This thesis examines the media representation of The Daily Show’s ‘Rally to Restore Sanity’ and the way the rally participants engaged with it. This was a unique event because of the speculation and ambiguity that surrounded it which included characterisations of activism for civil discourse, advocacy for Democrats in the run up to the Congressional mid-term election, to those labelling it as a mass comedy/music event. Also, given that The Daily Show was shifting from its television platform to the field of public protest, this was an opportunity to examine whether the rally could push the boundaries of satire by instigating a more civilised tone in America’s political news discourse. The rally would also be an opportunity to better understand the type of people that engaged with this hybrid satire event and whether their attendance was an act of civic participation.

"Without techniques of visualization, without symbolic forms, without mass media…risks are nothing at all.” (Beck, 2006: 332) There is considerable disparity in the media's profile, prominence and portrayal of climate change when measured against the issue's evidence base. Warming of the climate system is unequivocal (IPCC, 2013: 4) with unprecedented levels of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere (ibid: 11), which are extremely likely to have been caused by human activities (ibid: 17). At its unchecked worst, climate change has the capacity to "alter the sustainability of life on earth as we know it" (Lewis, 2012: 260). In order “[t]o manage the grave risks of climate change effectively, the world must build a zero carbon energy system by the second half of this century” (Green & Stern, 2014: 9). Despite these warnings, climate change has failed to align with news agendas in the UK. Its visibility and presentation in the media is significantly awry with scientific, technical and socio-economic predictions. Instead, terrorism and the threat facing the West from Islamic extremists has commanded more media attention and been treated with greater urgency and less scrutiny than climate change (Lewis, 2012: 260). Whilst it is at odds with research, which indicate that terrorism is a minor, among global threats (Abbott et al, 2006: 4), Islamic-terrorism has come to calibrate the definition of ‘risk’ in the modern Western world. Parallels are drawn between the differing treatment of climate change and terrorism in the media and in political responses (see for example Lewis, 2012; Sunstein, 2006; Kahan, 2013), but no research has yet empirically compared the disparity in media coverage of these risks in more detail. This research addresses that gap and presents the findings of a content analysis designed to comparatively examine reporting of climate change and terrorism over a 14-year period (from January 1999-December 2012) in five British newspapers – The Guardian, The Times, the Daily Mirror, The Independent and the Daily Mail. As a result, this study finds that climate change is 'undone' by the lack of a strong, grand narrative in the British press, with the issue defined in some instances according to a newspaper's ideological position. The terrorism media narrative is concentrated around incident and response while climate change is diffuse, and the discourse of action offset by the alignment of the issue as a predominantly future based risk with financial implications. Competing and antagonistic messages between climate change and terrorism in the media present ‘others’ simultaneously as both victim and enemy, while climate change is also often the subject of debate. Discursive ownership of climate change, when compared to terrorism, is disparate as is the impact of the issue, which lacks a British hallmark. This research argues that what the media says matters (Lewis, 2012: 268). Recalibrating climate change into a concentrated narrative that joins causes, impact and action may have positive implications for those at the forefront of climate communication: scientists, academics and charities/pressure groups. I suggest that comparing risks rather than addressing them individually and taking a 'politicized reading' of newspaper reporting (Carvalho, 2007: 240) may further our understanding of the representation of global risks in the media.

The media industry is undergoing a comprehensive change due to media convergence and the diffusion of the internet. However, there is a lack of research in the field of Information Systems on how these technological phenomena impact work practices in broadcasting and media organizations. Using the BBC’s Digital Media Initiative (DMI) as a case study, I provide a detailed description and analysis of the implementation of DMI in news and long-form productions. The empirical evidence was gathered from BBC Northern Ireland (BBC NI), where a large-scale digital video production infrastructure based on DMI was implemented. My point of departure is the study and impact of digitalization in work practices associated to the production of video as an image-based artefact, which complements previous studies that focus on information tokens such as electronic text. I seek to assess how work practices at BBC NI were affected by the use of digital video throughout the DMI workflow. In this context, my case study analyzes: 1) DMI’s technical infrastructure and its impact on work practices for the purpose of searching and organizing video content, and how this affected news and long-form productions distinctively; and 2) the domain of video craft editing brought about by the digitization of the video production process. My contribution demonstrates the importance of a semiotic approach to the study of the digitalized image-based artefact, particularly when analyzing the construction of a video narrative. Video narratives are based on work practices that originate not only from particular occupational cultures, but also from the technological characteristics of digital video information. I address the importance of the semiotic character of digital video, in both syntactic and semantic dimensions, and acknowledge its role as a constitutive element for understanding the impact of digitalization and work in the information age.

