area. I show how an avoidance of discussion of Whiteness and a general inability to articulate their thoughts about race prevents the attendees from interrogating the role the LAN party's organization may play in the racial makeup of attendees.

Focusing on issues of sexual harassment within gaming, I also look at the ways in which the games played and the social norms of the LAN party encourage the performance of hegemonic masculinity while playing the videogames but allow the attendees to inhabit a more complicit form of masculinity which is not overtly sexist. I argue that by embracing non-normative masculinity outside the games but discouraging it within the games, the LAN party participants are professing openness and acceptance but are failing to live up to that ideal.

The marketplace in today's world is more dynamic than ever with the growing trends of environmentally-conscious business practices and products. The popular phrase of "going green" is used by many companies and organizations striving to provide environmentally safe products and services. With this growing industry, consumers are exposed to more and more "green" advertisements each day. However, many question if the practice of green advertising is worthwhile.

By looking at the way consumers react to different kinds of advertisements, it can be seen that green advertising is not always a smart choice. Researchers suggest that the reactions vary on many factors such as the type of consumers and the type of product.

This study analyzed the idea of green advertising versus non-green advertising based on the levels of high and low involvement products. An experiment was conducted using college students who completed a survey that presented a set of eight different advertisements for an array of brands and products. The participants included two groups made up of those who were exposed to green advertisements and those who were exposed to non-green advertisements. Both groups were shown the same set of four high involvement products and four low involvement products. The group of high involvement products included two kinds of cars and two kinds of laptops. The group of low involvement products included two kinds of pens and two kinds of bottled water.

The findings show that green advertisements work best with high involvement products. Unlike low involvement products, green advertising positively influences the consumers' attitude toward the advertisement and the brand, as well as purchase intention. Low involvement products did not have the same results and the influential power compared to high involvement products.

Photography is increasingly used as conversation in social media. Photography has been used as evidence of activity, for influence and identity, and for persuasive rhetoric. Current demand for understanding social photography is due to its modern inclusion as a standard communication process for creating and affirming community. Mobile technology and increased data rates through available bandwidth have resulted in the answer and response interaction cycle now happening with photographs. Facebook users share over 300 million photographs a day (Facebook, 2013) which indicates a mass of communication occurring between individuals, small groups, communities, and the public that does not have the same level of communication understanding as written and spoken language. A second level of inquiry concerns the lower levels of understanding concerning small groups and communities. The majority of communication studies concern individuals, the public mass, and Western hierarchical organizations. This research leverages tools from iconic photojournalism in order to analyze ease of use and applicability for future social photography studies. Hariman and Lucaites (2007) five primary tools of aesthetic familiarity, civic performance, semiotic transcripts, emotional scenarios, and contradictions and crises are evaluated through the data sample photography shared by the Burning Man community. The data set concerns photographs and their associated responses shared through Twitter as a social media tool intended for open, public access. The intent of this study concerns the ability to leverage the process for past, present, and future sharing of photography in order to analyze and apply ways to build community. This analysis reveals the minimal use of sharing a photograph as an emotive invitation to join with the community's performance enables a high success of visualizing community. This study investigates analysis and application tools for visualizing community through social photography.

After the bloody Tiananmen crackdown in 1989, the legitimacy of the Communist Party of China (CCP) suffered a devastating blow among the overseas Chinese (OC). The CCP responded to the challenge by implementing transnational outreach policy in the OC community, which includes substantial efforts to increase the Party’s influence in the overseas Chinese-language media (OCLM). By conducting a qualitative analysis of the evolution of the CCP's OC policy, this thesis finds that the Party has made tremendous progress in achieving the policy’s strategic goals: modernization and transnational legitimacy. The CCP’s increased influence in the OCLM has made crucial contributions to the Party's success in restoring transnational legitimacy in the OC community. This thesis finds that the China News Service (CNS), China's second-largest news agency operating under the Overseas Chinese Affairs Office of the State Council, plays a major role in the CCP's attempt to influence the OCLM and centralize the production of Chinese-language news.

