The aim of this thesis is to identify potential routes of participation in environmentally sustainable changes of the Swedish meat production and consumption. Changes are needed as meat production and consumption have been linked to serious environmental problems, such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and land use change. Scientists, international organizations, and Swedish government authorities have identified individual consumer responsibility as key in making that change happen. The public is to be informed and educated to make more environmentally sustainable choices as meat consumers, and become more supportive of policy instruments. This strategy, which mirrors the dominant approach to solving environmental problems, is suggested by government authorities despite their suspicion that media should have made most Swedes aware of the environmental impacts of meat. In this thesis potential participatory routes are identified through the analysis of Swedish news media and audience framings of meat production and consumption. Media framing is studied as an important source of information, and perhaps motivation, crucial in the individualized consumer responsibility approach. The media framing is studied through content analysis of mainstream and alternative radical newspapers. The audiences’ framing of meat may be influenced by media, but also by their everyday experiences, beliefs, values, and opinions. Focus group discussions with reception elements are the methods used for studying how audiences frame meat and use media in the process. The concept of participation is broadened to include passive and active forms to capture in which roles individuals consider to contribute to changing meat production and consumption. It is not self-evident that routes to change must include individual participation, since responsibility may be attributed to other actors, both by media and their audiences. The results imply only participatory route supported by media and audience framing. It is the one that mirrors the individualized consumer responsibility approach to solving environmental problems. The major barrier to the route is the audiences’ perceived inability to act. In an alternative route supported by both media and audience framing, state centered actors are made responsible for enforcing change. Here, the major barrier is the perceived unlikeliness of powerful actors assuming responsibility. Audiences construct no citizen roles for themselves to participate in. Neither does media, who only address audiences as consumers. Based on these findings it is suggested that the outlook for the individualized responsibility approach to making meat production and consumption environmentally sustainable is gloomy. At least if it the approach is to continuously rely on the information and motivation offered by media.

Thesis advisor: Donald Cox / This dissertation consists of two essays which address the origins of the business cycle. In particular, it asks: to what extent do behavioral or psychological effects, famously termed "animal spirits" by John Maynard Keynes, contribute to the amplification of business cycle fluctuations. The first essay, titled "The Labor Market Effects of Bad Economic News", examines the effects of economically pessimistic newspaper articles on hiring and employment patterns. Combining information on newspaper subscriptions with automated content analysis of newspaper articles, the paper reconstructs the flow of pessimistic news across the United States during the past recession on a county-by-county, quarter-by-quarter basis. This high resolution map of pessimistic news delivery is then used to estimate the causal impact of media pessimism on labor market outcomes. Exposure to negative news is found to suppress hiring and total employment during the early stages of the recession by up to 40% compared to pre-recession levels; overall, media pessimism can account for some 7% of jobs lost between 2007 and 2010. Further analysis of Google search data suggests that this contractionary effect is mediated by changes in public attitude caused by exposure to pessimistic stories in the media. Importantly, this study considers only articles which report negative news about the state of the national economy, rather than stories which focus on local events. It argues that the prevalence of such news stories affects local labor market conditions, but is unlikely to be affected by such conditions. This approach helps to address the simultaneity issues which have dogged previous research on the topic. The second essay, titled "Uncertainty and Risk Averse Firms in DSGE" a develops theoretical framework to rationalize the previous paper's empirical results. This paper solves a simple general equilibrium model in which firms are risk averse over future profits in a manner analogous to household risk aversion. It shows that response to increased economic uncertainty - particularly uncertainty with regards to future consumer demand, economies with risk averse firms are likely to undergo a business cycle contraction. This result also addresses a long standing problem in the RBC literature; namely, how to generate a contraction with a Keynesian demand side shock. In most models with risk averse utility-maximizing households, a reduction in aggregate demand due to consumer-side changes is expansionary. The paper argues that by introducing firm-side risk aversion into the model, this counter-intuitive behavior can be corrected in a realistic and parsimonious manner. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Economics.

This thesis examines the processes the American and Norwegian press go through when identifying (or not) private citizens who are suspected of or arrested for a crime. Four central principles are explored in detail and elaborated upon as they relate to the press and individuals in the criminal justice system: the public's right to know, the right to privacy, protection of reputation, and presumption of innocence. Three Norwegian newspaper editors and an independent consultant to the Norwegian Institute of Journalism elaborated on how identification of criminal suspects is determined in Norway. The Norwegian case study provides an alternative approach to identification. Both legal and ethics solutions are proposed as a way to help protect the privacy, reputation, and presumption of innocence of private individuals suspected of or arrested for a crime but without unconstitutionally intruding on press freedom.