Launching in 2006, Al Jazeera English (AJE) set out to challenge the dominance of Western-based organisations in the field of international English-language news broadcasting. Ambitions of ‘balancing the current typical information flow by reporting from the developing world back to the West’ directly link the organisation to longstanding debates on asymmetric global news flows (AJE Website, Corporate Profile, 04/09/2008). In this context, the aim of my thesis is to develop a theoretical framework that allows to conceptualise two related aspects: 1) assessing degrees of both similarities and differences between AJE and established Western-based news broadcasters and 2) addressing underlying mechanisms that begin to explain degrees of difference that AJE has managed to carve out in the field of international television news. On the basis of a critical realist ontology, I combine Bourdieu’s concepts of field, habitus and capital with an understanding of agency as advanced by Archer. While the first allows me to conceptualise the relational nature of questions of news flows on the level of journalistic practices (which in the past have primarily been the domain of macro-theory), the latter serves to acknowledge the role of the reflexive powers of the individual when it comes to professional trajectories and editorial decision making. Combined, these approaches are uniquely positioned to explore the complexities of a news organisation aiming to be simultaneously similar enough to be on a par with established networks and different enough to live up to aims of ‘reporting back’. My findings suggest that overall, in accordance with its remit, AJE focussed on the global South and on people outside the realms of power to a greater extent than BBC World News, while in other areas asymmetries at odds with AJE’s remit (such as gender imbalances or an association of the South with conflict) were found to be reproduced. This dialectic was reflected in the channel’s organisational environment, where a relatively autonomous position, characterised by a largely non-commercial outlook, provided actors with a rare degree of autonomy, the utilisation of which, however, continues to be contingent on an ongoing negotiation between AJE’s twin aims of (professional) similarity and (editorial) difference.

This research examines the connection between human rights and journalism, and the importance that the latter has in the shaping of common understandings of human rights. Based on an analysis of the Portuguese public service television news, this study pays particular attention to the representation of human rights in the news and the production practices that determine human rights reporting. The research reveals that the financial crisis is powerfully influencing the content of the news, shifting human rights coverage to more social rights-focused reporting. Further, the financial constraints are affecting the professional practices and impeding the dislocation of correspondents to cover human rights issues abroad. This tendency, in its turn, is 1) reinforcing the manifest reliance on news agencies’ contents to cover distant human rights situations, and 2) emphasising proximity and national interest as decisive news values, generating more nation-focused human rights coverage. Consequently, this proximity to human rights problems at home is both empathetic and forced.

Representations of gay, lesbian, queer and other non-heterosexualities on British terrestrial television have increased exponentially since the mid 1990s. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer characters now routinely populate mainstream series, while programmes like Queer as Folk (1999-2000), Tipping the Velvet (2002), Torchwood (2006-) and Bad Girls (1999-2006) have foregrounded specifically gay and lesbian themes. This increase correlates to a number of gay-friendly changes in UK social policy pertaining to sexual behaviour and identity, changes precipitated by the election of Tony Blair’s Labour government in 1997. Focusing primarily on the decade following Blair’s installation as Prime Minister, this project examines a variety of gay, lesbian and queer-themed British television programmes in the context of their political, cultural and industrial determinants, with the goal of bridging the gap between the cultural product and the institutional factors which precipitated its creation. Ultimately, it aims to establish how and why this increase in LGBT and queer programming occurred when it did by relating it to the broader, government-sanctioned integration of gays, lesbians and queers into the imagined cultural mainstream of the UK. Unlike previous studies of lesbian, gay and queer film and television, which have tended to draw conclusions about cultural trends purely through textual analysis, this project uses government and broadcasting industry policy documents as well as detailed examination of specific television programmes to substantiate links between the cultural product and the wider world. The main body of the thesis comprises five chapters, including three industrial case studies examining the four main terrestrial broadcasters- Channel 4, Channel 5, ITV and the BBC- and their gay, lesbian and queer output between 1997 and 2007. Again by analysing policy documents and the distinct public service obligations of each broadcaster, these case studies link the brand identities and imagined audiences of each with the range and volume of LGBT and queer programming they produced within the ten year period studied. In doing so, they also consider the effect of digitisation and the multi-channel environment on the specific types of queer and LGBT programming provided by each broadcaster, and the impact of niche-market broadcasting on the presentation of sexual difference within the contemporary UK context.

