Clear Blue Waters of the Danube was planned and drafted from October 2007 to December 2012. It is written from the perspective of Daniel Rourke, a young man whose life is changed forever by the arrival into the family home of Marija Kovač, a Croatian refugee. The wars leading to the break-up of Yugoslavia, notably the Croatian War of Independence from 1990-5 and the Bosnian Civil War from 1992-5, provide the novel's historical background. Preparation included interviews with conflict survivors, witnesses, soldiers who fought in the war, and those who were children during the fighting. Research visits to Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina took place during the summers of 2008 and 2009. I also drew upon conversations with former Yugoslav refugees from my time working in London during the 1990s and early 2000s. Other information was selected from biographies, historical records, documentary films, diaries and reports by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia. Although the novel notes the key moments of Yugoslavia's violent break-up, Clear Blue Waters of the Danube is not a political thriller. It follows a young man on a journey of self-discovery that takes him away from the family home, first to London, then across the Balkans. By establishing the truth about terrible incidents from the past, he comes to a greater understanding about himself and his previous behaviour. More importantly he is able to re-evaluate the relationship with his father that lies at the heart of everything he does, and in whose shadow he has always lived. The question of whether a writer is truly able to separate himself from his/her subject matter is investigated in greater depth throughout my critical project. Planned between October 2007 and June 2008 then written over the following two years, the perspectives of English-speaking war correspondents during the Spanish Civil War from 1936-1939 are examined. Newspaper articles, memoirs, biographies and films are scrutinised. Although the allegiances of British newspapers were split more or less evenly, the majority of writers and reporters supported the Republican effort and invested huge amounts of personal feeling into their work. For a war fought over such contrasting values, a degree of bias was perhaps inevitable. As I began my research, my aim was to investigate to what extent objectivity in such circumstances was even possible. If news reports bore the hallmarks of fiction, what then of the Spanish Civil War novel? The final part of the project deals with Ernest Hemingway and For Whom the Bell Tolls. As a journalist, Hemingway had engaged in propaganda on behalf of the Republic and readily accepted the weak evidence behind the denunciation of Republican dissidents. Following the war‟s conclusion, he returned to Cuba to write his novel of the Spanish Civil War, For Whom the Bell Tolls. Ironically having written newspaper reports to spread misinformation, he elected to use the form of a novel to reveal his version of what had actually happened. Can fiction reveal the 'truth' about events when supposedly non-fiction texts cannot? My thesis asks fundamental questions about why we write and what we choose to write about. Can any writer truly separate him/herself from the subject matter? Can our understanding ever be full and free from bias and prejudice? Or do a writer's values permeate the work to the extent that, whether a newspaper article or a novel is written, genuine objectivity becomes impossible? Is the quest for objectivity a desirable or realistic aspiration?

This thesis explores the character, content and legacy of newspaper journalism in Belfast between 1855 and 1910. It locates Belfast's press at this time as the successor of more radical journalism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and as a predecessor of the tabloid style or 'New Journalism ' which did not properly take hold in the North until the early twentieth century. Newspapers in Belfast at this time were sectarian, fragmented, overtly political, capitalist, decreasingly radical and highly competitive. Their coverage used an array of literary devices including language, layout, genre and rhetoric to convey meaning to their audiences. They not only reflected Belfast society but also acted as an influence on politics and publics order. They were a vital part of business and social aspects of the civic sphere. The key newspapers of the period of study were the Belfast News Letter, the Belfast Morning News/Irish News, and the Belfast Telegraph. These newspapers continue to exist as dailies and are still capable of providing insight into contemporary Belfast society. The legacy of the Belfast press between 1855 and 1910 can still be identified when it comes to understanding the same newspapers in a 21st Century setting. Until now, newspapers of this period have been used by historians as sources of factual information and historical detail rather than studied in their own right as important social, political, economic and cultural institutions in a developing Victorian city. This thesis provides a taxonomic survey of Belfast's newspapers before exploring newspaper content thematically in terms of sectarianism, business, constitutional and militant nationalism, and socialism. It references previous work by Anderson (1983), Conboy (2004, 2011), Palmegiano (2007), Wolff (1971), Pykett (1990) and others with a view to providing a strong theoretical framework which locates Belfast's press as part of a wider Irish press which must be understood fully before it can be compared to other nations' presses in the Victorian age. The thesis thus makes a major contribution to the field as it is the first rigorously academic document chronicling the history of the North of Ireland's foremost group of newspapers.

