The aim of this study was to explore how the Black Lives Matter movement was constructed on Instagram by American television channels the week after George Floyd was killed. The purpose was to answer the following questions; (1) What proportion of the posts were dedicated to the Black Lives Matter movement during the chosen week? (2) How was George Floyd and Derek Chauvin portrayed on the media ́s Instagram? (3) What words and images were used to describe the Black Lives Matter movement? (4) What similarities and differences can be found between the channels ́ portrayals of the Black Lives Matter movement? The approach chosen was a multi-method research, thus using a both qualitative and quantitative design. Based on this method 112 Instagram posts uploaded between May 27th and June 2nd, 2020 were analyzed. CNN, Fox News and MSNBC are the largest news channels in the United States and therefore chosen for this study. Our study concluded that the overall presentation of the Black Lives Matter movement was positive, in terms of the total reporting from all three channels. Observing the channels separately, CNN and MSNBC mostly portrayed it positively, while Fox News mostly negatively. According to our analysis, the reason why the posts could be perceived in this way was based on the words used and images displayed. The words death, looter, and violence provided a negative understanding of the situation. Whereas the words such as loving, solidarity and freedom created a positive appearance. Overall the study found that the proportion of reporting on Black Lives Matter was vast in comparison to other news stories on all three channels. However, one of the substantial differences between them was the portrayal of the offender Derek Chauvin and the victim George Floyd.

News value assessment has been done forever in the news media industry and is today often done in real-time without any documentation. Editors take a lot of different qualitative aspects into consideration when deciding what news stories will make it to the first page. This thesis explores how the complex news value assessment process can be translated into a quantitative model, and also how those news values can be predicted in an effective way using machine learning and NLP. Two models for news value were constructed, for which the correlation between modeled and manual news values was measured, and the results show that the more complex model gives a higher correlation. For prediction, different types of features are extracted, Random Forest and SVM are used, and the predictions are evaluated with accuracy, F1-score, RMSE, and MAE. Random Forest shows the best results for all metrics on all datasets, the best result being on the largest dataset, probably due to the smaller datasets having a less even distribution between classes.

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The diploma thesis " The transformation of the press releases into the media texts" deals with criteria according to what journalists make decisions, what press release should be included into the news and what should not. Since the present media studies perceive gatekeeping as a broader process of information control involving all aspects of message encoding, therefore not just a selection but also a compilation, a transmition, a formation and the timing of information transmition from a supplier to a recipient, the diploma thesis also pursues the transformation process of a press release into a media text itself. The diploma thesis is divided into a theoretical and a practical part. The theoretical part includes the gatekeeping process analysis, the pseudoevent problems analysis and news production routinization analysis. This chapter summarizes the knowledge to the topic from scholarly literature. The second and the principal part of the diploma thesis is the practical and application part. This part argues a personal and a creative approach to a chosen problem solution. The premediate defined hypothesis are being disproved or approved on the basis of a practical research. The background material for this diploma thesis are the press releases of three private companies (G-PROJECT, s.r.o., The Hlubocko -...

In the beginning of 2021 the documentary “The selected children” was aired in one of the public Swedish television channels. In the film we follow the filmmaker as he returns to his elementary school that he left almost three decades ago. His memories where positive but the film depicts abuse with a focus on the leadership and a rope swing . The ensuing media debate was influenced by the fact that the school was, and still are, a waldorf school (Steiner school) and the cult concept was frequently used. This bachelor thesis aimed to find the underlying reasons for the media usage of the cult concept in this context and further how and why a description of a school in the past became a novelty in the present. The perspective is religion sociology and medialization. The purpose is to understand how and why the cult concept is used in nationwide written news media, narrowed down to 11 articles published in Aftonbladet, Dagens ETC, DN, Expressen, GP, SvD och SVT nyheter during May and June 2021. I used a qualitative content analysis method combined with an abductive reasoning. The theory used was in the field of cults, NRM and medialization with an emphasis on media logic also described as media modus operandi. The result shows that the cult concept is used to describe and frame the extreme characteristics of the school. There is a connection between the school and other waldorf schools both in the description of the schools as cults related to abuse and abnormality but the main reason is the foundation in relation to the waldorf pedagogy and anthroposophy. The media uses a very narrow number of sources describing the school, waldorf schools and the anthroposophic movement. The descriptions are made in the present as if the film was depicting the present school as well. As such the sources alongside the framing language constructs the news value in line with the media logic. In conclusion I argue that the findings show that media uses the cult as a description aswell as a news story in line with the theory, describing how the news are storytellers as they have developed into the entertainment industry.