This study examines the reception of news messages by audiences, with special reference to coverage of the 1984/5 miner's strike. A new methodology is employed, which used groups of people selected to highlight possible differences in the reception of messages. Some groups had a special knowledge of the events of the strike, while a more general sample included people from different occupations and regional areas. The groups were invited to write and texts of their own television news programmes using actual photographs from news reports on the strike. This approach showed what the groups understood the content of the news to be on specific issues. It was then possible to compare this with what they believed to be `true', and to examine the sources of their beliefs, as well as why they either accepted or rejected media accounts. Earlier research with the Glasgow University Media Group had focussed on the content of television news. This showed how the presentation of certain views and explanations together with the embracing and underlining of them by journalists was part of a general process by which the news was structured. The conclusion was that some key themes were highlighted in the news text. The current study indicated which news themes had been retained in the memories of audience members. One notable result was the clarity with which such themes were recalled and the close correspondence between news programmes written by the groups and some actual news bulletins. Some groups were able to reproduce not only the thematic content of news bulletins on issues such as violence, but also the structure and language of actual news headlines. Television news (and to a lesser extent the press) was found to be a major source of information for many people in the groups and had a clear influence on some elements of belief. However, it was also found that direct experience could have a crucial influence on how new information from the media was understood. Such direct contacts, together with political culture, class experience and processes of logic were the most important factors in the relation between the reception of a news message and what was finally believed by the audience.

With the advent of digital era, the broadcasting landscape is radically changing. Technological development, deregulation and globalisation, as well as changes in social structure and lifestyles combine to shift the established broadcasting paradigm. In the broadband communications environment, bandwidth scarcity, the basis of public service broadcasting, is relieved and thus hundreds of channels are available. Audiences once united in their loyalty to public service channels. are now fragmented. In these circumstances, public service broadcasting, which has been regarded as indispensable, is losing its rationale. Public service broadcasters, irrespective of region and country. are forced to battle for viewers and funding, to redraw their mission and range of activities. and to reshape themselves for the digital world. This study explores how the public service broadcasters (the BBC and KBS) of Britain and Korea have been restructuring themselves to adapt to the changing broadcasting environment. It also traces how the concept of public service broadcasting has evolved in Britain and examines the development of Korean broadcasting, proposing that the distorted operation of Korean public service broadcasting directly resulted from that country's history. Finally, it analyses the reasons why broadcasting in Korea has never been operated on principles of public service despite its proclaimed 'public service system' and explores how to secure the public-ness and public interest of Korean public service broadcasting in the future. For this study in-company research at the BBC and KBS was conducted between 1998 and 2003, along with a literature review. During this period over forty senior staff members were also interviewed, representative of both broadcasters.

The purpose of this study was to explore different acts of interpretation in the interaction between text (television drama) and audience. This study proposed a new theoretical and methodological problematics for audience studies, which is called 'empirical reception aesthetics', challenging for taken-for-granted terms such as audience activity, interpretative communities and the openness of text. It brought out three areas of interest in empirical reception aesthetics; the audience's horizons of expectations, the interpretative positions and textual invitations. In order to investigate these areas, this study emphasised methodological convergence, employing both survey research and the focused family interview. Concerning the audience's horizons of expectation about television drama, the Korean audience saw it as 'emotional escapism', 'distanceship', 'naturalistic realism', and 'imaginative realism', which set limits on divergence in interpretations and reading pleasure. This implies that a range of foreknowledge is an integral part, as a mediated factor, in the interaction between text and audience. It found that there were four interpretative positions; 'the escapist', 'the habitual', 'the ironic' and 'the non-engaged'. Though the individual viewer tends to take a dominant position, this is closely influenced by the other positions on the ground that interpretative positions are correlated with each other. This implies that the audience's interpretative position is not fixed in relation to class or gender. By using the term 'interpretative positions', we are able to avoid a simplistic distinction of oppositional reading and dominant reading and the mechanical application of the audience's interpretation to social backgrounds. Moreover, audience activity can be better understood when focused on a negotiated position.

This thesis explores the way in which the institutional changes that have occurred within the post-network era of American television have impacted on the situation comedy in terms of form, content, and representation. This thesis argues that as one of television's most durable genres, the sitcom must be understood as a dynamic form that develops over time in response to changing social, cultural and institutional circumstances. By providing detailed case studies of the sitcom output of competing broadcast, pay-cable, and niche networks, this research provides an examination of the form that takes into account both the historical context in which it is situated as well as the processes and practices that are unique to television. In addition to drawing on existing academic theory, the primary sources utilised within this thesis include journalistic articles, interviews, and critical reviews, as well as supplementary materials such as DVD commentaries and programme websites. This is presented in conjunction with a comprehensive analysis of the textual features of a number of individual programmes. By providing an examination of the various production and scheduling strategies that have been implemented within the post-network era, this research considers how differentiation has become key within the multichannel marketplace. With a number of channel providers competing for specific niche segments of the audience, it further demonstrates how sitcoms have become more distinctive, original, and contentious in the process.