This thesis revolves around the subject of fake news, a phenomenon that has been highly discussed with the advent of the internet-based media. It aims to shed light on the problem of fake news and its implications in the Turkish mainstream media by mainly departing from the discourse theory, as well as by using additional theoretical approaches over fake news and media in polarized settings. In that sense, five research questions were developed to understand how fake news items disseminate in the Turkish media ecosystem, and what this could mean for the Turkish mainstream media specifically from the contexts of political partisanship and polarization. In order to answer the research questions, a total number of 687 fake news items have been analyzed in three different data sets. After providing an overall picture of the problem of fake news in the Turkish media ecosystem, the thesis specifically focuses on fake news items that circulate within the Turkish mainstream media. Overall, 77 fake news items are further subjected to an analysis of discourse activity schema in order to find out the narratives that the fake news items are connected to the Turkish political and social context. The research shows that the use of fake news items in the Turkish mainstream media indicates divergent and conflicting epistemologies over certain social and political themes, which are government- opposition divide, secular religious divide, economy, and education. Moreover, the research also indicates that certain social and political themes are under the discursive hegemony of certain groups within the Turkish mainstream media organizations. These themes are found to be anti-immigration, anti-US, anti-Israel, and FETO. Eventually, two main points are discussed in relation to the given theoretical background. First, the problem of fake news in the Turkish mainstream media indicates a damaged understanding of journalism in the country, which requires a reorientation and reexamination. Second, media in polarized settings may increase partisan alignments and divergent epistemologies, which can lead to the use of fake news items in order to empower certain agendas.

Thesis advisor: William Stanwood / Television news provides information to audiences that help them create meaning from the world around them. This paper explores the relationship between television news and social protest, specifically how television news frames might shape audience perception of social protest as a form of democratic participation. This study utilizes a textual analysis of news stories from NBC, CBS, and Al-Jazeera English in order to compare coverage of social protest in the United States and internationally. Two separate protest issues were studied: Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring protests in Tahrir Square in Egypt. Using framing as a theoretical framework, I utilized the three codes of the protest paradigm – narrative structure, official sources, and invocation of public opinion – to analyze thirty news stories about Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring. Two codes – the circus and disorganization – emerged during the research. With support from other relevant scholarship, this study concludes that United States network television news acts as a voice of hegemony in the coverage of social protest, framing protest in ways that benefit elites and uphold the status quo. Protest is often delegitimized by news frames that portray protest as a violent activity and protestors as counter-cultural, social outsiders. Al-Jazeera English, in contrast, provides a counter-hegemonic perspective that legitimizes protest as a form of democratic participation used by a diverse cross-section of citizens. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2013. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Communication Honors Program. / Discipline: Communication.

sustentar um discurso na notícia, com a quantificação da informação através desse recurso ajudando a construir a versão que se quer do fato, com o consentimento dos processos produtivos do Jornalismo. O referencial teórico parte do binômio Comunicação e Trabalho por considerar que as rotinas de trabalho e as práticas produtivas permitem, e até incentivam, ao jornalista usar os números na interpretação dos fatos sociais. A partir da análise de reportagens publicadas no jornal O Estado de S. Paulo sobre as manifestações de Junho de 2013 e também durante a Copa do Mundo de 2014, a pesquisa relaciona os conceitos de linguagem e confronta-os com a fala dos jornalistas, autores das matérias. As entrevistas realizadas mostram a naturalização que se faz de todo o processo de produção da notícia, com os números sendo usados para simular um sentido de verdade no texto jornalístico, servindo como argumento para construção da objetividade. Esse estudo está contextualizado no paradigma materialista, que vê a razão como argumento para apreensão da realidade, e considera ainda as obras de Mikhail Bakhtin e seu Círculo, para o qual o sujeito tem uma relação com o meio ao seu redor e seus discursos. / This dissertation seeks to understand how numbers are used to hold a speech at news, with the quantification of information through numbers helping to build a version of the fact, with the consent of the productive processes of Journalism. The theoretical framework is based on the Communication and Labor binomial, considering that work routines and production practices allow, and even encourage, journalist to use numbers in the interpretation of social facts. From the analysis of articles published in the newspaper O Estado de S. Paulo on the protests of June 2013 and also during the World Cup in 2014, both in Brazil, the survey lists the language concepts and confronts them with the speech of journalists, authors of the reports. The interviews show the naturalization that makes the entire news production process, with the numbers being used to simulate a sense of truth in the news text, serving as an argument for construction of objectivity. This study is contextualized in the materialistic paradigm, which sees the reason as an argument for apprehension of reality, and considers the works of Mikhail Bakhtin and his Circle, for which the subject has a relationship with the environment around him and his speeches.

