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The goal of this research was to examine how the One organization's web site either supports or rejects established literature that concludes that U.S. media contains negative representations of the developing world.

University of Macau / Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities / Department of Communication

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.

The turn of the millennium has heralded an explosion in the popularity of adventure sports often also referred to as alternative lifestyle sports or extreme sports. These are offering both new avenues and potential challenges to the traditional ways of conceptualising and practicing sport. This thesis analyses the development of adventure sports, in particular climbing and kayaking, as a subculture. It delivers a socio-economic history of climbing, analyses the role of the media in its development, its participation and its lived experience. Further it investigates the impact of globalisation, commercialisation and consumerism on adventure sports, and considers to what extent they are being brought into the mainstream as a result. The economic impact of participation in adventure sports is reviewed along with a study of how the make up of its participants has changed as the activities have become more accessible. Particular focus is placed on the analysis of the gender order, specifically looking at the experiences of women in adventure sports. For this purpose the sports culture found in climbing and kayaking is examined and the implications for the reconstruction of gender relations are considered. This study employs an ethnographic approach including both semi-structured and structured interviews with both adventure sports experts and participants, document and media analysis, participant observation and the more recent nethnography approach. One of the significant contributions of this thesis has been to provide a comprehensive review and analysis of the social, cultural and media environment of arguably one of the most popular lifestyle sports in the UK. It has also shown the strong interrelationship that exists between the media and adventure sports, and has demonstrated how the increased commercialisation and commodification of the activity has resulted in economic development particularly in some remoter parts of the UK through the packaging and provision of the climbing experience. At the same time some participants see this is ‘selling out’. This research has demonstrated how women’s participation in adventure sports has been subject to marginalisation, sexualisation and trivialisation similar to other mainstream sports. However, this work has also highlighted that there is room for optimism as new discourses of femininity contrary to the traditional male hegemony are emerging. Further research opportunities have been identified concerning issues of ethnicity and participation; the social, cultural and economic relationships between adventure sportspeople and rural communities. Emerging feminist discourses also warrant further investigation.

Social media posts are used to examine what people experience in their everyday lives. A new method is developed for assessing the situational characteristics of social media posts based on the words used in these posts. To accomplish this, machine learning models are built that accurately approximate the judgments of human raters. This new method of situational assessment is applied on two of the most popular social media sites: Twitter and Facebook. Millions of Tweets and Facebook statuses are analyzed. Temporal patterns of situational experiences are found. Geographic and gender differences in experience are examined. Relationships between personality and situation experience were also assessed. Implications of these finding and future applications of this new method of situational assessment are discussed. / Includes bibliography. / Dissertation (Ph.D.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2016. / FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection

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The media has had a significant impact on spreading environmental awareness internationally. The issues covered in the media can be seen as both representative of and an influence upon the heterogeneous public. This paper describes the environmental reporting in the South African provincial newspaper, the Natal Witness, and considers the results to both represent and influence South African environmental ideology. Environmental reporting in South Africa has been criticised for its focus on 'green' environmental issues. This criticism is rooted in the traditionally elite nature of both the media and environmentalists. However, both the media and environmentalists have been noted to be undergoing transformation. This research tests the veracity of assertions that environmental reporting is elitist, and has found that the assertions accurately describe reporting in the Witness. 'Green' themes are most commonly found, and sources and actors tend to be white and men. However, a broad range of discourses were noted, showing that the paper gives voice to a range of ideologies. These results hopefully will make a positive contribution to the environmental field by initiating debate, further studies, and reflection on the part of environmentalists, journalists, and academics on the relationship between the media and the South African environment. / Thesis (M.Sc.)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg, 2004.

The impact of a female sportswriter's presence on a newspaper staff was examined by content analysis, studying photo and copy space devoted to both male and female sports coverage. Composite weeks, one each from each quarter of the year following the woman's date of hire were selected from the only four newspapers in the state of Indiana hiring female sportswriters. Compared to similar Indiana newspapers without female sportswriters, those with female staffers were found to devote more copy and photo space to women's coverage in the entire sports section, and on the sports section front page, papers with female sportswriters used more photos of women and devoted more total space (photos and copy) to women's sports coverage. The effect was consistent regardless of the newspaper's market size. / Department of Journalism

The media, which help define what we think and our roles in the society, have a crucial role to project both men and women’s issues so as to change people’s perceptions and stereotypes about the role men and women play in the society. There is need, therefore, to ensure gender equality in the operations of the media so that issues to do with both men and women get adequate and equal coverage. This study on the reportage of the land redistribution exercise in Zimbabwe has, however, exposed the gendered nature of the operations of the media, particularly in the news production process. It provides that, overally, the news discourse is a masculine narrative whose androcentric form is a result of, and is protected by, claims to ‘objectivity,’ ‘professionalism’, ‘impartiality’ and the pursuit of a journalistic routine system that hegemonically prioritises men’s issues over those of women. The situation, as the research shows, has not been helped by journalists’ incapacity to do thematic appreciation of issues and their over-inclination towards a simplistic event-based journalism that fails to question policies as they are enacted and implemented in gender-skewed processes. The lack of gender policies, the operations of patriarchy and the pursuit of a journalistic routine system that sees nothing wrong with the ostracisation of women issues are very fundamental findings that the research uses in its attempts to explain why the gender equality discourse was left out of the news reports about the land reform exercise in Zimbabwe.