In 2008, a group of masked protesters stood in front of the Church of Scientology in Los Angeles to protest the organization's censorship on the Internet (Knapperberger, 2012). This protest was the first collectivized, localized, and material manifestation of the group Anonymous, a loosely coordinated decentralized group of Internet based-activists that began on the web. Amidst increasing regulation of the Internet, Anonymous is a key subject to watch to determine how contemporary social movements will unfold with the introduction of cyberspace as a place of organization and performance. To provide a foundation for this study, I review social movement theory in the U.S. with an emphasis on visual imagery in protests. While traditional movements relied on public collective action (Bowers, Ochs, & Jenson, 1993), new social movement theory assumes movements rely on private and individual reclamation of identity (Buechler, 1999, 2000). Anonymous fits into neither theory but takes aspects from both, challenging social movement theory to go further and account for the Internet-driven conditions that change the nature of the protester, revealing anonymity and appropriation of images as two distinct markers of contemporary social movements, as initially depicted in the use of the Guy Fawkes mask. Next, I look at geographies of place and how protest changes in cyberspace based on the images that emerge, giving the group aesthetic control over their social construction. Mirzoeff's (2011) analysis of visualized authority explains how Anonymous creates a countervisual to the state control of aesthetic reality by guiding is visual representations. DeLuca and Peeples' (2002) concept of the public screen addresses the promulgation of protest images, which become the primary rhetoric of the movement and a means to establish aesthetic credibility. Anonymous exists as a character in a disembodied cyber-world, with the media creating myths of embodied protesters. Through Bahktin's (1981) analysis of the chronotope, I study the spatio-temporal relationships of traditional social movements and how Anonymous challenges those relationships by establishing new chronotopes that influence contemporary movements. Emerging chronotopes break down the distinction between the protester and the hacker, the public and private dichotomy, and allow for contemporary protesters to break out of these conditions and inhabit a space of legitimacy. Anonymous offers a case study for the future of contemporary social movements that will take place in cyberspace in an era characterized by a struggle over information in a virtual world. Because social movements are no longer primarily defined by traditional media outlets, Anonymous shows how protesters can determine their own aesthetic reality. The chronotopes that emerge speak to the movement's ability to expand social movement theory as both a public and private operation, functioning outside of state suppression tactics and normative restraints. As the chronotopes become recognizable by the public, Anonymous gains leverage in defining its own genre of social movements. Anonymous is a performance without a distinct beginning and end, but operates as an evolving ideological position. The visual realities that emerge into the material world may provide further insight into how the state will allow (or disallow) social movements to occur.

This dissertation explores the role soft control plays in the relationship between the television industry and short forms of digital media. Following James Beniger and Tizianna Terranova, I define soft control as the purposive movement by the television industry towards shaping audience attention toward predetermined goals through a range of interactions where development happens somewhat autonomously, while being interjected with commands over time. I define such things as media environment design, branding, and data collection as soft control practices. I focus on television as a way to understand how an industry historically patterned around more rigid forms of audience control deals with a digital media environment often cited for its lack of control features. And while there is already a robust discussion on the shifting strategies for the online distribution of shows, there is less of a focus on the increasing importance of shorter forms of digital media to the everyday operation of the television industry. Shorter forms of media include digitally circulated short videos, songs, casual digital games, and even social media, which is itself a platform for the distribution of shorter forms of media. I refer to all these forms of short media as "micromedia" and focus my interest on how various television companies are dealing with media environments saturated with it.

To do this I look at, for instance, how television companies use the data available on Twitter and appropriate the user-generated content of audiences, as well as how standard digital communication interfaces are utilized to more easily retrofit previous audience retention practices into new digital environments. Through the investigation of how television creates and appropriates micromedia as a way to reconfigure practices into the everyday lives of participatory audiences, I argue that we can see soft control elements at work in structuring the industry-audience relationship. These soft control features call into question the emancipatory role attributed to participatory audiences and digital technologies alike. If we think about media forms in their specific contexts, making sure to focus on their intermedial connections and their materiality, we can complicate ideas about what the categories of audience or industrial control mean.

Videogames are complex media objects that require significant input from the player for their enjoyment. The multiple experiences and outcomes that can emerge when an individual plays a game present difficult methodological challenges for games researchers. This dissertation proposes two complementary methods for studying this complexity: temporal data collection and situational analysis. These help delineate both how players acquire knowledge from a game system and use their previous knowledges in future videogame experiences by focusing on the moment-to-moment decisions and actions that the player takes in a given situations. In addition to providing a way to investigate player skill and knowledge of a system over time, this method also provides a way to understand how the meanings that players and scholars make from games develop over the course of their play.

By expanding on previous definitions of the repertoire—the sets of skills and knowledges that player rely on in overcoming a game’s challenges—, I develop models for how knowledge is acquired, incorporated, and utilized over the course of an individual game and different game genres. These models developed through the individual situations that occurred in my analysis of these games and show how knowledges and skills develop not only within a single game, but are translatable from game to game. I developed the concept of a technique to provide a means for scholars and designers to understand how an individual’s performance is practiced and evolves as they learn more about the game system and come to grow comfortable with particular actions. The second performance model developed in this dissertation, the play style, describes the general ways that a player approaches a game and how different goals, both internal and external, can effect how knowledge and skills are used.

