<p> With the rising rate of Internet penetration in Morocco, digital media, including social media, represent an increasingly important role in the spread of news in Moroccan society. In general, young Moroccans are the most digitally literate in the country and consume a wide range of online media. In the context of Morocco&rsquo;s complex and plural linguistic landscape, language abilities and preferences add an additional layer to the study of the spread of digital media. This study uses a mixed methods approach involving a researcher-designed online survey of 193 Moroccans between the ages of 18 and 35 as well as 34 in-person semi-structured interviews with students attending four Moroccan universities in order to examine the news media consumption habits of young Moroccans, focusing on the intersection of language preferences, digital media choices and Moroccan nationhood. This study demonstrates that young Moroccans appear to possess a certain flexible news citizenship, allowing for a unified sense of the Moroccan nation despite linguistic differences. Overall, young Moroccans tend to rely on indigenous Moroccan digital news media outlets, such as Hespress, as well as foreign news sources, for daily news; both of these types of media are outside of the state- and party-run news media system, which includes the majority of television and radio channels and many print newspapers. While different language ideologies and their supporters do exist in Morocco, the &ldquo;imagined community&rdquo; of Morocco continues despite these linguistic distinctions. In contrast to concerns that new media will result in a fragmentation of the public sphere, the Moroccan case seems to show instead digital news media reinforcing an existing unified nation across linguistic difference.</p>

Lippmann (1922) theorized that we understand our world through elites and the media because we cannot experience everything ourselves. We look to others to share their experiences with us. In this way, the media and elites tell us what is important in our world. Converse (1964), Zaller (1992), and Lupia (1994) argue that not only do elites and the media help us see what is important, but they draw out attributes of these issues to help us make political determinations congruent with our belief systems. In this thesis, I conduced two studies investigating candidate, party, and White House tweets about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA). First, I used a quantitative content analysis to understand how in-parties, out-parties and politicians communicated about the PPACA. I studied tweets from 2009, when the bill was in Congress; in 2012, during an election year; and in 2015, at the start of another election cycle. I observed that elites and media used the term Obamacare with affective cues to communicate about the PPACA. The Democrats used positive tone when talking about the law, while the Republicans used negative tone and oppositional language. I also noted that Democrats linguistically reappropriated Obamacare to imbue it with positive cues for their base. Next, I conducted to qualitative textual analysis to investigate how the White House communicated about the healthcare policy priority. I began with emergent open coding of 10% of the sample and used this to develop a quantitative code book to analyze the remaining 90%. I developed a tactical category architecture with six categories of provision of information and seven categories of propagandistic techniques. I was able to show that widely used techniques in strategic communication are effective in setting the agenda for the public. Parties, candidates, and the White House communicate what issues are salient and help us toward value judgments of those issues in line with our ideologies. Twitter changes how tacticians practice. The brevity of tweets requires strategic use of language to build the agenda and a savvy press to interpret those cues as they share the agenda with the public.

In this project I examine the performative nature of the ghost bike memorial. Ghost bikes, flat-white painted immobile bicycles created by cycling communities and loved ones of victims, are installed roadside to mark the locations of cycling related deaths. Using critical performance ethnography and critical-cultural analysis as methods, I analyze how the ghost bike performs as an artifact of mourning and inspires co-incident performances of grief, activism, and community building and maintenance. As a memorial object used worldwide to represent cycling culture, the ghost bike acts as a social network link that connects a multitude of diverse cycling communities. I present five case studies of ghost bikes in New York City, Durham, North Carolina, Baton Rouge, New Orleans, and Lafayette, Louisiana in order to dissect what the polysemic ghost bike communicates to public audiences. My analysis led to the discovery that ghost bikes are not only used as memorials. They also perform as metonyms for the absent, ruined bodies of cyclists; as markers of racial identity for victims; and as tools to reframe the narratives told about cycling-related deaths. I describe how the differing interpretations of the memorial are adapted to create and alter performances of identity, and I argue for the potential for these performances to influence perceptions about cycling safety, cycling-based legislation, and road infrastructure.

