No description available.

Thesis advisor: Donald Fishman / This thesis examines and compares the terrorist attacks at the 1972 Munich Olympics and the 2013 Boston Marathon in order to assess the ongoing vulnerability to terrorism at international sporting events, in specific, and the global environment, in general. In each of these instances, terrorists took advantage of the vulnerability of large international sporting events and launched attacks that had both political and social implications. Although each attack had separate motives, results, and repercussions, both incidents served as crises in a rising media age and impacted public policy. This paper compares and contrasts the 1972 Munich Olympics and the 2013 Boston Marathon through theoretical analyses of Downs’ Issue Attention Cycle and Birkland’s Focusing Events Theory, as well as through a comparison of the crises’ dominant features. Over the course of the 40 years separating the events, security and emergency response methods have improved, as have technology, media, and information flow. Even with these modern techniques, however, today’s generation, as with its predecessors, still lives in an age of vulnerability to terrorism. The conclusion combines the analysis of the issue-attention cycle and the potential public policy changes in accordance with the 1972 Munich Olympics attack and the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings to argue that there is no fool-proof prevention method to the issue of vulnerability to terrorism and that the global community will to continue to be vulnerable in the future. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2014. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Communication Honors Program. / Discipline: Communications.

Disaster preparedness is absolutely necessary as the number of both man-made and natural disasters increases worldwide. Not confined to any regions or people, disasters can result in mass casualties. The United States is not spared from these incidents. Ever since the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the United States has tried to establish more effective and efficient emergency management systems at all levels in order to respond to any type of disaster. Due to the effort, much improvement in disaster preparedness was observed when mass casualty events happened within the last 10 years. Although there are many independent studies for each mass casualty event, there are very few studies done to compare multiple mass casualty incidents and find commonly shared lessons. This paper aims to determine whether there are any similarities among three mass casualty events - 2005 Hurricane Katrina, the 2009 Aurora Theatre Shooting, and the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing. Because the response to the 2013 Boston Marathon Bombing was the most seamless among the three, the most in-depth investigation was done on this incident. Through the examination, the study will also prove if any of the lessons learned from these events can be implemented in future mass casualty incidents. To do so, many current reports and literature reviews were analyzed. The conclusion gained from this study is that there are indeed commonly occurring challenges in disasters and various aspects of disaster preparedness that require practice and preparation. In addition, learning from others' unfortunate mass casualty incidents and their lessons is an important part of strengthening the existing disaster preparedness systems.

Photojournalism captures moments within an event or space in time that are used to tell a larger story. Photographs are powerful tools for communication because these moments not only represent facts; they also have an ability to speak to viewers on a relatable and emotional level. With this power comes ethical responsibility and natural tension points between photograph, and journalistic practices. Journalism’s ethics codes group points of discussion specific to photographs into categories of manipulation, privacy, or graphic content. This thesis argues that these issues fall into broader overlapping themes of authenticity and sensitivity. Using visual analysis of four photographs from the Boston Marathon bombing and Newtown school shooting, it considers how journalists deal with the relationship between photography and journalistic theory using this ethical framework of authenticity and sensitivity. It concludes with a discussion of best practices for coverage of tragic events from the real-world perspective of the photojournalist.