Lastly, through the temporal data collection and situational analysis methods, I am able to further elucidate the roles that luck plays in videogames—an undertheorized arena of gameplay experience. I provide three distinct ways that scholars can discuss the experience of luck and how it intersects with the repertoires of skill that a player develops: designed chance mechanics, glitches, and botches. Designed chance mechanics are the elements of a videogame that provide randomness to the game system and must be understood and responded to appropriately by the player in order for their success. Glitches are aberrations in the software or hardware that can develop unexpectedly through player action. Lastly, a botch , adapted from the world of professional wrestling, provides a model for understanding how feelings of luck emerge from unexpected situations that are not intelligible within the repertoires of player knowledge. With these concepts, I have provided the field of game studies a comprehensive method for discussing the forms of luck that emerge from the player’s subjective experience, the system’s designed uncertainty, and mixtures of the two. By offering models of performance and consideration of a largely overlooked concept like luck, I provide a nuanced look into the complicated development of skill that occurs in the performance of videogame play.

Twitch.tv is a new phenomenon in the world of gaming and online entertainment. Advertising professionals could use Twitch.tv as a new outlet to advertise brands to their audiences. To further understand brand recall of advertisements on Twitch.tv, this thesis examined different variables such as game experience, ad placement, and ad familiarity. The Limited Capacity Model of Motivated Mediated Message Processing (LC4MP) relates to effects on viewer recall of brands in advertisements seen on Twitch.tv, as it is ultimately a new form a television and this model can help understand how its messages are processed (Lang, 2000). A 2x2 factorial design was used to determine interactions between brand familiarity and advertisement placement as well as their effects on brand recall. Game experience was used as a covariate to determine if this variable further made a difference in brand recall of advertisements on Twitch.tv.

The study investigated the existence of some generic and non-generic media frames in the campaign speeches of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton using content analysis. The comparison of the two political actors in their usage of frames in their campaign speeches revealed that Donald Trump exploited economic consequence, conflict, morality, attribution of responsibility, and negative campaign frames more than Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton did not socially exclude any minority group within and outside the United States of America. Both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton are equal in their utilization of the human interest frame, positive campaign, and mixed campaign. If campaign speeches were moderators of candidates’ electoral victory, negative campaign is, therefore, a facilitating factor in affecting voters' behavior considering the success of Trump in the polls. Nevertheless, the commonness of mixed campaign to both the political candidates indicates that a discrete use of any of the generic frames by political actors and communicators may not be a certainty for changing voters’ behavior. Instead, scholars and professionals should treat frames as discretional communication tools applicable and dependent on the context of a social environment in which many factors exist and determine the choice of frames in communicating between the speech actors and the audiences.

Social media have recently emerged as one of the primary information sources in the U.S. Journalists and news organizations have been keen on establishing a presence within digital social networks in order to utilize this new channel to build and maintain an audience. However, little is known about the practical implications of social media engagement by journalists for audience perceptions of news.

The present dissertation attempts to investigate 1) the influences of journalists' social media activities, self-disclosure and interaction with other users, on audience perceptions of the journalists; 2) if the perceptions serve as an important mediator between the social media activities and audience perceptions of the journalists'; news products; and, 3) if and how the direct and indirect effects of journalists'; social media activities are moderated by audiences'; individual differences in journalism orientation (IJO), which refers to which journalism norm audience members lean toward: engagement (public journalism norm) or detachment (objective journalism norm). Given that journalism is in a state of flux between traditional detached approaches and newer attached perspectives, these are important questions to be addressed relative to journalism in new media environments.

An experiment with multiple message stimuli was conducted in the context of a journalist's Facebook profile, and college students' perceptions of the journalist and his news product were measured via an online questionnaire. All perceptions were examined on both personal (e.g., attractiveness) and professional (e.g., objectivity and competence) dimensions.

The results provided empirical evidence that, 1) when it comes to journalists, engaging in such common social media activities as self-disclosure and interaction can significantly harm journalists in terms of their perceived competence although the same behaviors can improve perceptions of their personality. Results on the perceived objectivity dimension were mixed such that objectivity was positively influenced by interactive behaviors whereas it was negatively influenced by self-disclosure via social media; 2) Audience perceptions of journalists, formed based on their social media activities, tended to transfer to their impressions of the journalists' news products, demonstrating that the indirect effects of journalists' self-disclosures and interactions via social media on audience perceptions of their news products were mediated through audience perceptions of the journalists in terms of personality and competence although this mediation relationship was not evident in the case of journalists' self-disclosing activities and the professional-dimension perceptions; 3) These influences of journalists' social media activities were moderated by audiences'; individual journalism orientation such that the impacts of journalists'; self-disclosure on the journalists' personal and professional images (in both objectivity and competence) were in general stronger for the audiences oriented to an objective journalism norm, indicating that those with an objective orientation tend to react more sensitively to journalists' unconventional behaviors.