Concern about the representation of distant crises in the 1990s has been the subject of a developing literature, focusing on the relationships of the news system and policy formation. The war in Bosnia was probably the most intensely and extensively reported of the decade, said to have affected the public conscience like no other. However, the precise effects of coverage are much disputed and there has been no detailed, systematic analysis of media representation so far against which this possible influence can be assessed. This study presents the results of a systematic examination of British TV news representation of the war. It aims to answer the question:h ow did the British TV news system describe and frame the war in Bosnia? The study tests the hypothesis that British media obfuscated key questions in the war. It is proposed that this may have made effective intervention in support of Bosnia and its people less likely. The main focus of this inquiry is to assess the accuracy of the TV representation of war and genocide in Bosnia, against a detailed historical account of those events. Secondary questions focus on what inferences can be made from the representation about the context of its production, and about its consumption. Through layered combination of several content analytic techniques,T V news( and broadsheet newspaper) reports from a key period of the war (April to August 1992) are used to describe the framing of the war with the aim of reaching conclusion about its accuracy.I n the light of this representations one potential political effects are discussed. The study has one main conclusion. That is that there were key inaccuracies in the reporting in the period under consideration, particularly regarding Serbia's aggressive war and genocide against the people and state of Bosnia. It is argued from this primary finding that these inaccuracies may have had significant implications for the effects of media coverage on policy.

This thesis investigates the use and perceived credibility of news blogs among news consumers and news professionals in Thailand. Data was obtained on three reader blog communities linked to Thai online newspapers – OKnation, The Nation Weblog and Mblog. The study examined why blogging exists as a component of mainstream news provision, the attention of users to news blogs, the diversity and the quality of news blogs, and degrees of association between claimed use of news blogs and attitudes of users. Theoretically, it drew upon uses and gratifications and news credibility research. This research employed three research methods: online questionnaires with news blog users, interviews with news professionals, and content analysis with the three reader blog communities. The findings of the study indicate that news blogs were a component of mainstream news provision for some Thai news organisations. In order to attract visitors and use as sources, four out of 15 online newspapers (26%): Komchadluek, Bangkokbiznews, The Nation and ASTV Manager provided blogs for the general public where they could share news and interesting stories. News blog users tended to be male, 41–60 years old, highly educated, and self-employed, with a high income. They used the Internet, consumed television news and read newspapers both offline and online very often but scarcely consumed radio news. OKnation was by far the most popular news blog community. One out of two blog users wrote approximately one news blog story per week. Political surveillance and opinion seeking were the top two news blog use motives. News blogs produced by individuals were rated as less credible than mainstream news reports in the view of audiences and news professionals. Most of news professionals emphasised that news blogs helped them to improve the quality, but not the diversity, of mainstream news reports.

Human society is faced with a changing climate, which will affect the economies of every region of the world, including Thailand. One of Thailand's strategies on climate change is to call upon the public to take actions towards climate change with the media between government and the public to provide a key link by communicating climate change issues to the nation. Therefore, this research analyses the role and contribution of the media, in particular the national broadsheets and television stations. This research has developed a theoretical framework to investigate why and how the media communicates climate change news to the Thai public and how the public responds to climate change issues. This research employed two main methods: interviews and a questionnaire survey. Thirty interviews with journalists from four Thai newspapers and six television channels were conducted to examine the process of producing climate change through the newsroom. In order to study the public reception of climate change news from the media, a questionnaire survey was carried out amongst the Thai public. The findings of this research suggest that there are various reasons why journalists report climate change news to the public, including public demand, the media organisations' new policy and journalists' personal interests. However, the final decision on whether to report climate change news is shaped and framed by the editors who play a main gatekeeper role in the news production process to assure newsworthiness as the dominant criterion in news selection. The focus of Thai climate change news content shifts from coverage of the scientific aspects of climate change that had characterised news content for many years to coverage concentrating on other issues, such as politics, poverty, economics and social science.

