The Egyptian protest movement which brought down the Egyptian regime headed by President Hosni Mubarak, not only gripped the minds and hearts of the Egyptians, but it captured the interest of the national and international media as well.   The research aims at answering questions related to the kind of frames employed in four newspapers; namely, Al-Ahram, Al-Masry Al-Youm, The Telegraph and The Washington Post, in light of the protest paradigm, in addition to the way the same four newspapers tried to explore and identify the characteristics of war and peace journalism, according to Galtung’s dichotomous model, not to mention to trace how the four newspapers in hand depicted the protesters.   To achieve this, two methods were applied in this study; notably, frame analysis, and critical discourse analysis. A sample of 60 news articles and editorial pieces was thoroughly examined and taken from the aforementioned four newspapers. The derived non-random samples were covering the events of the Egyptian Revolution from the eruption on January 25, till February 17, 2011; means one week after toppling the regime and the resignation of the Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on February 11, 2011.    The study revealed that the national newspapers; Al-Ahram and Al-Masry Al-Youm, were more prone to accentuate protesters’ acts of violence, albeit Al-Ahram showed a propensity toward using official sources at the expenses of voicing protesters, compared to Al-Masry Al-Youm. However, The Telegraph’s and The Washington Post’s coverage was more shifting away from the protest paradigm.   Similarly, the national newspapers in hand, were leaning more towards war-reporting; resorting to victimizing language in addition to a language of good and bad dichotomous, not to mention to abstain from exposing the untruth of all parties involved. However, The Telegraph and The Washington Post were adhering to peace-reporting; using extensively people sources and exposing the black and whites of all parties in the problem, in addition to taking the side of protesters and depicting them positively. From the findings, the study may reach a conclusion that the more a newspaper’s coverage adheres to the protest paradigm, the more it inclines to war-reporting. On the other hand, the more a newspaper’s coverage shifting away from the protest paradigm, the more it conforms to peace journalism.

The central question of this thesis is, how has the alternative US media framed the war in Syria? The analytical approach is informed by recent scholarly debate regarding peace journalism and constructive journalism. The framings of the war in Syria have been studied in three alternative US online news sources through a qualitative content analysis. The news sources are Truthout, The Progressive and Common dreams. Results show that these alternative US media has framed the war in line with characteristics of peace journalism and constructive journalism. This tendency departs from how the conflict is regularly framed in mainstream US media. The three studied media have for example promoted diplomatic and peaceful solutions to the war in Syria and tend to give voices to people that are not part of the US political elite.