Hillary Clinton faced gendered discrimination by news media sources during her presidential campaign in 2008. However, there is almost no research concerning the ways Clinton was portrayed on political blogs. Because blogs typically attract consumers who have similar ideologies, this paper explores if Clinton faced more gender bias on conservative blogs than liberal blogs, utilizing two well-established political blogs. Specifically it looks at three biases that exist in traditional sources of news media: appearance-based discrimination, an emphasis on domesticity, and analyses of femininity. This paper found that, in general, bloggers on a conservative website presented more instances of gender bias and bloggers on the liberal website presented fewer. The analysis indicates that while gendered stereotypes existed throughout the blogosphere during the Democratic Primaries, they were more pronounced on conservative websites.

The world of journalism is becoming increasingly dangerous, as figures published by international media organisations demonstrate. But the Western news media suggests, that particularly Western foreign correspondents are facing incredibly high risks and cases of abducted, tortured and murdered foreign correspondents are reported regularly. The question arises “Have they become targets?” Foreign correspondence has been a dangerous occupation since it first emerged during the Crimean War, when the first consistent war reporting was established. Ever since then, foreign correspondents have had to face opposition, criticism and harsh realities. However, they have also always been highly valued journalists and well-respected for their courage to travel overseas, often into conflict-riddled areas, to report important news to their audiences back home. Sometimes they have even lost their lives in the pursuit of truth. Daniel Pearl, Christian Struwe and Karen Fischer or Trent Keegan are just a few examples of the many correspondents and journalists who have died as martyrs for their profession. As the actual data published by international media organisations, such as Reporters Without Borders, the Committee to Protect Journalists or Freedom House, suggests, it has rapidly become worse for all journalists in the last 20 years and there is worse to come. It appears as if the factors leading to their deaths are increasing and will be contributing to even higher death tolls in the future. The thesis will consider such questions as: Who is there to protect journalists and foreign correspondents? Independent media organisations are trying their best. The international press is bemoaning the many deaths and governments have promulgated laws to protect their reporters, but does that actually help? Will those attempts make it better in future? And can the Western news media apparatus itself be held partly responsible for some of the deaths?

The world of journalism is becoming increasingly dangerous, as figures published by international media organisations demonstrate. But the Western news media suggests, that particularly Western foreign correspondents are facing incredibly high risks and cases of abducted, tortured and murdered foreign correspondents are reported regularly. The question arises “Have they become targets?” Foreign correspondence has been a dangerous occupation since it first emerged during the Crimean War, when the first consistent war reporting was established. Ever since then, foreign correspondents have had to face opposition, criticism and harsh realities. However, they have also always been highly valued journalists and well-respected for their courage to travel overseas, often into conflict-riddled areas, to report important news to their audiences back home. Sometimes they have even lost their lives in the pursuit of truth. Daniel Pearl, Christian Struwe and Karen Fischer or Trent Keegan are just a few examples of the many correspondents and journalists who have died as martyrs for their profession. As the actual data published by international media organisations, such as Reporters Without Borders, the Committee to Protect Journalists or Freedom House, suggests, it has rapidly become worse for all journalists in the last 20 years and there is worse to come. It appears as if the factors leading to their deaths are increasing and will be contributing to even higher death tolls in the future. The thesis will consider such questions as: Who is there to protect journalists and foreign correspondents? Independent media organisations are trying their best. The international press is bemoaning the many deaths and governments have promulgated laws to protect their reporters, but does that actually help? Will those attempts make it better in future? And can the Western news media apparatus itself be held partly responsible for some of the deaths?

Trump’s new year tweet about Pakistan’s role in the fight against terrorism ignited a controversy and a war of words between Pakistani officials and the US. This thesis studies newspaper coverage of both countries on this particular issue. Dawn and The News International are chosen from Pakistan and The New York Times and The Washington Post are selected from US media. The aim of this research is to analyse and compare the media discourse. Critical discourse analysis (CDA) was adopted as the most suitable choice. A sum of eight articles, comprising two from each newspaper, is analysed intensively. Outcomes of the analysis are discussed in relation to ‘framing’ and ‘agenda setting’ theories. Five key elements from the theories are listed including: language (vocabulary), conflict presentation, sources, related issues and emphasis. Results reveal that Pakistani newspapers use very strong, rather harsh vocabulary while reporting response to Donald Trump’s tweet. The US newspapers adopted literary phrases and less harsh tone to report this issue. Conflict presentation was focused on Trump’s tweet as a central idea in all the newspapers. Pakistani newspapers focused on the coverage of reaction from military and government officials of the country. On the other hand, US newspapers included sources from both countries to have an objective view. But they have included some controversial issues, which do not have a direct link to this debate starting with Trump’s tweet. Keywords: Twitter and news media, Trump’s tweet about Pakistan, Afghan war, CDA, Framing.

