The era between the close of the nineteenth century and the onset of the First World War witnessed a marked increase in radical agitation among Indian and Irish nationalists. The most outspoken political leaders of the day founded a series of widely circulated newspapers in India and Ireland, placing these editors in the enviable position of both reporting and creating the news. Nationalist journalists were in the vanguard of those pressing vocally for an independent India and Ireland, and together constituted an increasingly problematic contingent for the British Empire. The advanced-nationalist press in Ireland and the nationalist press in India took the lead in facilitating the exchange of provocative ideas—raising awareness of perceived imperial injustices, offering strategic advice, and cementing international solidarity. Irish and Indian press coverage of Britain’s imperial wars constituted one of the premier weapons in the nationalists’ arsenal, permitting them to build support for their ideology and forward their agenda in a manner both rapid and definitive. Directing their readers’ attention to conflicts overseas proved instructive in how the Empire dealt with those who resisted its policies, and also showcased how it conducted its affairs with its allies. As such, critical press coverage of the Boxer Rebellion, Boer War, Russo-Japanese War, and World War I bred disaffection for the Empire, while attempts by the Empire to suppress the critiques further alienated the public. This dissertation offers the first comparative analysis of the major nationalist press organs in India and Ireland, using the prism of war to illustrate the increasingly persuasive role of the press in promoting resistance to the Empire. It focuses on how the leading Indian and Irish editors not only fostered a nationalist agenda within their own countries, but also worked in concert to construct a global anti-imperialist platform. By highlighting the anti-imperial rhetoric of the nationalist press in India and Ireland and illuminating their strategies for attaining self-government, this study deepens understanding of the seeds of nationalism, making a contribution to comparative imperial scholarship, and demonstrating the power of the media to alter imperial dynamics and effect political change.

This study reports the findings of a systematic visual content analysis of 356 randomly sampled images published about the Iraq War in Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report from 2003-2009. In comparison to a 1995 Gulf War study, published images in all three newsmagazines continued to be U.S.-centric, with the highest content frequencies reflected in the categories U.S. troops on combat patrol, Iraqi civilians, and U.S. political leaders respectively. These content categories do not resemble the results of the Gulf War study in which armaments garnered the largest share of the images with 23%. This study concludes that embedding photojournalists, in addition to media economics, governance, and the media-organizational culture, restricted an accurate representation of the Iraq War and its consequences. Embedding allowed more access to both troops and civilians than the journalistic pool system of the Gulf War, which stationed the majority of journalists in Saudi Arabia and allowed only a few journalists into Iraq with the understanding they would share information. However, the perceived opportunity by journalists to more thoroughly cover the war through the policy of embedding was not realized to the extent they had hoped for. The embed protocols acted more as an indirect form of censorship.

Relying on framing theory, this study used The New York Times to explore how Chinese news was depicted before, during and after the Beijing Summer Olympics. The research regarding how the Chinese government tried to leverage the Olympics to enhance its image is often deliberated. However, there have only been a 3 few studies on the evaluation of the effects the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympic Games had on the image of China, as depicted by The New York Times. This study generated an understanding of the impact the presentations of The New York Times had on the soft power used by China through the Beijing Summer Olympic Games. The study examined how the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics were associated with the depiction of Chinese news in The New York Times during the pre-, mid-, and post-Olympics years. Specifically, world and business sections within The New York Times were mainly influenced by the effects of the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics. In addition, there were no direct associations found between the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics and how China was depicted photographically in The New York Times. In terms of the above factors; this study showed that China's national image did not improve in the New York Times after the 2008 Bejing Summer Olympic Games.

This investigation is based upon the old, but popular Chinese Proverb- "one picture is worth more than a thousand words" (Bartlett, 1980, p. 132). This researcher examined presidential campaign photographs in hopes of finding a possible media bias toward political candidates. This study confirmed two previous studies (Moriarty and Popovich, 1991 and Moriarty and Garramone, 1986), which reported that the media does, in fact, attempt to balance the visual coverage of political candidates during a presidential election. All visuals, including photographs and illustrations from Time, Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report of candidates Bill Clinton and Bob Dole were used for this study. Data from these national news magazines were collected from September 2 (the kick-off after the Labor Day) to November 4 (the weekly edition just prior to the election on November 5). Moriarty and Garramone ( 1986) developed coding definitions to identify 15 visual attributes of presidential campaign photographs. These attributes include: activity, posture, arms, bands, eyes, expression, interaction, camera angle, portrayal, position, size, props, setting, dress and family association. All visuals were coded as more favorable, less favorable or neutral. A total of 282 visuals were used in this study. The results concluded that Bill Clinton was in 183 visuals, while Dole was in 99 visuals. If one looks at the sheer number or quantity of the visuals, they would assume that Clinton did out photograph Dole. This assumption would lead one to believe that the media was biased, but in fact, most of the visuals that were coded were "more favorable" to both of the candidates.

