A study of the role of Amar Ujala and Dainik Jagran

The purpose of this study is to investigate how the public’s perception of an organization-public relationship and crisis response strategies affect the attribution of crisis responsibility. Using Coombs’ (2007) SCCT theory, this study will contribute insight into which crisis response strategies work for certain types of organization-public relationships. This thesis is the initial investigation of an attempt to determine how several factors, including crisis type, crisis history, relationship type, relationship history, and crisis response strategy, can affect the perception of a crisis.A large, southeastern university was chosen as the organization under study, and its student population was the stakeholder group studied. A financial challenge was chosen as the crisis. Four different crisis response strategies were manipulated through news articles. The study measured the perception of the organization-public relationship, and after the participants were exposed to one of the four manipulation articles, their attribution of crisis responsibility to the organization was measured. Four hundred students were chosen for the study.Data analysis showed that the reminding manipulation produced the lowest attribution scores overall, for participants with a negative relationship, and participants with a negative relationship. Three of the four crisis response manipulations produced significant differences in attribution scores for participants with a positive relationship with the university and participants with a negative relationship with the university. Correlations were also found between perception of organization-public relationship and attribution of crisis responsibility. No significant differences were found among the four crisis response strategies in terms of attribution scores or correlation between relationship scores and attribution scores.

This study observed the news coverage of three historically significant and especially emotional national tragedies – the September 11th terrorist attacks, the Space Shuttle Columbia explosion, and the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina – specifically regarding front page design, an increasingly important yet underrepresented facet of journalism research. Past research regarding newspaper page design on typical news days and research regarding the atypical, emotional coverage of the three tragedies fueled the researcher’s hypotheses that type, photographs, and layout on front pages covering the tragedies would be significantly different than those on typical news days. In an examination of 436 front pages covering the three national tragedies, the study measured headline word count, headline capitalization, photo count, article count, and the area occupied by photographs, headlines, and text relative to either the entire page or the areas above and below the fold. The study found that headlines tended to be more brief than usual, and 9/11 headlines tended to be fully capitalized, suggesting that headlines were powerful on front pages by being “briefly spoken, yet echoing loudly.” Headlines and photos were not buried on the front page, as they tended to occupy more space above the fold, and news articles, while fewer in number, tended to occupy more space below the fold, suggesting that the dramatic headlines and photos “introduced” readers to the page and led them to read the articles. Future research should examine the front page design of other historically significant events, as well as the front page design of newspapers covering typical news days. Future research also should investigate front page layout as a concept of page design (instead of being considered synonymous with design) and layout’s linking function among other design elements.

Neustadt transformed academia’s fundamental conception of presidential leadership by arguing that extra-constitutional resources such as strategic persuasion, public prestige, and professional reputation are more critical to effective presidential governance than the simple application of the president’s constitutional powers. Professional reputation, which refers to political elites’ appraisals of the president as a leader, is a central yet scholastically understudied pillar of Neustadt’s theory. Neustadt argued that the “echoes” of a president’s professional reputation typically emerge from the newspaper columns of prominent political commentators (1990, p. 53-54). In essence, newspaper columns function as public forums where elites engage each other in interactive dialogue regarding their assessments of presidential leadership. The president’s professional reputation literally emerges from the give and take of those public discussions, thus the president’s reputation can be regarded as a socially constructed concept that emanates fundamentally from a communicative process (Denton & Hahn, 1986; Graber, 1981; Littlejohn, 2002). The purpose of this study is to explore through qualitative methods the opinion-editorial section of The New York Times in order to discover the thematic structure of President George W. Bush’s professional reputation as it relates to his stewardship of Iraq policy in the fall of 2002. In accordance to the tenets of Neustadt’s theory, this study identified “a dominant tone, a central tendency” in elite assessments of President Bush’s leadership on Iraq policy within the specified population of elite writings (Neustadt, 1990, p. 53).

This study compares and contrasts the way cancer and heart disease were framed in three major American news magazines from 1991-1995 and from 2001-2005. It is a partial replica of a 1992 study by Juanne Clarke titled “Cancer, Heart Disease and AIDS: What Do the Media Tell Us About These Diseases?” Every article about cancer and heart disease from these news magazines in these time periods was analyzed and coded into categories. The study concludes that cancer is a much more personal issue than heart disease; it is portrayed in a way that makes it more “serious” than heart disease. In these stories, cancer patients are affected to their very core by their condition, while heart disease patients are just regular people who have problems with a small part of their bodies. Cancer is represented much more often in the media than heart disease, possibly because of this personal aspect.

The purpose of this study is to evaluate the media and audience frames used in print media coverage of Mountain Justice Summer and mountaintop removal. The study synthesizes aspects of framing theory of media effects as described by other media scholars in an attempt to create a working model to evaluate media and audience frames. As this study will show, the media use an overall negative frame in the coverage of Mountain Justice Summer, but also have an overall negative frame in the coverage of mountaintop removal. Based on these findings, the study suggest activists with Mountain Justice Summer helped to frame the issue of mountaintop removal by staying on message, and the overall source for negative perception of activists came from industry representatives or community members. Evaluation of audience frames shows an overall positive perception of Mountain Justice Summer activists and opposition to mountaintop removal. This finding suggests a weak connection between media frames and audience frames, but also allows for further evaluation of the framing theory of media effects.

This study examines the cross-cultural similarities and differences of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) practices between leading America companies and leading Chinese companies. It pays particular attention to the why, what, how and where of CSR practices and discovers how these companies manage and localize their efforts through the comparison of corporate websites. Utilizing corporate websites to perform a content analysis, fifty of the top American Fortune 500 businesses were analyzed. The results from the fifty American Fortune 500 companies were then compared to twenty-three top Chinese Fortune 50 companies. The codebook elements that were used to compare CSR practices between America and China revealed few similarities and many differences. Through analyzing corporate websites, the results of this study revealed that leading American companies are more advanced in recording and publicizing CSR efforts than leading Chinese companies.

This study examined the influence of government, politicians and advertisers on the content of Croatian Public Television (HTV) news. This research examined whether HTV has remained state TV and under as strong government influence as it was in the former Yugoslavia? Or has it transformed into public TV, which has been the goal since Croatia gained independence in 1991? Or has it become commercial TV?The data were gathered through 10 semi-structured in-depth interviews with journalists and producers in the HTV news department and through a content analysis of HTV’s main newscast, Dnevnik.The major findings suggest there is still a lot of coverage of politics in Dnevnik, but not as much as in the past. The political influence has been stronger again in the last three years; however, self-censorship is a bigger problem at HTV today than actual censorship.The results indicate the big advertisers like the phone company Croatian Telecom or the gas company Ina influence the news programming at HTV, especially Dnevnik. The conclusion is that HTV today is state TV with commercial influences.

Texte remanié de: Diss. / Traduit de l'allemand. Bibliogr. p. 167-197.

Texte remanié de: Dissertation--Bielefeld--Universität, 2003.