A media policy on maternity leave is the subject matter of the thesis, which presents the results of a qualitative research of an audience by the grounded theory method. The analysis of various causes, conditions, contexts, strategies and consequences of media policies of individual speakers is based on the use of semi-structured interviews. The media usage on maternity leave is a complex of attitudes not only of the mother but also of the father who can be in agreement with his partner in one household but in conflict in another household. Influences of parents childhood or of the nearest neighborhood is continuously reflected in individual strategies of the media policy. A professional status of the mother and her needs offered by the media also plays a significant role. Last but not least, there is a conflict between mothers` own comfort when the media take over the role of a nanny and are a vital member of the household, and a childcare when the mother more or less regulates the role of the media in the early years of a child's life on the basis of her own experience, in other words to a reasonable degree.

This dissertation examines nonprofit, co-operative, and volunteer media enterprises operating outside Saskatchewan’s state and commercial media sectors. Drawing on historical research and contemporary case studies, I take the position that this third sector of media activity has played, and continues to play, a much-needed role in engaging marginalized voices in social discourse, encouraging participation in community-building and local governance, fostering local-global connectedness, and holding power to account when the rights and interests of citizens are jeopardized. The cases studied reveal a surprising level of resiliency among third sector media enterprises; however, the research also finds that the challenges facing third sector media practitioners have deepened considerably in recent decades, testing this resiliency. A rapid withdrawal of media development support from the public sphere has left Saskatchewan’s third sector media at a crossroads. The degree of the problem is largely unknown outside media practitioner circles, even among civil society allies. I argue this relates to the lack of recognition of nonprofit, co-operative, and volunteer media as a distinct third sector, thus obscuring the global impact when hundreds of small undertakings shed staff and reduce operations in multiple locations across Canada. At the same time, there is increasing recognition that such media have the potential to fill a void left by commercial and state media organizations that have retreated from local communities. Accordingly, this dissertation makes the case for a coordinated media development strategy as a component of the social economy. The challenge is to build useful mechanisms of support among civil society allies that do not replicate oppressive donor-client relationships that are all too common in the arena of governmental and private sector support. While never simple, the opportunities and social benefits are considerable when citizens devise the means to participate in the creation of a robust, diverse media ecology.

This thesis argues that there is a clear imbalance in the representation of crime in the newspaper, Grocott’s Mail, in Grahamstown, in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. The thesis concludes that the system of marginalisation and segregation which was established during the apartheid era is the foundation for the continued segregation and marginalisation of certain groups of people in Grahamstown as depicted in crime journalism. Previous research shows that not only people, but spaces are marginalised through media representations of crime. As people are represented as dangerous, so too the spaces they occupy become dangerous spaces. Importantly, the research shows that discourses of marginalisation are present in newspaper reports reproducing the discourses prominent in society, and in turn, the newspaper itself perpetuates these marginalising discourses. This extends into the coverage that different crimes receive in newspapers. For instance, the reports show that a middle-class audience will be more concerned with property crime in middle-class neighbourhoods, than other crimes in lower-class neighbourhoods. I argue that not only the type of crime, but the severity, the effect, and the necessity for justice represented by the newspaper, are all largely determined by the region of the crime. Further, I show that the criminal is not only demonised and represented as individually deviant in the reports in the newspaper, but that these representations are made by this newspaper because they are deeply imbedded as a discourse in society. This is partly because this newspaper has taken on a monitorial role, requiring neutral reporting from journalists, and a dedication to surveying the processes of state institutions, like the police and courts. As a result, the ways in which crime is reported on in the newspaper is fairly well fixed, making it difficult for journalists to conceive of different ways of reporting crime. The representations of the criminal justice system that the monitorial media, this newspaper included present, are a careful balance between the interest of the public, and the need to preserve relationships with sources. The monitorial media in general, and this newspaper in particular, represent the criminal justice system. The relationship between the police and the newspaper, and the courts and the media, therefore strongly influences the way in which crime news is reported. In particular, crime news is represented from the perspective of the criminal justice system. This research was carried out using Critical Discourse Analysis, qualitative interviews, and focus group interviews.

This research focuses on the controversy surrounding the exhibition and media publication of Brett Murray’s painting, The Spear of the Nation (May 2012). It takes the form of a qualitative Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), underpinned by Fairclough’s (1995) three-dimensional approach, to investigate how the contesting discourses articulated by the ruling political party (the ANC) and the news media have been negotiated in the City Press coverage in response to the painting. While the contestation was fought ostensibly on constitutional grounds, it arguably serves as an illustrative moment of the deeply ideological debate occurring in South Africa between the government and the national media industry regarding media diversity, transformation and democracy. It points to the lines of fracture in the broader political and social space. Informed by Foucault’s conceptualisation of discourse and the role of power in the production of knowledge and ‘truth’, this study aims to expose the discourses articulated and contested in order to make inferences about the various ‘truths’ the ANC and the media make of the democratic role of the press in a contemporary South Africa. The sample consists of five reports intended to represent the media’s responses and four articles that prominently articulate the ANC’s responses. The analysis, which draws on strategies from within critical linguists and media studies, is confined to these nine purposively sampled from the City Press online newspaper texts published between 13 May 2012 and 13 June 2012. Findings suggest the ANC legitimise expectations for the media to engage in a collaborative role in order to serve the ‘national interest’. Conversely, the media advocate for a monitorial press to justify serving the ‘public interest’. This research is envisioned to be valuable for both sets of stakeholders in developing richer understandings relevant to issues of any regulation to be debated. It forms part of a larger project on Media Policy and Democracy which seeks to contribute to media diversity and transformation, and to develop the quality of democracy in South Africa.

The diploma thesis with the title "Media Presentation of International Relations in Czechoslovakia during the Cold War in the Czechoslovak Television" uses selected events in the defined period to show how much foreign policy of the Soviet Union influenced the Czechoslovak Television news. First, both Czechoslovak and Soviet foreign policies as well as media policy of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia are described, followed by a brief history of the Czechoslovak Television. The core part of this diploma thesis lies in the third chapter, where specific reports from the news of the Czechoslovak television are analyzed.

El contenido móvil es la gran novedad del universo digital en el siglo XXI. El desarrollo de redes y terminales ha impulsado la conectividad ubicua en amplísimos sectores de la población a escala global, pero su gran impulso ha provenido de la aparición de ecosistemas complejos de contenidos y aplicaciones promovidos por plataformas tecnológicas. En este trabajo se ha analizado la actividad de los integrantes de la cadena de valor del contenido móvil (creadores de contenidos, proveedores de terminales, gestores de redes, proveedores de sistemas operativos, reguladores, usuarios y sector publicitario). Asimismo, se han estudiado los principales factores de disrupción del ecosistema (Apple y Google; 'App Store'; medios sociales; 'cloud computing'; y neutralidad de la red). La investigación concluye afirmando la especificidad del contenido móvil y señala a los datos del usuario en movilidad como el nuevo gran vector de creación de valor asociado al contenido en un fut uro próximo. / Mobile content is digital universe's biggest news in the 21st Century. The development of networks and devices has fuelled ubiquitous connectivity globally among wide segments of population. However, its big impulse has come from the rise of complex content and applications ecosystems, lead by technological platforms. In this work, activity of value chain players (content creators, terminal suppliers, network managers, operating systems suppliers, regulators, users and advertising sector) within mobile content is analysed. Furthermore, main disruption factors of the ecosystem (Apple and Google; the App store phenomenon; social media; cloud computing; and network neutrality) are studied. This research concludes asserting the specificity of mobile content and foresees user data in mobility as the next big value creation vector linked to content for the next future.