The Japanese law Fūzoku eigyō tō no kisei oyobi gyōmu no tekiseika tō ni kansuru hōritsu (風俗営業等の規制及び業務の適正化等に関する法律), commonly known as fūeihō prohibited dancing in nightclubs after midnight (or 1 A.M.). This law was rarely enforced at least between the late 1980s to 2010, but suddenly police began to crack down on nightclubs nationwide for violating the law in the early 2010s. This led to a civil society campaign and eventually to a revision of the law in 2016, seemingly letting nightclubs operate freely in the future. However, studies by Ryan Hartley, for example, point out that the law still poses many difficulties for nightclubs and reports show that nightclub crackdowns have continued after the revision (Hadfield 2018). This research aims to identify, analyse and compare discourses in Japanese and international news articles in the 2010s concerning fūeihō crackdowns, the civil society campaign and the revision, following the methodology of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and previous research on the environment in which nightclubs operate in Japan. Four main areas of interest in the articles are: 1) What is the reason mentioned for the 2010s crackdowns, 2) what led to the 2016 revision of the law, 3) fūeihō & the crackdowns in international context, and 4) what does the future look like for Japanese nightclubs. Many of the international articles studied exhibited a lack of researching or possibly deliberate oversimplification of the issue, especially by often stating that the revision has eliminated the “war on dance”. Japanese articles occasionally brought up concerns over issues that the revision of the law could bring including noise pollution and drug trafficking, from which it can be understood that a discourse of nightclubs being apotential source of problems exists. Despite this, all of the articles in one way or another expressed that revising the law is important or would at least bring positive outcomes, for example by increasing tourism.

The underrepresentation of sportswomen in all forms of news coverage has been widely acknowledged by feminist media scholars. However, some researchers claim that there is a shift towards greater gender equality of sports media coverage, especially during the Olympic Games. In light of such studies, the present study examined the quantitative and qualitative media representations of male and female athletes in six German news media outlets during the Olympic Games 2016. The empirical analysis focused on the coverage of the German men’s and women’s hockey team. In contrast to previous studies, the chosen example represents a special case, since on the factual level, hockey can be seen as a gender equal sport, because hockey is played by men and women equally in Germany and both teams won the bronze medal at the Olympics 2016. Content analysis and feminist critical discourse analyses were used to examine in what ways the media portrays male and female hockey players differently and thereby plays a part in the ideological construction of gender. The study found that, although the selected German media outlets gave more coverage to the hockey women than sportswomen usually receive, the coverage was filled with narratives based on hegemonic masculinity that produces striking contrasts between the female and male hockey players. Results show that the media was more likely to minimize the athleticism of the hockey women, by comparing them to the men’s team, including non-sport relevant information or emphasizing their traditional gender roles as wives and mothers. Moreover, the coverage of the female hockey players typically employed expressions which imitate femininity, whereas the language used to report on the male athletes contained power descriptors, conforming to the hegemonic notions of masculinity. Thus, the media reporting produces gender differences and naturalizes a gender hierarchy in which sportswomen are represented as inferior.

This work focuses on a gender analysis of female characters in video games, specifically the action genre of computer games in which players play from the perspective of a third party (ie see a playable character on canvas). Pays attention to very specific situations in which the female figure is markedly ambivalent status - show clearly feminine characteristics, it moves but clearly masculine space and pay the archetypal clearly masculine activities. Working with so anlýzou konrkétních computer games and playable characters trying to determine whether computer games as a new medium for his portrayal of female characters contribute to gender stereotypes and whether, therefore, become another medium, that these stereotypes produces and reproduces that deconstructs these stereotypes and changing, or whether it even creates new stereotypes. The analysis is the analysis itself as a representation of female characters in visual, narrative or folder of computer games and interactive component analysis itself - that is playing. In this sense, the work seeks to determine how the female characters look if they present archetypal feminine or masculine characteristics and what pleasure playing them can offer both male and female players. In conclusion, the work also attempts to describe the transformations which...

The quantitative and qualitative analysis of the media representation of political leaders in the articles published on the Facebook pages and of the form of discussion under the articles creates fairly comprehensive picture of the discourse on the issue of women at the top political positions in the online environment. Although gender does not appear to be one of the most important factors influencing the tone of the analyzed texts, it is possible to identify several tendencies that are related to gender in both articles and comments. Except for positive tone when evaluating political actions and opinions of female politician, which highlighted the stereotypical characteristics of women (patience, compromise, etc.), articles and comments are negative. Other identified forms of media representation of female politicians were usage of images of power and weaknesses (female too strong is associated with negative tone); associating women with emotions (both extremes - absence of emotions and over-emotionality  are associated with negative tone); and using privacy-related topics such as family, fashion, hobbies (a woman who is not interested in these areas, and thus does not fall into the stereotypical image of a woman, is again depicted negatively). Analysis of the comments in the online discussion...