This set of results revealed that journalists' conforming to social media norms and acting like ordinary social media users could make not only the journalists but also their news products look personally attractive and friendly, but professionally less competent. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

During the 2016 presidential election season, Senator Ted Cruz’s use of social media to promote his campaign and build up a grassroots following was masterful. This case study explores Cruz’s digital outreach efforts in the shadow of GOP rival Donald Trump’s commanding use of traditional earned media. This case study views the Cruz campaign’s digital outreach strategy through the lens of the Agenda Setting theory of communication, which seeks to explain the mass media’s ability to influence what the important issues are to the public, and through the reverse agenda setting effect, meaning if the airtime is unavailable through traditional means, the opportunity to create their own media space is open to anyone that needs it, and their own agenda will be established for the digital audience.

This study examines the portrayal of the Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act (PPACA) based on the Twitter feeds of Democratic and Republican leaders. This innovative thesis provides a clear depiction of how divisive and unprecedented political cyberwarfare has unfolded within the realm of computer-mediated communications. This study also uses an original approach in its capability of identifying the political combatants of a divisive topic. This is also the first content analysis of its kind by bringing data analysis to the concepts of Entman and Kuypers, focusing on problem/solution and cause/effect rhetoric that confirms framing as a powerful political weapon. This research combines all of the above concepts and applies them to one of the most popular and current social media sites as a basis of analysis. This research also proves the value of politicians’ personal Twitter accounts when studying the general framing strategies of the respective parties.

The TV industry is a competitive marketplace with rapidly realigning powers and players, fueled by an environment of intense conglomeration and consolidation. The present study focuses on three facets of this industry that are inextricably related to competition: (1) government rules, regulations, and policies; (2) the role of TV content production; and, (3) the role of consumer behavior and preference. Further, it explores the technology behind TV, as television distribution is intrinsic to the future of the industry.

The purpose of this study was to formulate a preliminary conceptual perception about how Kuwaiti college students in the United States use and perceive electronic media. This qualitative study has sought to recognize the utilization habits and perception of Kuwaiti college students in the USA toward electronic media. The study examines the reasons for the high degree of dependency on electronic media by Kuwaiti students in the USA and the most significant features and properties that are available by electronic media, which attract youth attention. This research conducted semi-structured, in-depth interviews with a sample of 15 Kuwaiti college students in the United States. It was concluded that Kuwaiti college students are the major users of recent technology and pioneers of electronic and social media. It also seeks for future investigations to understand whether the demographic characteristics of Kuwaiti college students are affecting their media utilization habits.

Reporting of international conflict has implications for understanding, political action, and policy formation. This means media coverage can influence the outcomes of conflict. This study investigated reporting of the Arab Spring conflicts by U.S. television networks (ABC, CBS, and NBC). The study examined the time frame between the onset of the uprising and February 29, 2012 when dictators were unseated in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen. Agenda-setting and media framing theory were used to analyze transcripts (N = 316) for dominant issues, sources used, frames and, social media. Results of the study corroborate existing research regarding conflict reporting. Coverage was mostly episodic and dominated by violence, however, attention was paid to the role of social media in overthrowing regimes, violent acts of regime brutality, and democracy. Core causes of the uprising received only marginal coverage. Ordinary domestic citizens were used most frequently as sources. Other findings applicable to U.S. media coverage are presented.

While campaigning as a candidate for the 2016 U.S. presidential election, Donald Trump publicly used the term “silent majority” to motivate his voting base. Although this term may seem original on the surface, it was first used in a political setting in the 1960s, when former President Richard Nixon began using the term extensively before and after his election in 1968. In this critical discourse analysis, the term “silent majority” is examined through a historical lens to get a sense for how it originated, why it was used, and how it has developed. Furthermore, this project’s research question is directed at American news media, as we study how, and if, journalists’ interpretations of the “silent majority” have changed over a timespan of nearly 50 years.

The current quantitative study attempted to understand, identify and examine four aspects of the viewing behavior; binge watching. Those aspects were binge watching characteristics, binge watching motivations and people’s perceptions of binge watching, as well as exploring the relationships between binge watching and gender. The study found that people would usually binge watch alone between 3-5 episodes in one session, and they would spend six hours binge watching on weekends. Moreover, catching up on missed episodes was the only positive significant motivation the study found. The study found people perceived binge watching as a satisfying activity that made them feel in control, which would not cause anxiety, addiction, or isolation even though it was unproductive and time-wasting behavior. The study found some differences between men and women. Women binge watched dramas and were motivated by catching up on missed episodes. Women tended to perceive binge watching as unproductive behavior. Men were more likely to repeat binge watching after they had already finished doing so.