This thesis argues that blogging can open up a space for free speech and, at times, facilitate wider debate in the relatively authoritarian society of Malaysia. At the same time, blogging is heavily shaped by the prevailing elite groups and political culture in Malaysian politics. The thesis finds that blogging is able to facilitate the forming of a network of alternative or dissenting views but it can also be dominated by existing elite groups in society. The majority of bloggers are highly educated professionals and many of them are media and political elites. The use of blogging by some civil society and partisan bloggers, particularly pro-UMNO bloggers, to remove political rivals by staging a form of “psychological warfare” points to a dominance of factional politics within UMNO in the Malaysian blogosphere during the 2008 general election. Thus, blogging does provide a space for certain liberal democratic practices but it also reflects existing elite groups and political culture in the country. This thesis also argues that blogging does bring about new ways of campaigning in electoral politics. The use of blogging as part of campaigning among opposition politicians is, however, influenced by the wider institutional and societal structures in society. The findings reveal that blogging can provide a space for mobilising political action. It also allows opposition politicians to disseminate information on campaign activities and promote electoral candidates but blogging loses its appeal among politician-bloggers during the campaigning period. Blogging, thus, does not have a simple across-the-board function of promoting liberal democratic practices and transforming new ways of campaigning in electoral politics. This thesis concludes that an examination of blogging has to be situated within its particular social and political environment in order to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of its influence on democracy and political life.

This thesis attempts to explain the political communication process in relation to blogs. The first concern of the thesis is the relationship between conventional media and blogs with regards to the political communication. The thesis will use both first and second level agenda-setting theory to explore the relationship between conventional media and political blogs. In addition, this study aims to investigate blog users' media use and political involvement in comparison to non-users.

The following research analyses popular political blogs from the US and New Zealand, focussing on the way environmental sustainability is conceptualised and the way neoliberalism is embedded within these conceptualisations. This study follows from the recognised importance of sustainability, its tense relationship with neoliberalisation, the significance of media in communicating sustainability, and the emergence of political blogs as both purported supplement to, and contester of, mainstream media.

The study is undertaken on the premise that the technological advancement of blogs has not only accorded a novel platform for communication, but has also democratised the right to exercise political expression in Malaysia. Blogs have on numerous occasions outpaced restrictive laws that were enacted to curtail the exercise of this fundamental right and have caused great challenges in applying the existing specific media laws to online content in the blogosphere. The main purpose of the study is to resolve the legal uncertainties faced by bloggers in disseminating political speech under the existing laws of the country and to analyse the legal position in the United Kingdom as a comparative model or reference to the issue. In so doing, the study examines the general principles and restrictive laws to freedom of expression and the application of these rules to political blogs, scrutinises the statutory rules and regulations that are currently being employed to govern the traditional media and the Internet as well as other relevant general legislation, in particular the law of defamation, that has been commonly employed to regulate blog entries and comments by readers in both countries. The study concludes that although offline and online content should not be treated differently and certain regulatory controls are undoubtedly necessary to prevent misuse of political blogs by unscrupulous persons, any legal measures to be adopted by the Malaysian government to govern political blogs should take into account the rapid development of various forms of Internet based communications and be proportionate in light of current needs and the local circumstances of the society.

A number of incidents such as the "Obama-is-a-Muslim" rumor during the 2008 presidential election suggest that influential political blogs are playing a major role in setting the agenda of the legacy media. The power of the political blogosphere is forcing media practitioners, communication scholars and political theorists to re-conceptualize how issues arrive on the political and public agenda. This new phenomenon challenges the fundamental assumptions of agenda-setting theory to the extent that the 42-year old model, including the notion of a shared public agenda, should be reevaluated. By situating news agenda research within a larger intellectual context of agenda setting, this dissertation explored the intermedia agenda-setting relationship between political blogs and legacy news media, such as newspapers, network TV, and cable TV channels. Analyzing the contents count data of political blogs and legacy media and Internet Search Volume Index (SVI) data, this dissertation explored how coverage of a certain issue by top-ranking and influential political blogs may predict the coverage of the same issue by legacy news media. Employing a combination of quantitative and qualitative research methods, the results of the study revealed that political blogs significantly predicted the coverage of the legacy media on the "Obama-is-a-Muslim" rumor over a period of five days. The results also showed that the coverage of the rumor by both the political blogs and legacy media significantly predicted the level of Internet searches related to the rumor on all five days. The study also found positive and statistically significant correlations between the coverage by the political blogs and legacy media on the Obama-is-a-Muslim rumor and the volume of Internet searches on that rumor. The correlation was high on day 1, and decreased on each subsequent day. The study also found bi-directional agenda-setting relationships between the coverage of the political blogs and legacy media on the `Obama-is-a-Muslim' rumor. However, there was hardly any bi-directional relationship between the coverage of political blogs of the rumor and the volume of Internet searches related to the rumor. Although, the study found bi-directional relationship between the coverage of the legacy media on the rumor and the volume of Internet searched related to the rumor, the relationship faded away quickly. However, the study findings suggest that the perceived power of political blogs should be seen as trivial and ephemeral while that of the legacy news media should be seen as substantial and indelible in setting the public agenda. These findings may broaden our understanding of intermedia agenda-setting.

