This study focuses on the role of the press in violent political conflicts in Kenya in the period that preceded the 2005 referendum on the draft constitution. Based on media reports, six major thematic areas of concern emerged during constitution making. These were: land tenure, devolution of power, the executive, the legislature, the Bill of Rights, and the provincial administration. These sections of the draft constitution caused a remarkable divergence of opinion. The citizens either supported or opposed the draft constitution on the basis of how the draft had treated those sections in the draft constitution. Besides the major thematic areas, newspapers regularly focused and reported on ethnicity, violence, political leaders‟ utterances, the process of constitution making, and political conflicts. Three main objectives guided the study. The first objective focused on the relationship between media content and different levels of political conflict. The influence of media content and how these may have led to high political conflict, medium political conflict, low political conflict and no political conflict, are tested in this study. The second objective highlighted the kind of coverage that the draft constitution got during the period that preceded the referendum in November, 2005. This objective facilitated interrogation of media content and whether media content focused on aspects of the draft constitution such as land ownership, the executive, devolution, the legislature and religion, as highlighted in the draft constitution of Kenya 2005. The third objective examined the thematic emphasis that the media undertook in the period that preceded the referendum. The themes that were dominant in the period before the referendum could have impacted on readers' perceptions of the critical issues that could have informed the voters' decisions. Three primary questions were addressed in the study: Firstly, was there a link between media content and different levels of political conflict in weak democracies such as Kenya? Secondly, did media content influence ethnicity and did it encourage ethnic conflict in diverse societies? Finally, what were the key thematic areas of coverage by the press, and how were they used during the referendum? In order to study these research objectives, I used a combination of theories to enhance understanding of the interplay between media content and audience in the society. The theories are: agenda setting, two-step flow, priming, framing, and the public sphere. The study adopts a triangulation convergence design in mixed- methods research that involves both qualitative and quantitative methods. A structured questionnaire and content analysis were used to seek responses to the research questions of the study and to meet the stated objectives. The research revealed that the two newspapers under investigation, namely the East African Standard and the Nation, provided more coverage to issues that were not central to the content of the draft constitution, such as political leaders' utterances, violence, ethnicity, and the process of constitution making. This showed that the newspapers tended to sensationalise issues instead of providing objective coverage of political matters. These newspapers used their opinion pages to educate their readers on how the referendum was turning violent. The theme of political leaders' utterances is closely linked to that of violence. This suggests that the violence was influenced by some of the leaders' statements. These utterances, and more so those that touched on ethnicity, could therefore have been a potential cause of the ensuing political conflicts during the 2005 referendum on the draft constitution. The findings reveal that newspaper editors tended to focus on political conflict at the expense of the actual content of the draft constitution. This would have provided insight and knowledge on the document and avoided sensational reporting, which could have contributed to violent political conflicts during the period that preceded the referendum on the draft constitution of Kenya.

Agenda-setting hypotheses inform political communications studies of media influence (public agenda-setting), as well as examinations of the policymaking process (policy agenda-setting). In both cases, studies concentrate on the salience of issues on actors' agendas, and the dynamic process through which these agendas change and effect each other. The results, narrowly conceived, offer a means of observing media effects or the policy process. Broadly conceived, agenda-setting analyses speak to the nature of relationships between major actors in a political system. This study differs from most past agenda-setting research in several ways. First, this project draws together public and policy agenda-setting work to build a more comprehensive model of the expanded agenda-setting process. Secondly, the modeling makes no assumptions about the directions of causal influence - econometric methods are used to establish causality, allowing for a more nuanced and accurate model of issue dynamics. Quantitative evidence is derived from a longitudinal dataset (1985-1995) including the following: a content analysis of Canadian newspapers (media agenda), 'most important problem' results from all available commercial polls (public agenda), and measures of attention to issues in Question Period, committees, Throne Speeches, government spending, and legislative initiatives (policy agenda). Data is collected for eight issues: AIDS, crime, debt/deficit, environment, inflation, national unity, taxation, and unemployment. The present study, then, is well situated to add unique information to several ongoing debates in agenda-setting studies, and provide a bird's eye view of the media-public-policy dynamics in Canadian politics. Many hypotheses are introduced and tested. Major findings include: (1) there is a Canadian national media agenda; (2) the salience of issues tends to rise and fall simultaneously across Canada, although regional variation exists based on audience attributes and issue obtrusiveness; (3) there is no adequate single measure of the policy agenda - government attention to issues must be measured at several points, and these tend to be only loosely related; (4) the agenda-setting dynamics of individual issues are directly and systematically related to attributes such as prominence and duration; (5) Canadian media and public agendas can be affected by the US media agenda. / Arts, Faculty of / Political Science, Department of / Graduate

