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This dissertation critically examines how U.S. print media sought to represent the realities of decolonizing and newly independent countries in West Africa by focusing on pivotal events and charismatic leaders from the “non” vote in Guinea in 1958 to the radical appeal of Amilcar Cabral in Guinea-Bissau in 1973. The framing and agenda setting of mainstream media coverage turned leaders and events into metonyms not only for peoples and nations but also for Africa and Africans as a whole. However, the complexities of West Africa, such as political rivalry in the Congo or civil war in Nigeria, troubled such representations. Thus this dissertation tracks the widening of coverage and opening up of representations in African American and New Left print media in a time of global unrest as well as Cold War.

Motivating the political will necessary for fair and ambitious climate change policies is significantly complicated by the rise of populism. Right-wing populist communication targets civil servants and intellectuals as conspirators furthering a climate agenda for their own self-interest. Yet, despite the real world implications of populist communication, more work is needed to both (1) understand the presence of populist frames in media communication on climate change and (2) untangle the relationships between the far-right and diverse forms of climate skepticism. Completing a content analysis of newspaper opinion pieces and Fox News programing between 2008 and 2020, I find that populist skeptic frames are an important part of media communication on climate change in both the Wall Street Journal and Fox News. Additionally, I find that populist skeptic frames most commonly use process skeptic claims, leveraging conspiratorial language to describe collusion between the government and scientists to falsify the severity of climate change and control the public for their own gain. Using a survey experiment, I find that higher populist attitudes are negatively associated with both belief in climate change and support for climate mitigation policies among Republicans. Conversely, I do not find a significant effect of exposure to a populist process skeptic frame, prompting the need for more work on the connections between populist skeptic framing and climate change attitudes.

The aim of this study is to analyze whether any media bias and framing can be observed in the U.S. news reporting surrounding the topic of the abortion debate. And if yes, how they are being presented to their respective audiences.For this, thirty articles have been analyzed in total; published respectively by Fox News and CNN in the timeframe of June 2021 until June 2023. This covers the time before, after, and during the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the law of Roe v. Wade. For the analysis I referred to Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis, as well as the theories of framing and media bias. Additionally, the theory of hegemony was applied to the results. These theoretical concepts were accompanied by a combined paradigmatic approach of interpretivism and critical theory.The results of the analysis indicate that both news outlets present bias, framing, and hegemonic ideologies within their reporting. The content of Fox News showed a tendency of an anti-abortion stance in its rhetoric, utilizing frames concerning morality, freedom, politics, and the abortion industry. Meanwhile, CNN’s content tended to take an oppositional stance by utilizing pro-abortion rhetoric, as well as frames concerning harmful information, freedom, the danger of Conservatives, and politics. These findings led me to conclude that there are significant implications for media hegemony inherent in the reporting of both outlets.

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