abstract: Analysis of political texts, which contains a huge amount of personal political opinions, sentiments, and emotions towards powerful individuals, leaders, organizations, and a large number of people, is an interesting task, which can lead to discover interesting interactions between the political parties and people. Recently, political blogosphere plays an increasingly important role in politics, as a forum for debating political issues. Most of the political weblogs are biased towards their political parties, and they generally express their sentiments towards their issues (i.e. leaders, topics etc.,) and also towards issues of the opposing parties. In this thesis, I have modeled the above interactions/debate as a sentimental bi-partite graph, a bi-partite graph with Blogs forming vertices of a disjoint set, and the issues (i.e. leaders, topics etc.,) forming the other disjoint set,and the edges between the two sets representing the sentiment of the blogs towards the issues. I have used American Political blog data to model the sentimental bi- partite graph, in particular, a set of popular political liberal and conservative blogs that have clearly declared positions. These blogs contain discussion about social, political, economic issues and related key individuals in their conservative/liberal view. To be more focused and more polarized, 22 most popular liberal/conservative blogs of a particular time period, May 2008 - October 2008(because of high intensity of debate and discussions), just before the presidential elections, was considered, involving around 23,800 articles. This thesis involves solving the questions: a) which is the most liberal/conservative blogs on the web? b) Who is on which side of debate and what are the issues? c) Who are the important leaders? d) How do you model the relationship between the participants of the debate and the underlying issues? / Dissertation/Thesis / M.S. Computer Science 2012

La thèse du présent travail est que certains blogs politiques américains sont non seulement une forme de journalisme citoyen mais aussi des atouts lors d'élections. Au vu de ce qui précède nous poursuivons un triple objectif : démontrer non seulement le pouvoir de mise en agenda de la blogosphère politico-journalistique aux États-Unis mais aussi la légitimité de celle-ci comme forme de journalisme postmoderne à la lumière du travail qu'elle effectue et de ses valeurs. Il vise en outre à prouver la capacité de mobilisation de la blogosphère politique américaine en périodes électorales notamment à travers une étude du blog de campagne de Howard Dean, candidat malheureux à l'investiture démocrate pour l'élection présidentielle de 2004. Pour mener notre recherche nous avons eu recourt à trois théories : La théorie des utilisations et satisfactions qui cherche à expliquer les raisons pour lesquelles les individus consomment un média particulier et les satisfactions qu'ils en tirent. La théorie du réseau nous a permis de saisir l'organisation et le fonctionnement de la blogosphère politico-journalistique mais aussi son pouvoir de mise en agenda. La dernière théorie qui nous a aidé dans notre travail est justement la théorie de la mise en agenda. Celle-ci a montré des similarités entre les médias sociaux comme les blogs politico-journalistiques et les médias traditionnels en terme d'influence sur respectivement la couverture médiatique et les conversations interpersonnelles. / The thesis of this work is that some American political blogs are not only aform of citizen journalism but also assets during elections. We have three objectives in the present work : demonstrating not only the agenda setting power of political and current event blogs but also its legitimacy as aform ofpost modernjournalism in light of what itproduces (news staries, reports...) and its values. This thesis also aims to show the mobilizing capabilities of political blogs via an analysis of Howard Dean's cyber campaign during the 2003 democratic primaries in anticipation of the 2004 presidential campaign. To undertake this work we will resort to three theories: the uses and gratifications theory that describes the reasons whypeople are attracted to aparticular media and the satisfaction they derive from it. Network theory that explains the formation and the functioning of networks. ltproved helpful to grasp the structure of political blogs and the way they manage to sway . the work of mainstream media. Eventually Agenda setting theory made easier the analysis of mainstream media's influence on interpersonal conversations and the transposition of this mode! on the fashion with which current events and political blogs influence mainstream media's coverage.