Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Political Science, June 1999. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

published_or_final_version / Comparative Literature / Master / Master of Philosophy

Thesis (M.S.)--Florida State University, 2002. / Advisor: Dr. Kathleen Burnett, Florida State University, School of Information Studies. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Oct. 3, 2003). Includes bibliographical references.

The identification and examination of cultural information strategies and censorship patterns used to propagate the controversial issue of the caricatures in two separate cultural contexts was the aim of this dissertation. It explored discourse used for the coverage of this topic by one newspaper in a restrictive information context and two newspapers in a liberal information context. Message propagation in a restrictive information environment was analyzed using the English daily Kuwait Times from the Middle East; the liberal information environment of the US was analyzed using two major dailies, the New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer. The study also concurrently identifies and elaborates on the themes and frames through which discourse was presented exposing the cultural ideologies and premises they represent. The topic was approached with an interdisciplinary position with the support and applicability testing of Chatman's insider-outsider theory within information science and Noelle-Neumann's spiral of silence theory and Herman and Chomsky's propaganda model based in the area of mass communication. The study has also presented a new model of information censorship - circle of information censorship, emphasizing conceptual issues that influence the selection and censorship of information.