Sexy Sports: A reception study of the National Broadcasting Corporation (NBC) Olympics website coverage of women’s beach volleyball at the 2008 Beijing Olympics involves an examination of the sporting media and its reportage of the female athlete. The thesis will focus on the reception of the NBC Olympics website coverage of women’s beach volleyball at the 2008 Beijing Olympics by viewing groups constituted by the researcher. The reason for this is that it would be difficult to find naturally constituted audiences for this website, but its reception is never-the-less of research interest. My hypothesis is that the nature of the images and text on the website is overdetermined by the construction of women on other popular texts such as men’s magazines etc. In focusing on the meanings obtained from the content of the website (texts and images), the study will investigate how these meanings are naturalised in specific moments of production as well as through their intertextual relationships with similar texts involved in the glamorisation of female athletes. Specifically the study explores the meanings obtained from the content of the website (texts and images) and how in turn these meanings are naturalised by the consumers of the website. The study will utilise a qualitative research design to unpack the content of the website through the use of qualitative content analysis, focus group interviews and individual in-depth interviews. The research will be informed via a theoretical framework that draws from feminist theory, sport feminism, the concept of intertextuality between media texts, ideology and Stuart Hall’s model of preferred reading. Increasingly mainstream media uses the image of a woman’s body to sell almost anything from men’s razors to margarine and in so far as the reporting of women’s sports is concerned this holds true. Through the research I intend to account for the connotative power of other texts i.e. the men’s magazines and pornography, and how this is likely to be carried through into shaping the meanings that are read off the website. Arguably the production of the NBC texts and images are overdetermined by the existence of similar texts already in transmission in the circuit of culture.

The purpose of this study was to examine how male and female celebrities are represented on the 24 covers of e+, a weekly entertainment magazine that was published by Dubai-based Al Nisr Publishing. This cross-sectional, exploratory study used a qualitative visual semiotic analysis and quantitative content analysis to examine how male and female celebrities are constructed and represented on covers published between October 2010 and September 2011. In addition, the study explored whether the myths and ideologies found on the covers made an impression on the perceptions and tastes of teenagers living in the UAE. A subsequent self-administered questionnaire was completed by 30 teenagers living in the UAE aged between 16 and 19 with the purpose of determining how teenagers experienced representations of celebrities. Furthermore, to gain a deeper understanding of how teenagers experienced celebrity culture, three focus-group interviews, each comprising of six participants, are conducted. The study found that both male and female celebrities were represented in gender stereotypical roles. Results showed that male celebrities were represented as active, strong, decisive and dominant. Male celebrities were associated with success, fast cars and dangerous weapons. On the other hand, female celebrities were predominantly represented as submissive. The representations of female celebrities focused on beauty and fashion. The survey and focus-group results revealed that celebrity culture does have an influence on teenagers. Participants reported that they bought products that they saw celebrities wearing or using, emulated the celebrities’ behaviour and copied hairstyles and make-up looks. However, the study found that, in addition to celebrity culture, teenagers’ perceptions are also shaped by their peers, parents and other people they interact with such as teachers. / Communication Science / M.A. (Communication Science)

Cosmopolitan and For Him Magazine (FHM) are, at present, both the most widely read and, therefore, the most popular "white" consumer magazines in South Africa. They both appeal to young audiences of between 18 and 34 years of age, approximately, and target middle-class, educated groups of readers. My interest in Cosmopolitan and FHM lies in their ability to influence and shape their readers' actions, values, identities and relationships, in particular with the other gender. My analysis is focused on the cover pages and the Editor's letters of six copies of each magazine, ranging from April to September 2003, providing me with a corpus of 12 cover pages and 12 Editor's letters. I adopt a critical perspective through the use of Fairclough's (1989) Critical Discourse Analysis, supported by Mills (1995) Feminist Stylistics, McLoughlin's (2000) textual analysis of cover pages and Kress & van Leeuwen's (1996) visual analysis tools. By combining these different methodologies my research falls into what is newly termed Feminist Critical Discourse Analysis (Lazar 2005). The cover page analyses used primarily McLoughlin and Kress & van Leeuwen and provides an element of pure genre analysis, while the analysis of the Editor's letters were subject to Fairclough's three inter-related stages of analysis, namely: a Description of the formal textual elements of the letters, an Interpretation which analyses the processes of text production and interpretation, and lastly an Explanation of the socio-historical context. Through an analysis of these magazines, whose interests are being served and how the readers are shaped and positioned by the magazines can be identified. My analyses revealed conflicting discourses within each magazine, however it was Cosmopolitan that revealed more tension and conflict in terms of identifying and representing women, while FHM subscribed, for the most part, uniformly to the "new lad" ideology. However, while Cosmopolitan attempted to show a forward-thinking and emancipatory view of the roles of men and women in society, both magazines covertly sustain patriarchal dominance and hegemonic masculinity. In conclusion, I reveal the need for consumers of the mass media to become more critically aware of the ideologies that are promoted through the differing tools of the media and that only through this critical awareness can any further movement towards equal relations between men and women be made. / KMBT_363 / Adobe Acrobat 9.54 Paper Capture Plug-in