With the rise of internet literacy across the world, men and women on the street are increasingly participating in the news media more than ever before. Early speculations about the influence of citizen journalism imbued the practice with an almost messianic ability to save both journalism and democracy. Whilst these suggestions were influenced by a small amount of data analysis, mainly from Western countries, they were encouraging and demonstrated the potential of citizen journalism in representing the voice of ordinary people. This thesis suggests that citizen journalism is not only promoting the perspective of ordinary citizens, but is also supplementing the coverage of the mainstream media, building relationships, shaping the public sphere, and fulfilling the critical role of a watchdog. Analysing data from a sample of twenty-four different English language citizen journalism sites, this thesis examines the phenomenon of citizen journalism, focusing on the member countries of the South Asian Association for Regional Co-operation. Employing a mixed methods approach, quantitative and qualitative analyses were undertaken of the data set. The results show that citizen journalism sites in the larger and more developed SAARC countries provide more coverage of news than those in the smaller and underdeveloped countries. Political news is given the highest priority by the majority of the sites whilst news about war and terrorism is given the least. The analysis has also discovered that the sites function as a bridge, bringing people living in different parts of the world together and enabling them to engage in political discourse and the sharing of knowledge and experience. Moreover, citizen journalism is helping people to educate themselves about the culture and political systems of their new countries while also forming their own community online. This was particularly the case with the sites that were owned and operated by the diaspora people living in the West. In addition, with a few exceptions, the majority of the sites make substantial use of supplementary materials to enhance news articles, encouraging readers to participate in interactive news activities, such as posting comments. The study has also found that citizen journalists come from a wide range of backgrounds, from politicians acting as citizen journalists to students aspiring to generate revenues through commercial advertising on the Internet. However, they differ from each other in terms of their news values and news presentation — some of the sites offer more political news than others whilst others behave more like the mainstream media, providing a wide range of news articles. On the other hand, a few of the sites are less active and provide fewer news articles than others. The study has also found that citizen journalists from the SAARC countries include works of fiction as part of their news output, thus offering the slightly different definition of citizen journalism from that in the West.

This textual analysis examines online mainstream media coverage during Hillary Clinton’s 2015/16 presidential campaign. Previous research on female political candidates indicates that there are both subtle and unsubtle ways the media reinforces masculinity in the political realm. The results of the study provide a commentary on the internet as a cultural text and Feminist Communication Studies, suggesting that there may be a decrease in the institutionalized sexism in the reporting of mainstream online media. Although encompassing only a small snapshot of the 2015/16 presidential race, the results also suggest that media seemed to lack a category for Clinton – she is both an inside and outsider, sitting at the cusp of a transformative historical event.

The purpose of this study is to investigate, from a dialogical perspective, what messages are conveyed about the Swedish Police Agency's reorganization in the big city press for a limited period in the autumn of 2016. Dialogical analysis provides a tool to not only investigate each text individually, but also to examine the internal relationships between the texts in our selection. The study answers the following questions: What image of the Police Agency's reorganization is conveyed in the media? How does the message about the reorganization of the police agency change by the interplay of the media texts? The result shows that different messages emerge depending on how the reorganization is put into context when different actors' voices and different content topics are highlighted. The results also shows several examples of intertextual relationships between the different texts. Intertextual relationships are shaped when a text uses information or quotes from other texts and puts it into a new context. This study shows how information from a significant news article about the Swedish Police Agency’s effectivity is re-used in other articles and how this leads to a shift of message. The method used is dialogical analysis and partly also a discursive perspective. This study, which emerges from a social constructivist perspective, contributes to the understanding of how media texts interact and the effect this have for the reader(s).