The following study is aimed to evaluate the views of the Turkish News Media on Europe by analysing news articles derived from six Turkish daily newspapers with different political and ideological stances. Following are the questions of the study; What are the discourses on Europe in news articles of six Turkish daily newspapers? How are the discourses on Europe expressed, culturally respectively politically? In order to achieve this aim, a postcolonial standpoint on nationalism has been implemented alongside its critical view on orientalism. The reason why nationalism is included in the study is that it provides a better understanding of the view of “the other” by understanding the view of “us”, since one cannot exist without the other. Using the linguist Norman Fairclough ́s three dimensional model as part of the Critical Discourse Analysis, the discourses in the news articles have been studied as well as their relations to other discourses, and social practices of nationalism.

This thesis is a content analysis of news about sex trafficking published in the US from 2001 to 2013. The focus of the research is the portrayal of sex traffickers in the news. The project discovered that in the news, the public image of sex traffickers is overwhelmingly people of color who are described to be violent, deceptive and forcible. In addition, sex traffickers are portrayed to make sense of the simplistic representation of powerless female trafficking victims. The portrayal of sex traffickers in the news is simplistic and is driven by the state's response to sex trafficking: punishment of sex traffickers.

The purpose of this thesis, “Local news - a fumbling in darkness after an audience that leavesquietly”, is to investigate how the local news media in Västerbotten decides what to reportabout, and what to leave out and why. It also investigates what the audience think about thenews they are being served. It looks at the relationship between the audience and the localnews media. Four different local media companies are being examined, two of them arepublic service media, the Swedish Television and the Swedish Radio. The other two arenewspapers and private owned media companies, Västerbottens-kuriren and VästerbottensFolkblad. The theories that are being used in this thesis is gatekeeping, agenda setting, localjournalism, click journalism, journalists ideal and audience studies such as uses andgratification. The methods that are used are a quantitative survey and semi-structuredinterviews. The survey is directed to audience to get a sense of what news they want and howthey look at their relationship with local news media companies. The purpose of theinterviews is to get a view of how the media companies are producing news, and how theyexperience their relationship with their audience. The study has shown that the audiencedoesn't always know what they want the news media to report about. One overall themethough was that the audience wished for more local news. The media companies have theambition to produce local news and cover the whole county but fails due to the lack ofresources. The media needs a more active audience to increase the support both in trust, butalso for their economy. Here both the media companies and the audience has a responsibilityin the question.

In the last twenty years, the way in which individuals consume news about politics has changed. As the internet becomes increasingly accessible, convenient, and inexpensive, more consumers than ever before choose to get their news online. As this migration continues, an understanding of online news consumption becomes increasingly important to the study of media systems. There are several ways in which the internet can be truly transformative - this thesis investigates some of these claims as they pertain to the comparative study of media systems. The primary dimension of analysis presented here investigates the internet's role in facilitating the homogenisation, or convergence of domestic media systems. Using a historical institutionalist approach, this thesis examines internet news in the United States and the United Kingdom, two cases at the centre of this debate. To adequately reflect the diversity present in online news consumption, this project uses a dataset comprised of news stories about two national election campaigns accessed via search engines, news aggregators, and social media. The analysis presented here demonstrates the complexity of the online news environment, highlighting key areas like source distribution and regional news content where path dependency has persisted despite the transition to online news, and those areas such as regional news sources where distinguishing between the two cases is more difficult. Where this is the case, the thesis explores alternative the explanations of Americanisation and technological determinism. Variance between Google, News360, and NewsWhip data collected for this thesis demonstrates how the way in which consumers get their news influences how converged or path dependent the media system appears.