The aim of this study is to analyze whether any media bias and framing can be observed in the U.S. news reporting surrounding the topic of the abortion debate. And if yes, how they are being presented to their respective audiences.For this, thirty articles have been analyzed in total; published respectively by Fox News and CNN in the timeframe of June 2021 until June 2023. This covers the time before, after, and during the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn the law of Roe v. Wade. For the analysis I referred to Fairclough’s critical discourse analysis, as well as the theories of framing and media bias. Additionally, the theory of hegemony was applied to the results. These theoretical concepts were accompanied by a combined paradigmatic approach of interpretivism and critical theory.The results of the analysis indicate that both news outlets present bias, framing, and hegemonic ideologies within their reporting. The content of Fox News showed a tendency of an anti-abortion stance in its rhetoric, utilizing frames concerning morality, freedom, politics, and the abortion industry. Meanwhile, CNN’s content tended to take an oppositional stance by utilizing pro-abortion rhetoric, as well as frames concerning harmful information, freedom, the danger of Conservatives, and politics. These findings led me to conclude that there are significant implications for media hegemony inherent in the reporting of both outlets.

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Socially salient information (such as stereotypes and expectancies) can be transmitted amongst individuals in a variety of subtle ways. One of these is the Linguistic Expectancy Bias (LEB), in which patterns of linguistic abstraction indirectly indicate a speaker's attitudes toward a target. The LEB is a common feature of human communication, but research on it has largely been limited to the laboratory; its presence in news media reports is not well-studied. In three studies, I investigate the operation of the LEB in the print media domain. In the first, published reports of NFL games between intercity rivals were analyzed to determine whether or not hometown teams receive more favorable linguistic treatment than hated rivals; results indicate no evidence of a systematic LEB effect. In the second, news reports about the 2004 Presidential election were examined for differential coverage based on the party membership of the candidates, with no evidence of linguistic bias discovered. In the third, participants were exposed to a description of a politician that varies in the levels of abstraction used to describe his actions and asked to form impressions of him. Linguistic bias was found to have a subtly paradoxical effect, such that bias against a candidate resulted in greater explicit and implicit liking for him. Implications for both the social psychology and political science literatures are discussed. / Psychology

<p><strong>Abstract</strong></p><p><strong>Essay in Political Science, D-level, spring 2010. “Do the American mass media serve foreign policy interests? – A scrutiny of two American newspapers’ coverage of the <em>coup d’état </em>in Honduras in the summer of 2009”, Author: David Scott. Tutor: Anders Broman</strong></p><p><strong> </strong></p><p>The bias of the American mass media has been widely discussed among scholars. Not only has this phenomenon caught the attention of political scientists, but also academics from other scientific fields. Two of the most known researchers of the American media are the linguist Noam Chomsky and the professor of Finance Edward Herman. They apply, on the American media, a so called “propaganda model” which claims that the media will serve the interests of the domestic power elites. One of the interests that the media try to satisfy is the foreign policy goals of the American state, which is to vilify enemy states and idealize client states. This thesis is applied on the American media coverage of the <em>coup d’état </em>that resulted in the ousting of leftist President Manuel Zelaya from the presidency in Honduras in 2009. In this case the model predicts that Zelaya will be vilified as an enemy and that the cause of the coup will be portrayed as legitimate. The essay studies, in the newspapers <em>New York Times </em>and <em>Wall Street Journal, </em>the portraiture of three aspects of the coup: the cause of the coup, the role of the military and the victims of violence and, finally, Zelaya as a president and the support to versus the resistance against his presidency. Through a textual analysis of the material, the essay concludes that there is a bias and that this means that the propaganda model can be verified. The bias consists of that the papers tend to legitimize the clients (the perpetrators of the coup) by portraying Zelaya as violator of the Honduran constitution and as a radical leftist aligned with Venezuela’s president Hugo Chávez. The legitimization goes further through the toning down of the military’s role in the use of violence against demonstrators. Although this is the bias, it must be stressed that it is subtle and has been detected through an extensive interpretation of the material.</p>