‘Democracy’ has been frequently praised by the Chinese political leadership, while liberal democratic institutions have remained conspicuously absent under CPC one-party rule. This study explores the discourse on democracy in the newspaper China Daily between the years 2007 and 2017 to determine how the concept is articulated in a Chinese presumably alternate discourse on democracy. Fifty articles published between 2007 and 2017 are sampled, and a discourse analysis is performed to identify prominent themes featured in these articles concerning democracy. The sample is then further divided in two subsamples with a cutoff in 2012, to investigate whether there has been a qualitative shift in the discourse since the accession to power of Xi Jinping. The analysis shows that - and how – the discourse treats China largely as a particular democracy, frequently contrasted with ‘Western-style democracy’, and downplays certain democratic principles and institutions in favor of alternative ones. It also shows that an overall shift in tone seems to have occurred since the accession of Xi, from optimistic and progressive to a more negative one.

Understood sociologically, denial is best conceptualized as a social practice. As a phenomenon, social denial refers to patterned behaviour where actors both know and do not-know about uncomfortable truths (Cohen, 2001). Put simply, social denial is a socially reproduced blindness in the face of traumatic events and processes. In opposition to social denial is a different social practice, bearing witness. Bearing witness is engaged when society’s actors give voice to those who would otherwise be silent. Drawing on theoretical frameworks from Stanley Cohen’s work States of Denial and Fujiko Kurasawa’s work Global Justice, this thesis aims to critically reflect and explore the registers and mechanisms of both social denial and bearing witness. The exploration of social denial is sociologically relevant, and generally important, as a means for understanding the role it plays in society, and to further understanding what social denial is and how it works. The better actors understand an issue the more capable they are of addressing it. This thesis conducts a media frame analysis of selected published articles from the National Post and the Globe and Mail that speak to the issue of MMIWG. This analysis reveals social denial through the frames “culpable victim”, “poster child”, and “the extra”; and bearing witness through the frame of the “honourable victim”. The analysis and research of this thesis reveal how social denial covers up the relevance of colonialism with respect to MMIWG. Furthermore, it suggests that social denial acts to both camouflage the gritty details underlying MMIWG and erase the identities of MMIWG.

The long-spun Brexit process has been named a symbol of an alleged disconnection between the European Union’s high-level decision-makers and its citizens. This thesis aims to contribute to the existing literature on the role of national parliaments in brining EU affairs closer to the citizens. More specifically, it turns attention to the Riksdag, and to how informative parliamentary debates on EU affairs are communicated to Swedish citizens. Earlier studies have provided valuable insights into how political opinions on EU affairs are presented in electoral manifestoes and behind closed doors in the Riksdag’s committees. By conducting a quantitative content analysis on Swedish news medias’ coverage of the Riksdag’s debate on EU-affairs over the last ten years, this study offers a first insight into how EU debates are conveyed to the wider Swedish audience. Drawing on previous research on national parliaments, the concept of opposition and theories from the field of political communication, three hypotheses are formulated. While the first hypothesis aims to test whether Swedish news media provide citizens a diverse set of positions from the Riksdag’s debate on EU affairs, the second hypothesis seeks to illuminate which parliamentary actors that are most prominent in medias’ reporting from the Riksdag. Finally, the third hypothesis turns attention to the mode in which EU affairs are presented in news media. None of the hypotheses are unambiguously supported by evidence. The implications are that the media to some extent filter the parliamentary debate. A filter that at occasions may exclude diverging positions on EU affairs. Further, though governments are presented as the main actor in the majority of all analysed articles, the Riksdag is close behind. The result implies that the Riksdag is indeed competing with the government in being the main agenda setter in Swedish news media. Nevertheless, it also suggests that oftentimes, the Riksdag is referred to as one unit, without news media distinguishing the diverging positions within the institution. Finally, the finding from the third hypothesis suggests that the Riksdag is somewhat restricted when it comes to shaping the discourse surrounding EU affairs. In spite of the Riksdag’s increased focus on policy-aspects of EU affairs, the mediated image of the very same debate may still be presented as a concern of polity or procedure. Ultimately, despite not providing any clear support for the hypotheses, the somewhat filtered mediated image of the Riksdag’s debate on EU affairs may carry implications for national parliaments’ ability to bring EU affairs closer to the citizens of the Union.