This study examines U.S. newspaper representation of Muslim-Arab women post 9/11 with an aim of better understanding how women are portrayed in relation to religion, society, politics and the economy. Through a discourse analysis, I examined local articles from across the nation, in addition to international articles, that examine various aspects of Muslim-Arab women’s lives between 9/11/2001 and 9/11/2005. With the increasing focus on the Muslim world in general, and Muslim women in particular, it is necessary to determine how women are portrayed. Muslim-Arab women have increasingly been on the face covers of magazines and front pages of newspapers since 9/11 and all the events that followed; among the major topics covered were the war in Afghanistan, the U.S.-led Iraqi invasion, as well as the elections in both countries. This project aims to provide a comprehensive examination of the diverse stereotypes used by Western reporters to describe Muslim-Arab women, their appearance, status, roles, obligations,responsibilities and aspirations. The analysis also examines the journalistic practices that contribute to distortion and stereotyping.

This thesis analyzes media coverage of the labor movements by taking main underlying dynamics into the attention, in which the neo-liberal policy implementations ideologically contradict with the will of the workers. The media representation of working class will be evaluated on the base of the most striking contradictory area, privatization. The study will generally discuss the main dynamics before going through the news analyses of four national and nine local newspapers. This news of national and local media will be evaluated by the methods of content and discourse analyses. The study will finally try to find out the attitude of the workers towards their media representation and their trust in the media through the method of interviewing. The national and local media will be compared during the evaluations presented within this thesis.

This study examines the attitudes and opinions of ALS patients toward mass messages about their condition. Six focus groups of ALS patient support groups viewed and responded to public relations messages, charity advertisements, and a news story. Results suggest that mass messages remind participants of the need for public ALS awareness. Participants also said they shared in the narratives and identify closely with the characters in the messages they viewed, and participants expressed concern with disease depictions. These concerns included a tension between positive and realistic portrayals, identification of message inaccuracies, and a desire for more specific disease information. The ALS disease as it relates to mass communication has not yet been explored in scholarly literature. This study highlights the importance of the thoughts and opinions of ALS patients toward mass communication about their disease, and it provides a rich understanding of the participants' desires for their disease experience to be recognized and understood.

Over the past 14 years, working independently and with other original thinkers, I have produced works that have on two fronts contributed to the evolving understanding of ethnic relations in contemporary Britain. The first is around social/community cohesion, media and representation as well as counter-terrorism policy as explored through the social sciences. The second domain covering the same themes is couched within the humanities, in particular, the production of literary fiction.

This thesis is a critical examination of newspaper coverage of Canadian-born cases of Bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) discovered between May 2003 and December 2005. Data for the thesis has been compiled from three newspapers: the Edmonton Journal, the Calgary Herald, and the Globe & Mail. The Alberta newspapers were chosen for their proximity to the BSE discoveries, and the Globe & Mail was chosen for the national focus of its coverage. Using Fairclough’s method of ordering discourses, I examine three discourses prominently featured in the coverage: the political discourse, the science discourse, and the socio-cultural discourse. I analyse the three discourses independently, incorporating relevant theory to further explicate the discourses. The primary focus of the thesis is on the newspaper coverage of the first Canadian-born BSE case, but newspaper coverage of additional discoveries are included to examine how the BSE media package changed over time.

The main issue of the dissertation paper was to provide a comparative analysis of ethnic minorities representation in the Czech and Kyrgzystan media discurses in the 90s of the 20th century. Both of the above mentioned countries have undergone a paradigm change, which in the terminology of the four theories of press changed the so-called soviet paradigm for libertarian one. The aim of the research was to demonstrate that it is possible to use the comparative analysis also in regard to ethnicities (ethnic minorities), cultures and national minority organizations that are geographically distant and typologically different. The research is based on comparison of four researches developed by the following authors: Petra Klvačová, Tomáš Bitrich: Jak se (ne)píše o cizincích, Věra Malkova: Этнические образы в республиканских газетах. Опыт этносоциологического исследования, Stuartem Hall (The spectacle of the "Other"), Bernard Berelson, Patricia J. Salter (Majority and Minority American's: An analysis of magazine fiction). The subject of the study is the collection of texts materials from printed media, supplemented and confronted with a trial research sample of responses provided by representatives of media, politics, science and public etc. (in-depth interviews) on the topic of minorities. By means of...