This thesis consists of three essays in the field of information economics. The first essay studies manipulation of information by partisan media. The recent increase in partisan media has generated interest in what drives media outlets to become more partisan. I develop a model to study the role of diffusion of information by word of mouth. In the model, a media outlet designs an information policy, which specifies the level of partisan slant in the outlet’s news reports. The news spread via a communication chain in a population of agents with heterogeneous preferences. The slant has an impact on whether the agents find the news credible and on their incentives to pass the news to others. The analysis elucidates how partisanship of media can be driven by political polarisation of the public and by the tendency of people to interact with people with similar political views. The second essay, co-authored by Jakub Redlicki, investigates falsification of scientific evidence by interest groups. We analyse a game between a biased sender (an interest group) and a decision maker (a policy maker) where the former can falsify scientific evidence at a cost. The sender observes scientific evidence and knows that it will also be observed by the decision maker unless he falsifies it. If he falsifies, then there is a chance that the decision maker observes the falsified evidence rather than the true scientific evidence. First, we investigate the decision maker’s incentives to privately acquire independent evidence, which not only provides additional information to her but can also strengthen or weaken the sender’s falsification effort. Second, we analyse the decision maker’s incentives to acquire information from the sender. The third essay analyses competition between interest groups for access to a policy maker. I study a model of lobbying in which two privately-informed experts (e.g., interest groups) with opposite goals compete for the opportunity to communicate with a policy maker. The main objective is to analyse the benefits which competition for access brings to the policy maker as opposed to hiring an expert in advance. I show that competition for access is advantageous in that it provides the policy maker with some information about the expert who did not gain access and gives the experts an incentive to invest in their communication skills. On the other hand, hiring an expert in advance allows the policy maker to use a monetary reward to incentivise the expert to invest more in his communication skills.

This research aims at finding how BBC and AJE media represented the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The study examines the news website, which reported the recent escalation of Jerusalem conflict in December 2017, where US President Trump have recognized Jerusalem as Israeli capital, and declared to move the US embassy from Tel-Aviv to Jerusalem. The study uses qualitative research, where it investigated the impact of ideology on media discourse by means of critical discourse analysis (DHA, Topoi, and Social actor’s representation). CDA was carried out for a sample of 8 news articles published on the websites of two networks: the British Broadcasting Corporation World news "BBCWN" and the Middle Eastern Qatari owned "Al Jazeera English". The articles were chosen within the month of December 2017. Articles were analyzed by means of the two-level analysis method, including the thematic and in-depth analysis. On the first, entry-level analysis, I focus on contents of texts and outline the discourse topics. While in the second phase I analyze the means of discursive strategies and the representation of social actors utilized throughout the text. The thematic analysis revealed that, both BBC and AJE have covered the incident similarly in general look. However, in-depth analysis showed that each network had portrayed the images of Israelis and Palestinians differently. On contrast of AJE, BBC tends to perceive Palestinians as a threat and the Israeli one as victims of the Palestinian violation. Moreover, the analysis revealed that each network had different ideologies and aims. The study concludes that AJE articles was biased pro-Palestinians, while BBC articles was biased pro-Israelis.

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Technology has allowed for the ability to create online platforms for sources ofreliable and unreliable news media. It is therefore important to understand the roleand relevance of alternative news media today and how disinformation is spreadonline. In this paper, we will examine the role of alternative news media websites inSweden and how it compares to the mainstream media websites spread of informationduring the coverage of the Covid-19 pandemic. We will also explore what thedifference is in their portrayal of events during the coronavirus, and what makes thisdifference appealing to certain readers. Using Google, we searched the top ten articlesfrom four online media news sources. Two of which sources were mainstream mediasources and the other two sources as alternative media. These articles were searchedfor during a specific timeframe and with the keywords such as “Corona” and “Covid19”. The dates for the timeframe of this experiment come from when the coronavirusbroke out in Sweden to one year after the event occurred. The top ten search resultsfrom each news source, as provided to us by Google’s algorithm, were placedthrough a text analysis tool called Voyant. The data findings are presented in threeformats: a Word Cloud, TermsBerry and Distinctive Words Comparison. The resultsof the experiment show a stark contrast in the difference in reporting on thecoronavirus topic between different online newspaper media, specifically alternativemedia news sources. Further research is recommended on a larger scale within thetopic of online alternative media.

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This work is based on an assumption that human decision-making process is following several approximate rules (heuristics) that causes predictable and systematic errors in judgement (cognitive biases). Although this stand point is typical for fields like behavioural economics or behavioural law and economics, there is no reason to not apply this logic also on other discipline like a mass media communication studies. This work offers an analysis of the information market where supply side is represented by producers of information (e.g. media organizations) and demand side is represented by consumers of those information (audience). The analysis is focused on factors that cause perceived description of a particular event can vastly differ from this event. One of those cognitive biases which cause different perception of the same media content is called hostile media effect. In respect to this effect, sympathizers with a socially controversial topic tend to perceive information in the mass media as hostile to their own opinion. Previous research concluded that hostile perception is mainly caused by a reach of information which is explained by the selective categorization - although individuals with different worldview can see the same content, they perceive it with a different valence. The valence of the...