The intent of this thesis is to better comprehend the strategies used in crisis denial videos from the perspective of kategoria. Benoit and Dorries taxonomy of kategoria was applied to crisis denial claims using the Sandy Hook elementary school shooting as a case study. The claims of prominent truther and YouTuber, Alex Jones, were coded and analyzed based on this taxonomy. The categories of the taxonomy include: accused committed the act before, accused planned the act, accused knew likely consequences of the act, accused benefitted from the act, and other. Two coders trained in identifying these criteria coded three transcribed YouTube videos focused on Sandy Hook with a combined total of over 1.5 million views. Accused planned the act and accused committed the act before were the most used taxonomy, with a 4 to 1 and 2 to 1 margin respectively, showing a consistent preference on how Jones likes to construct his claims. These tactics put the victims of Sandy Hook in an uncomfortable position because they are forced to deny the denial, a process that quickly becomes cyclical. The responses either transcend to an issue of free speech versus defamation or attack the accuser through litigation and public organizations dropping him. Claims that the accused has done it before denies closure to multiple crises while claims that it was planned seem endless and also contribute to denying closure. This denial puts victims in a chronic stage where they are forced to constantly and endlessly re-evaluate the crisis without resolution, disrupting current stage theory in crisis recovery. Truthers have changed how we define hoax. Previously, a hoax was the crisis, but now claims are made post-crisis depicting the crisis as hoax. Further research should focus on the formulation of a response to crisis denial that can break the cyclical pattern.

This thesis is a source of information and a practical guide for teachers' basic orientation in fake news issue. It presents various forms and examples of misinformation in the historical and political context. The history of hoaxes includes several centuries. Fake news accompany people from the invention of book printing to the present. For better understanding I will introduce them to teachers and students for their clear imagination of the situations in which mankind has encountered due to fake news from the past up to now. Knowledge or at least minimal awareness about the functioning of various information sources and the way how the fake news can influence users and customers help teachers to understand this problem and modern information sources as well. Then they can explain it to their students. Specific cases related to the environment of mystification of the public will help teachers to realize that information from the media should not be only blindly received and disseminated, but subjected to critical thinking about its credibility. First the educators should to be able to understand how to recognize false messages, what mechanisms does disinformation influence public opinion and where. Then they could pass this knowledge to their students. Findings from the overt non-standardised...

Analysis and perceived severity of risk influences organizational decisions to anticipated threats. As economic development and technology improve our standards of living, they also create new challenges to conceptualizing concrete and abstract threats. Organizations that face new threats, along with agencies that oversee these organizations, produce tightly coupled systems that increase risks for direct, indirect, and future stakeholders (Perrow, 1999). Natural disasters, political misbehavior, organizational corruption, financial collapse, food and water contaminations, chemical or nuclear accidents, international tension, to name a few, all present risks and challenges. Unfortunately, many of these situations endanger the lives and well-being of persons. The ability of individuals to conceptualize, prioritize, and respond to myriad threats ultimately determines their risk perception and intention to act accordingly. Individuals often exaggerate some risks, while failing to acknowledge the severity of others (Sandman, 1989; Lachlan & Spence, 2007). This study will contribute to the understanding of subjectively constructed threats by examining three specific perceptual crises: A hoax, near miss, and risk misconstrual event. Each of these cases relies on robust newspaper descriptions, content analysis of media, and confirmatory organizational interviews. They are documented through a level of legislative action to determine real and structural changes incurred from perceptual crises. From these investigations this dissertation articulates how perceptual crises challenge organizations and governments, ascertains the viability of actional legitimacy theory, and observes variance in communication challenges between differing crisis contexts. These expectations encompass both applied and theoretical contributions.

Teachers need to be equipped with the tools necessary to evaluate content on the Internet and determine if it is a credible source, or a hoax website since they are expected to instruct and prepare students on how to evaluate the sites which is now a relevant phenomenon. The purpose of the mixed‑method study was to obtain an understanding of the web evaluation strategies of prospective teachers regarding the evaluation of hoax websites and how their epistemic beliefs may influence their evaluation. Another aspect of this study was to find out what outcomes resulted from providing guidance, or not to prospective teachers before evaluating the hoax websites. Seventy‑two prospective teachers from undergraduate education courses completed an online questionnaire, where they evaluated four websites (two hoaxes and two credible) and completed questions regarding their epistemic beliefs. Two groups of prospective teachers were selected. Group A was the control group and Group B was the experiment group. Group A simply took the online questionnaire. However, Group B was provided with an overview of a specific web evaluation strategy, the WWWDOT Framework, before taking the online questionnaire. Sixteen participants were interviewed. Interestingly, almost half of the participants (48.6%), trusted at least one of the hoax websites. The study concluded that teaching the WWWDOT Framework helped to increase the number of people that did not trust the aesthetically appealing hoax website in Group B. Regarding epistemic beliefs, prospective teachers, who displayed feeling‑based epistemic beliefs, tended to trust the hoax website that was aesthetically appealing in Group A. The qualitative results provided additional insights and supported the quantitative data. The qualitative research suggests that lateral reading, spending sufficient time to read and evaluate and knowing the definition of a hoax website as being the most important web evaluation strategies displayed by those that did not trust the hoax websites.