In this dissertation, the researcher presents the findings of a discourse analytic enquiry on the construction of femininity within a contemporary South African magazine. It is argued that gender is a social construction and that women’s magazines provide a channel through which discourse of femininity reaches women. These discourses in women’s magazines are often narrow and stereotypical in nature which may limit the development of women’s feminine gender identities. A discourse analytic approach was utilised to reveal the different discourses of femininity within a contemporary women’s magazines, Cosmopolitan, as well as to indicate how they may contribute to the construction of femininity. From the magazine, relationship-focused articles were selected, from which three predominant discourses of femininity were identified which includes femininity as heterosexual, nurturing, and managerial. An important finding is that competing discourses of empowerment and traditional femininity were evident. This points to the highly complex ways in which gender, specifically femininity, is constructed in the magazine under study. / Psychology / M.A. (Psychology)

Author's name: Bc. Mácha Slavomír School: Social Science & Philosophy Dept. Faculty of Education Charles University, Prague Graduate Program (Single Major): Master Degree (Mgr.) in Teaching Social Sciences, Philosophy, and Ethics in High Schools and Higher Professional Schools Title: The Role of the Media in Shaping Public perceptions and Political thinking in the Czech Republic Consultant: PhDr. Josef Stracený, CSc Number of pages: 97 + 1 attachments Number of attachments: 1 Number of marks: 202412 Number of literature: 56 Number of web pages: 33 Year: 2012 Key words: role of the media, political marketing, political thinking, public opinion, media manipulation, media function, advertising in politics, message effects, active and passive audience, voter, citizen, social networks, This thesis aims to prove the role of media in shaping the public perception and political thinking in the Czech republic. Thesis was worked up by analysing specialised literature concerning the above topics. The role of the media in shaping the public opinion and the views of major political and social problems are being investigated in the long-term surveys. It is legitimate (nebo generally accepted) that all we know, believe or think about what happens in the outside world is sometimes shaped into a form that reflects...

The thesis is focused on the communication inclusion and exclusivity of Czech journalist on Twitter and how they use conventions of this platform to connect with other users. Through the description of current communication layers and functions of Twitter this thesis depicts how it became one of main sources of news and how it pushed journalists to reinterpret their traditional roles in the society. It also describe how digital humanities and digital trace data gathered from social media can be used as means of analysis of social interactions of its users. The practical part presents a cluster analysis based on Twitter data of 457 Czech journalists that shows how is Twitter used to communicate within and outside the Czech media system.

In this dissertation, the researcher presents the findings of a discourse analytic enquiry on the construction of femininity within a contemporary South African magazine. It is argued that gender is a social construction and that women’s magazines provide a channel through which discourse of femininity reaches women. These discourses in women’s magazines are often narrow and stereotypical in nature which may limit the development of women’s feminine gender identities. A discourse analytic approach was utilised to reveal the different discourses of femininity within a contemporary women’s magazines, Cosmopolitan, as well as to indicate how they may contribute to the construction of femininity. From the magazine, relationship-focused articles were selected, from which three predominant discourses of femininity were identified which includes femininity as heterosexual, nurturing, and managerial. An important finding is that competing discourses of empowerment and traditional femininity were evident. This points to the highly complex ways in which gender, specifically femininity, is constructed in the magazine under study. / Psychology / M.A. (Psychology)