This dissertation assesses the character and significance of <I>The Criterion</I> by recontextualizing the journal within a complex and changing structure of inter-war literary-cultural periodicals. Its basic contention is that careful consideration of the milieu of metropolitan literary journalism - including due attention to the role of commercial imperatives and to tentacular periodical 'networks' - throws new light on the institutional place of <I>The Criterion</I> in intellectual debate between the wars. Utilising evidence from unpublished archival material and from interviews with contributors to inter-war literary periodicals, this dissertation attempts to reconstruct a more thickly textured account of the publishing history and achievement of <I>The Criterion</I> than existing scholarly accounts. The first section of the dissertation explores <I>The Criterion's</I> interaction with four other influential and like-minded periodicals. These chapters downgrade questions regarding the substantive theoretical issues at stake, in order to concentrate upon the specifically journalistic context of their dissemination and reception. The second section turns the focus on the intertextual debates occurring within the journal, through a detailed examination of the subtle negotiation of Eliot's editorial directives in the work of the most important and prolific <I>Criterion</I> contributors. The question of how far Eliot orchestrated or dictated an editorial 'line' in the journal is further evaluated in the concluding section of the dissertation, which addresses <I>The Criterion's</I> engagement in contemporary politico-economic discourse, including some consideration of the journal in the wider intellectual field of European literary-cultural periodicals. It is hoped that the chapters fit together in an architectonic structure which provides a new framework of interpretation and thereby serves to deepen and extend recent critical and scholarly discussions of <I>The Criterion</I>.

Since their launch, Arabic news satellite TV channels have been recognized as a milestone in the history of Arab media, and their operation has affected – or infected - the Arab audience like no other medium has ever done. This study investigates Arab audiences‘ perceptions of news media services. Moreover, it is a study of news consumption profiles and how these are related to new and old news service provision as well as to viewers‘ motivations for watching news, and their perceptions of different news services in terms of their credibility. It also attempts to understand the evolution of mass media services in the Arab world in the last decade and the interaction between the news media and their audiences. The study takes place in the Arab Gulf States region (GCC countries), “The Gulf Cooperation Council for the Arab States of the Gulf”. Research data were obtained using a self-completion survey from three countries Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, and Qatar, where 1,752 participants of Arab descent answered the questionnaire. The findings indicate that news consumers‘ demographic profiles did not differ greatly between the three countries. In gender, the major participants of the study were reported to be more male than female. The majority of the audiences were young, under thirty years old, better educated, had bachelor degrees, were employed, and earned up to 25,000 (USD) per year. Politically they did not display extreme or polarised political orientations. Moreover, the study found that Arabic news TV services have emerged as the leading news resource and source of information for participants in the three Arab Gulf States. Furthermore, Al-Jazeera and BBC (Arabic) TV were rated as highly credible sources. Finally, the results of the study suggest that Arab audiences seek information from media they deem to be reliable and credible to gratify their need for news information.