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Democratic forms of government are either consolidating democratic institutions or unraveling into authoritarianism in the former Soviet Union. Among the possible causes of each success or failure to consolidate democracy is the character of civil society and its cultural proximity to long-standing, modern state-based, consolidated democracies of the West. What impact does Western or Westernized media have upon the indigenous civil societies of Eastern Europe, and is this impact sufficient to consolidate democracy among the states of the former Soviet Union? As case studies, Eastern Europe contains two states, Estonia and Russia, where democracy has either succeeded or failed alongside the presence of exogenous cultural influence in the form of Western or Westernized television broadcast media. To what extent does the presence of Western broadcast media and associated cultural memes predict the iv consolidation of democratic political values, and how ought any impact of these memes be interpreted in the light of modernity, Eurocentricity and cultural hegemony? To account for the impact of exogenous cultural influence, foreign policy prescriptions that encourage the growth of indigenous, mimetic, democratic civic culture would appear to be an effective means of supporting democracy in the emerging democracies of Eastern Europe. / by John R. Batey. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2013. / Includes bibliography. / Mode of access: World Wide Web. / System requirements: Adobe Reader.

Title in English and Afrikaans / Communication Science / D.Litt. et Phil. (Communication Science)

Submitted in fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy: Management Sciences, Durban University of Technology, Durban, South Africa, 2015. / Nigeria’s vociferous media has the potential to be divided along ethnic and religious lines. Given that most Nigerians view political aspirants in terms of their ethnic and religious lineage rather than political ideology, and since most Nigerians rely on the media for information, there is the tendency to fall prey to biased and insensitive reportage, capable of inciting violence which is elicited by prejudiced information often presented as news, features, commentaries, documentaries, etc. This problem is the major motivation behind this research, which aims to build through training, the capacity of the media to report elections in a conflict-sensitive manner. This thesis develops, through the use of a participatory action research design, an alternative method of news reportage using the peace-journalism model. The model, developed by Jake Lynch and Annabel McGoldrick (2005), encourages journalists to report social issues in ways that create opportunities for a society to consider and value nonviolent responses toward conflict by using the insights from conflict analysis and transformation to update concepts of balance, fairness and accuracy in reporting. It also provides a new route map, which traces the connections between journalists, their sources, the stories they cover and the consequences of their reportage. In addition, it builds awareness of nonviolence and brings creativity into the practical job of everyday editing and reporting. This research holds theoretical significance in that it explicitly identifies conditions that encourage journalists to apply conflict-sensitivity to their reportage, thereby promoting societal peace, particularly during elections. The research findings herein offer a unifying multi-dimensional, conceptual framework which can be used to analyse and discuss the role journalists play in ensuring peaceful elections and demonstrates that they have a constructive part to play when covering sensitive social issues. A training manual has been developed from the findings of the study; it is intended to serve as a template and guide for journalists reporting on elections across the African continent.

This thesis examines the development of Sinn Féin's communication strategies and considers how news coverage of the party has evolved in recent years, and in particular with the advent of the Irish peace process from the mid-1990s onwards. The aim of the research presented here is to establish the relationship between the development of the party's professional communication apparatus and the evolution of its news coverage and to determine the extent to which the emergence of a sophisticated approach to communication has impacted upon media coverage. The thesis argues that the development and implementation of the party's professional communication apparatus has been the result of a much wider process of republican reappraisal that took place during the 1980s. This culminated in the 1990s with the transformation of the republican movement into a more constitutional and negotiation-oriented party, while progressively moving away from the armed struggle as a means to achieve Irish re-unification. Moreover, in emphasising that there has been a considerable improvement in the reporting of Sinn Féin; namely that the news media have become progressively more interested in republican predicaments, less biased and more critical of unionism, it also suggests that the improved media coverage must be seen as a result of the political re-alignment of the movement itself. Ultimately, the main argument of this thesis is that we are now witnessing a new phase of the republican movement and, by proxy, of Northern Irish politics and its coverage in the media. This has meant that Sinn Féin has become more wiling to reach a political compromise and to find a peaceful solution to the conflct, and has attempted to affirm itself as a party with political and social interests, other than Irish re-unification. This has also forced the British government to reappraise its own view of the conflict and of Sinn Féin, recognising above all that the party and Northern Irish politics have evolved from a situation of war to one where it is dominated by careful and sensitive diplomacy. The result is that most of the common assumptions held about Sinn Féin including those of some academics, its political communication and its news coverage, must now be reconsidered in light of the radical transformations that have taken place.