This is a historical examination of how select Virginia newspapers covered lynching during two time periods, 1880 to 1900 and 1920 to 1932. The newspapers include white-owned and black-owned publications. The study features the owners/editors of four papers, one black and one white from each period. They are Joseph Bryan, John Mitchell, Jr., Douglas Southall Freeman and P.B. Young. The study also examines the standards of journalistic conduct that prevailed during the time periods, and how the selected editors met these expectations. The study concludes that white-owned papers, during the early period, reflected the racism that existed in Virginia at the time. During the later period, white papers were more neutral in their reporting and opposed to lynching in their edito1ials. The black papers were opposed during both periods. The study also concludes that the four editors varied in their allegiance to the journalistic standards of the day.

Nearly four hours of CBS Evening News summit reports, loaned by the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, were coded to construct a descriptive analysis and comparison of the coverage of the 1979 and 1985 summit meetings. Variables coded include speaker, language, origin of video and audio content, topic and quoted sources. Soviet speakers and topics were given proportionately more air time in 1985 than in 1979. But despite large differences in several important areas such as Soviet willingness to communicate via television, different leaders and their images, geopolitical factors, and improved video technology, many patterns of coverage showed similarities from 1979 to 1985. Nuclear weapons and disarmament talks garnered one-third of all summit-related story time, with U.S.-U.S.S.R. relations and the summits themselves being covered almost as much as nuclear issues. Coverage time spent on the leaders themselves remained stable. Overall, coverage of the 1985 summit was two-and-a-half times as extensive as 1979 coverage (perhaps because of attention paid in 1979 to a then-impending gasoline shortage), and 1985 coverage seemed to include more attempts to present "background information." A portion of the expanded 1985 coverage did not appear to be well balanced, but CBS coverage overall did not seem politically biased. The literature indicates that the study abstracted here may be the first analysis of video content pertaining to summit meetings. The literature also indicates that the perceptions and goals of summitry have changed since World War ll, that the process is now seen by many as increasingly bureaucratized and ritualistic. Printed media coverage which was reviewed contained references to this trend, but also to the possibility for individual leaders to achieve diplomatic breakthroughs on the basis of charisma or personal initiative. While no specific hypothesizing was done in these areas, the results of this analysis suggest that, from 1979 to 1985, either CBS coverage of summits, or the summits themselves, or both, were ritualistic and stable, and thus produced similar patterns of summit coverage across years during which large changes in other areas occurred.

A descriptive analysis to determine the communication effects of a reduced advertising budget, this study evaluated the 1994 Virginia State Parks advertising campaign. The campaign's objective was to provide Virginians more information about the parks, which in the previous 1992 Virginia Outdoor Survey, was said to be needed. The author sought to answer questions relative to the overall effect of reducing the advertising budget, as well as the amount and nature of awareness resulting from it. In order to measure these relationships, the author collected data into two random seven-day periods to compare 1994 versus 1993 for awareness, cost-effectiveness and effectiveness of media for relating information about Virginia State Parks. Results showed that more advertising (larger budget) does not absolutely correspond to more awareness. Also the scope of this measurement is insufficient to determine whether eliminating an entire medium's advertising (effect of reduced budget) has any noticeable effect regarding awareness. Evident from data in the random seven day periods is the fact that cable television advertising produced substantially more awareness than newspaper advertising. For this situation (the nature of the product being advertised and budget), cable television is most cost effective, especially for the level of awareness it results in. To measure the impact of using different media, a future campaign would need to replace from newspapers advertising with radio. Also, further study is necessary to determine how the information imparted to Virginians via the advertising is used to discover whether it is actually effective.

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

Thèse numérisée par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal.

This study turns to the annual Burning Man Festival held in Black Rock City, Nevada as a site of cultural performance where participants negotiate health meanings. I adopt a culture-centered approach to health communication and utilize critical performance ethnography and narrative performativity as methodological and theoretical frameworks to investigate the specific communication practices that bring about health meanings at the festival. Analysis revealed the significance of everyday life practices performed through narrative for understanding how Burning Man participants understand, reinforce, and counter various health meanings with implications for the field of health communication and performance studies.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 40-09, Section: A, page: 4796. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--The Florida State University, 1979.