The purpose of this dissertation is to present and reflect on seven years of research into the form of online news, its production, and consumption, at national and local websites in the UK, the US, and Finland. The general methodological approach was inductive and exploratory, with the work based mainly on semi-structured research interviews with journalists and editors and on content analysis. Quantitative Internet audience measurement, and observation and document analysis in the field were also used, although less frequently. Most of the work took a broad survey approach, although two in-depth case studies were also conducted. Forty per cent of the work included longitudinal data collection in order that the analyses could integrate evidence from across historical periods. The findings are multifarious and cover the Internet's globalizing and localizing potentials, technological and media industry convergence, changes in social relations between professional journalists and their audiences, and the adaption-or personalization-of news to individual readers' explicitly registered and / or implicitly determined preferences. The research reveals evidence of cyclical patterns of organizational and social behaviour, records evolutionary changes in online news output and professional attitudes, and demonstrates how technology's consequences are often unexpected. The research has practical implications for online newspapers' attempts to court international readers, serve local communities, integrate user-generated and multimedia content, develop business models, adapt to online-only delivery, and design and deploy forms of news personalization. These studies contradict some older scholarship on the supposed revolutionary effects of technology, question some of the concerns that have been expressed about how the changing characteristics of news might have negative consequences for society and individuals, and highlight gaps in the existing literature. In its suggestions for future research this dissertation calls for greater methodological integration so that the dependencies between news artefacts, their production, and consumption can be more clearly demonstrated.

The press is a business operation, run for profit. Its other roles are information provider and purveyor of entertainment to a targeted audience. These roles are often contradictory, although the commercial imperative remains the driving force of the industry. The research analyses press reporting of disaster. and tragedy. Human tragedy is immensely interesting to the reading public. In justifying intrusion into grief and shock the press frequently invokes the 'public interest defence', arguing that the public needs and has a right to know about events. This is a controversial and contested issue. Frequently the right to know is more accurately defined as a voyeuristic desire to live the experience second-hand. Press behaviour was the subject of heated debates in the 1990s, including two government inquiries and several failed private members bills. The industry argued that press freedom was essential to democracy and, despite numerous examples of insensitive, hurtful and inaccurate press reporting for which there are few effective remedies, has preserved its self-regulatory status. The research focuses on four case studies: the Strangeways Prison Protest (1990); the James Bulger case (1993); Fred and Rosemary West (1995); the Dunblane Tragedy (1996). Although these were very different events that occurred at different times during this extended period of press scrutiny, they reveal marked similarities in how events were depicted, how they assumed a wider significance and the treatment of those at the heart of the story. Analysis of newspaper reports is supplemented by primary research through inter-views with journalists, editors and others connected with the industry. The findings are presented thematically, addressing six key areas: the demarcation between public and private; reputation and identity; tone and style of reporting; press regulation; control of information; the industry's political economy. From these findings recommendationsfo r future disasterr eporting are made.

The objective of this thesis is to explore the roles of news media in the political conflict in Thailand’s southernmost provinces by analysing two aspects of Thai journalism: news content and news production practices. Four news organisations of different platforms and organisational natures were selected. The content analysis reveals that, despite their different characteristics, the four organisations’ reports similarly highlight the conflict’s violent aspect and the preservation of public order via law enforcement and security, rely heavily on authority sources, and primarily label perpetrators as criminals. Therefore, the news coverage tends to support the state’s legitimacy in solving the conflict and undermine other interpretations and proposed solutions. Interviews with news workers and ethnography of news production show that journalists encounter several difficulties in reporting about the conflict, from physical threats, limited access to information, and organisational constraints to the pressures from market competition and predominant beliefs in Thai society. The journalist-source relationship is also instrumental in shaping the aforementioned portrayal of the conflict. In all, these elements contribute to journalists’ different stances on the conflict and the various roles they perform. Three prominent roles of Thai journalism in the southern conflict are identified: 1) journalism as a presenter of truth, 2) journalism as a forum for every party, and 3) journalism as a supporter in conflict resolution. These disparate roles reflect the dynamic power play, debates about news professionalism, and reflexivity among journalists. They also signal the interplay between journalism and other political and social institutions. The thesis argues that, while the news coverage still largely endorses the authority’s perspectives and legitimacy, the shifts in the discursive contention and political consensus, as well as diversity and complexity in Thai news ecology could provide opportunities for the counterhegemonic accounts to emerge and facilitate healthy democratic debates about the southern conflict.