A Dissertation present in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Master of Arts Degree in the Political Studies, Faculty of Humanities at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, 2016 / Pending legislation in South Africa in the form of the Protection of State Information Bill presents an unprecedented threat to freedom of the press in post-apartheid South Africa. Like most countries globally, there have been tensions between the ruling party, which represents the state and the media, who argue that freedom of the press is critical to democracy. Both are institutions that consider their presence essential elements in a democratic regime. There is a fine line between censorship and self-regulation. But equally important is the need to balance rights to privacy with information that is in the public interest. In a country seen to have one of the most progressive constitutions in the world, enshrining freedom of the press, there are, however, still many questions around the media and where they ideally fit into society. Should they be the watchdog? Should they be a mouthpiece? And 22 years into democracy, how free are they to choose which role they prefer? With the freedom of expression war between the media and the ruling party continuing to play out in South Africa, the challenge lies in understanding what role the media has in efforts to entrench democracy. / MT2017

In this dissertation, I explore the ways in which traditional processes of opinion formation, media exposure, and mobilization operate in a networked, fragmented, and high-choice environment. From a methodological standpoint, one of the advantages of this shift toward Internet-mediated activity is the potential for enhanced measurement. In my dissertation, I take advantage of the data trail left by individuals in order to learn about political behavior and media effects online. Combining this measurement strategy with field experiments conducted in naturalistic online environments, I am able to shed light on how longstanding concerns in political science manifest themselves in the present-day media landscape. The overarching theme is that, thanks to advances in both research design and technology, many well-articulated concerns about the impact of the Internet on politics and public life can now be subjected to rigorous scrutiny. As I show here, the most dire predictions -- about people's tendency to cocoon themselves into ideological echo chambers or opt for low-cost "slacktivism" over more meaningful contributions to collective action -- appear to lack strong support. But it is also clear that results clearly depend on the structural features of a particular medium: Twitter enables peer effects and the mutual reinforcement of viewpoints, while the high-choice environment of the Web may inherently lead to moderation.

The growth of social media use raises significant questions related to political information and its effect on political knowledge and participation. One issue is whether social media delivers news and political information in a similar manner as traditional news media sources, like newspapers, TV, and radio, by contributing to political knowledge, which is linked to voter turnout. This dissertation examines the relationship between an individual's social media use, their use of traditional news media sources, and whether they turn out to vote. It utilizes American National Election Survey data from the 2016 U.S. Presidential election to complete three studies. First, the dissertation compares people who prefer social media and those who prefer traditional news media sources across as series of political habits and attitudes. Second, it looks at the expansion of the media environment and examines whether a person's social media use and preference for news or entertainment is related to political knowledge and voter participation. Finally, this dissertations examines at whether social media use increases the odds an individual will turn out to vote, thus acting in a similar manner as traditional news media. The results identify differences between people who prefer social media and people who prefer traditional news media sources. In particular, people who prefer social media tend to be younger, have less political knowledge, and have a lower voter turnout rate. However, unlike traditional news media use, the use of social media did not increase the odds an individual turned out to vote in 2016. Further, the use of social media and an individual's content preference of entertainment versus news was not related to political knowledge nor voter turnout. While social media does not appear to have a positive relationship with turnout, it does not appear to discourage a person from voting either. The results suggest that more work needs to be done, including examining the relationship between age, social media use and turnout, as well as how content length may be related to political participation. Finally, further examination is needed of the possible indirect ways social media may be related to voter attitudes and participation.