Planned Parenthood entered crisis mode in the summer of 2015 with the release of videos alleging sales of fetal tissue by the Center for Medical Progress. Its crisis communication strategy was implemented to manage its reputation and influence public opinion regarding the organization and potential defunding by Congress. Through the use of womens health and abortion framing, Planned Parenthood was able to prime its publics attitudes towards the organization and potential negative outcomes of removing federal funding from the organization. As discovered through a content analysis, Planned Parenthood specifically addressed the crisis in its press releases, allowing the organization to target political elites, traditional media, and opposition with defensive tone, while managing its reputation through a positive tone in its womens health frame on the social media platforms of Twitter and Facebook.

This study argues that Sherlock Holmes serves as rhetorical equipment for living. Using Kenneth Burkes theory of symbolic appeal and the critical tool proposed in the essay Literature as Equipment for Living, I explore how Holmes responds to the rhetorical situation of early nineteenth century England and consider why the Holmes symbol continues to appeal to audiences. I conclude that rhetoric is a necessary component of the Sherlock Holmes symbol and suggest that Holmess famous method is rhetorical rather than syllogistic.

Nowadays crises are omnipresent with daily news headlines as reminders. The public continues to see or experience many different crises that affect numerous individuals and organizations as well as society in general. Against this backdrop, corporate communication professionals, for effective crisis management, are expected to help the organizations and their leaders make decisions, as well as communicate clearly when crises arise. Considering a fast changing media environment, recent scholars have called for new approaches to crisis communication to enhance theoretical developments. They suggested that researchers should take a broader context beyond the dominant crisis communication research perspectives based on the symbolic approach, which focuses on image or reputation management through strategic messages. In response to their clarion call for new crisis communication theory development, some researchers suggested resilient-oriented crisis communication, adopting the resilience concept (e.g., capacity to bounce back) and highlighting its role in the crisis communication, management and rebuilding processes. Nevertheless, there is ample room for further research to improve their efforts because there remains a lack of empirical evidence. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to explore effective internal crisis communication within the strategic management perspective, considering organizational resilience. By doings so, the study attempted to not only fill the research gaps regarding internal crisis communication but also respond to the calls for a new direction of theoretical development beyond symbolic approach. Considering the resilience concept, the results in this study provide meaningful insight into how organizational resilience can be measured by employees confidence and communicative actions for sensemaking and sensegiving, conceptualized as employee generated organizational resilience (EGORA). In addition, the results of the current study highlighted how internal communication factors such as two-way symmetrical communication and transparent communication can be used strategically to communicate with employees for the organization resilience. The results also revealed the important mediating role of between the resilience and its antecedents, demonstrating that organization-employee relationships (OER) is a strong underlying factor in constructing why strategic internal communication and leadership can exert an impact on organizational resilience.

Interpersonal influence refers to the strategies and tactics relational partners use to establish, reinforce, or alter each other's cognitions, emotions, and behaviors. It is argued that in close relationships, influence is used to attain instrumental goals, manage the relationship, and maintain desired identities. Six strategic categories, involving 36 tactics, were created to assess influence during the videotaped disagreements of fifty couples (N = 100). Correlational results suggest that: (1) relational partners are more persuasive when using strategies of other-support and content-validation and less persuasive when using content-invalidation, (2) greater satisfaction is experienced when one's partner uses other-support strategies and does not use accusations, and (3) relational message interpretations of equality, immediacy, informality, and similarity are associated with content-validation and other-support strategies; while interpretations of dominance, lack of immediacy, and lack of equality are associated with content-invalidation and other-accusations. An exploratory effort is made to determine which nonverbal behaviors are most closely associated with verbal strategies and how they predict outcome and global measures.

Walter Lippmanns classic work, Public Opinion, crystallized thinking about the dynamic relationship between the press and public opinion, and clarified the role of each in democracy. Evaluations of that book, however, tend to be one-dimensional. Public Opinion captured just one iteration of his thinking on the subject, not his final statement on the matter. A comprehensive survey of his writing reveals Lippmanns views on the press and public opinion were not static, yet the attention Public Opinion receives continues to overshadow his other works; his evolving views on the press and public opinion are rarely mentioned. Although his views shifted in significant ways over the decades, those changes hewed to a familiar set of issues and oscillated between a fairly narrow set of differences. Lippmanns primary concern was always the functioning of democracy. He wanted it to work. His views on the press and public opinion revolved around a central tenet of progressive thinking that an informed public would reach reasoned conclusions. But Lippmann always wrestled with doubts about the capacity of the electorate; his elitist attitudes conflicted with his reformist sympathies. Could the public really govern itself intelligently? How could the press, with its own limitations, facilitate that process? Lippmann puzzled over the answers to those questions throughout his career. Ultimately, his experiences with the manufacture of consent during World War I undermined his confidence in public opinion; his stature as a member of the press coincided with greater hope in that institution.

ABSTRACT Using a media systems comparative framework, I investigated the relationship between systemic characteristics and news coverage of international events. Leveraging a highly salient event: the Ebola outbreak, I extended the Hallin and Mancini Model to non-western democracies. This dissertation explored differences in media coverage of Ebola across media systems. Findings revealed that characteristics of media systems inform how news about an event is framed by reporters. By investigating news influences, this dissertation broadly sheds light on the latent influences of politics and culture on what audiences receive as news. My results showed that liberal media systems such as those found in the U.S. or the U.K. were more likely to adopt advocacy and partisanship in coverage. I also found that the liberal media systems were more likely to use health expert sources in coverage of health issues rather than elite political sources. I found no difference in the overall type of frame used. Both systems used more of episodic frames than thematic frames.