The Western regional magazine Sunset has been published under a series of owners and publishers since 1898. In 1928, Sunset was purchased by Lawrence Lane, a Midwestern magazine executive who transformed it from a failing turn-of-the-century, general interest publication about the West, into a successful magazine about living in the West for the Western middle-class. Sunset had always been a magazine for men and women, and one that appealed to both male and female intellectuals at the time Lane purchased it. Lane and his editors attempted to interject more rigid middle-class ideals into a magazine that had espoused ideas that were progressive and less structured. Lane's new strategy to compartmentalize Sunset's content into its four categories—gardening, the home, cooking, and travel—resulted in a magazine that was conventionally gendered. Tension due to this shift played out in the publication's new cooking department. This thesis traces the development of Sunset's cooking department between 1928 and 1938 under the direction of its creator and founding editor Genevieve Callahan through the examination and analysis of Sunset cooking features and oral histories. The original department, structured to model a middle-class domestic ideology, did not accommodate all of Sunset's readers. The Western intellectualism of pre-Lane readers and their tendency to be less bound by conventional gender roles in the kitchen carried over into Sunset's cooking department via reader recipe contributions. These Western cooks included men and women whose foodways deviated from that of the typical middle-class housewife. Callahan experimented throughout the cooking department's first decade by shifting its editorial framework and softening her home economics rigidity to create a department that was inclusive of women and men who cooked both inside and outside the kitchen. The changes made to the department over that decade illustrate how editorial experimentation reconciled a new middle-class-oriented cooking department to accommodate Western cooks less apt to model traditional gender roles.

Short-term missions participants encounter difference in purportedly captivating ways. Current research, however, indicates the practice does not lead to long-lasting, positive change. Brian M. Howell (2012) argues the short-term missions experience is confined to the limitations of the short-term missions narrative. People who engage in short-term missions build assumptions, seek experiences, understand difference, and convey meaning, as a result of this narrative. The process of telling and retelling travel stories is integral to the short-term missions experience. Drawing upon literature on tourism, narrative, development, and photography, this study intends to evaluate the inefficacy of short-term missions through the stories which produce and are produced by photography. Through storytelling and photography from 21 short-term missions participants who have served in Ouanaminthe, Haiti, this project deconstructs the short-term missions narrative to understand, what is the relationship between the use of photography and the short-term missions experience? The results indicate a unique relationship between people, photography, and experiences within the framework of short-term missions.

This work highlights specific lexical items that have become racialized in specific contextual applications and tests how these words are cognitively processed. This work presents the results of a visual world (Huettig et al 2011) eye-tracking study designed to determine the perception and application of racialized (Coates 2011) adjectives. To objectively select the racialized adjectives used, I developed a corpus comprised of popular media sources, designed specifically to suit my research question. I collected publications from digital media sources such as Sports Illustrated, USA Today, and Fortune by scraping articles featuring specific search terms from their websites. This experiment seeks to aid in the demarcation of socially salient groups whose application of racialized adjectives to racialized images is near instantaneous, or at least less questioned. As we view growing social movements which revolve around the significant marks unconscious assumptions leave on American society, revealing how and where these lexical assignments arise and thrive allows us to interrogate the forces which build and reify such biases. Future research should attempt to address the harmful semiotics these lexical choices sustain.

This dissertation explores issues of gender politics, market segmentation, and taste through an examination of the contributions of several artists who have achieved Adult Contemporary (AC) chart success. The scope of the project is limited to a period when many artists who figured prominently in both the broader mainstream of American popular music and the more specific Adult Contemporary category were most commercially viable: from the mid-1980s through the 1990s. My contention is that, as gender politics and gendered social norms continued to change in the United States at this time, Adult Contemporary – the chart, the format, and the associated music – was an important, if overlooked or even trivialized, arena in which these shifting gender dynamics played out. This dissertation explores the significance of the Adult Contemporary format at the end of the twentieth century through analysis of chart performance, artist image, musical works, marketing, and contextual factors. By documenting these relevant social, political, economic, and musical factors, the notable role of a format and of artists neglected by scholars becomes clear. I explore these issues in the form of lengthy case studies. Examinations of how Adult Contemporary artists such as Michael Bolton, Wilson Phillips, Matchbox Twenty, David Gray, and Mariah Carey were produced and marketed, and how their music was disseminated, illustrate record and radio industry strategies for negotiating the musical, political, and social climate of this period. Significantly, musical and lyrical analyses of songs successful on AC stations, and many of their accompanying promotional videos highlight messages about musical genre, gender, race, and age. This dissertation ultimately demonstrates that Adult Contemporary-oriented music figured significantly in the culture wars, second and third wave feminism, expressions of masculinity, Generation-X struggles, postmodern identity, and market segmentation. This study also illustrates how the record and radio industries have managed audience composition and behavior to effectively and more predictably produce and market music in the United States. This dissertation argues that, amid broader social determinations for taste, the record industry, radio programmers, and Billboard chart compilers and writers have helped to make and reinforce certain assumptions about who listens to which music and why they do so. In addition, critics have weighed in on what different musical genres and artists have offered and for whom, often assigning higher value to music associated with certain genres, socio-political associations, and listeners while claiming over-commercialization, irrelevance, aesthetic insignificance, and bad taste for much other music.

The purpose of this study is to measure the message terror organizations hope to convey using the financial markets as a proxy of measurement to determine patterns within the marketplace and the effects on the terrorists’ ability to deliver a desired message due to the increased use of digital devices and access to instantaneous news, seen over the past decade. Using death count, geographic location, and event type, this study identified 109 attacks between 1985 and 2015 to be analyzed against 5 market indices and 5 securities. Measuring the effects within a 10-day sample window from the time of the attack (+ or - 5 days) using average abnormal returns, standard deviation, Sharpe Ratio and the initial reactions in the market place as a percentage of total attacks, the effects on average abnormal returns on the market proxies were measured on three levels; The entire sample period from 1985 to 2015; the first half of the sample period 1985-1999; and the second half of the sample period 2000-2015. Analyzing trends in abnormal returns and standard deviation, the results of the study were inconclusive.