When faced with stressful events, people seek the comfort of close others. The quality of support we receive from our friends, family members, and romantic partners, in turn, impacts our ability to cope. In addition, how we feel about our close relational partners seems intimately related to their abilities to foster appropriate, rather than maladaptive, coping. Surprisingly, however, the relational effects of support are largely ignored in literature. The two studies that comprise this dissertation incorporate tenets of two influential interpersonal communication theories, Person Centered Theory (PCT) and Relational Framing Theory (RFT), to investigate the relational effects of person-centered comfort. In Study 1, participants were asked to imagine experiencing an academic stressor, read a scripted supportive conversation, and were asked to evaluate the relational effects of the conversation. The results from Study 1 demonstrate that relational effects vary as a function of the person-centered quality of comforting messages such that high person-centered comfort is evaluated as expressing more affiliation and less dominance compared to low person-centered comfort. Further, HPC comfort results in positive changes in the perceived relationship qualities of closeness, commitment, intimacy, liking, loving, satisfaction and trust compared to LPC comfort. In Study 2, participants were asked to engage in a supportive conversation with a friend, after which they evaluated each conversational turn. Turns were coded for person-centered comfort. The results of Study 2 reveal that (a) HPC comfort has a negative impact on turn-level ratings of dominance and (b) stressor severity impacts both relational frames of affiliation and dominance. These results contribute to PCT by identifying relational effects of relational meaning and relational outcomes which vary as a function of the quality of person-centered comfort and further contribute to PCT by recognizing the person receiving person-centered comfort perceives relational effects in addition to feeling better (or worse) after a conversation. Further, these results contribute to RFT by recognizing that the quality of person-centered comfort impacts frame relevancy, such that LPC comfort is perceived as more dominant and HPC comfort more affiliative. After acknowledging limitations, future directions are discussed for the programmatic study of supportive communication and relationships.

<p> America&rsquo;s legacy media institutions, particularly print newspapers, experienced transformational change from 2005 through 2014. The Internet&rsquo;s rise as an advertising competitor, coupled with an historic economic downturn beginning in 2007, led to crippling financial hardship. In response, many newspapers slashed budgets, staff, and content. These trends raise lasting concerns about the vitality of American journalism. Previous research documents the industry&rsquo;s financial woes, explores implications for its future, and proposes reforms. This study contributes to the literature by examining how news content changed during this unique period. Specifically, it assesses how state government reporting by six U.S. publications&mdash;California&rsquo;s The Sacramento Bee and Los Angeles Times, Florida&rsquo;s Tallahassee Democrat and Tampa Bay Times, and Pennsylvania&rsquo;s The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Patriot-News&mdash;fared from 2005-14. A systematic content analysis of more than 4,000 articles measured two key indicators of journalistic strength over time: (1) the volume of in-depth news articles, and (2) the amount of investigative coverage. The research shows that across the six outlets, in-depth news pieces declined 30 percent from 2005-14, and investigative coverage dropped 17 percent. Half of the outlets experienced three or more consecutive years without any investigative coverage of state government. Below these topline trends, however, was a great deal of variation by outlet and year. These findings empirically support what media scholars and observers alike have suspected: The financial crises of the preceding decade diluted news content. More importantly, they underpin concerns that powerful actors are making critical choices on behalf of citizens with weaker media watchdogs holding them accountable.</p>

This dissertation tracks the historical shift from containment strategies for managing homeless populations in Skid Row to current strategies of using police and the penal system to periodically sweep the street of these unwanted bodies. This shift hinges on the construction of homelessness as a crisis requiring immediate and ongoing intervention. First, the state produces and reproduces homelessness as a state of crisis by withdrawing or denying support and public services and disallowing alternative, subsistence modes of survival. Then, it issues the performative utterance of the area as unclean or unsanitary. Developers and city officials mobilize the police to erase a visible presence of homeless bodies from the area. The crisis of homelessness, variously constructed as an issue of urban aesthetics, public health, and crime, enables public policy to be made on the fly. These policies have uniformly favored economic development at the expense of the needs of homeless persons and communities. The performative state needs the homeless to legitimate state intervention on behalf of developers. In this dissertation, I demonstrate how the racialized rhetorics of thanatology and revitalization have been used to construct homelessness as a crisis for the city in a manner that positions the homeless as threats to the life of the city. According to this rhetoric, it is cities that have economic vitality worth protecting and homeless people who act as an unwanted and degenerate economic species threatening their financial fitness, health, and well-being. I argue that the performative state produces homelessness as a material state of crisis and rhetorically constructs homelessness as a crisis legitimating intervention on the part of the state. The dissertation is organized according to the various ways in which homelessness has been constructed as a crisis warranting intervention: urban aesthetics, homelessness and practices of poverty as an eyesore (Chapter 2), public safety and crime prevention à la the broken windows theory (Chapter 3), and the economic vitality of the international city (Chapter 4). This dissertation seeks to explore the stakes across various constructions of the existence of the homeless population and their practices of poverty.

In this study, I describe several performance experiments in which I applied Brazilian theatre artist Augusto Boals Image Theatre method to mobilize a composition process that is artistically exciting, politically relevant, and pedagogically engaging. Over the span of about seven years I used Image Theatre as the bedrock of my artistic practice as a director of social justice themed works for the stage. I show how using Image Theatre as a tool for performance composition can balance artistry (theatrical practice), analysis (cultural studies), and activism (collaborative struggles toward justice). To do so, I review relevant literature on Boal and Image Theatre to show how my research contributes to the ongoing conversation about the ethics and applications of Boals method, then describe three major performance projects in which I used Image Theatre as a method for staging collaborative performances addressing social justice topics. In each case study, I offer descriptions of the performance composition process and final performance product in order to reflect on several practical strategies for directors and teachers interested in creating collaborative performances that call for social change.