Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Television is the favoured news source for most Australians and is regarded as having the potential to influence public opinion. From its inception however, television has been regarded as ill-suited to cover economic and business issues because of a perceived reliance on visual material and an inability to deal with complex issues. This tyranny of vision has been mitigated by technological developments such as electronic news gathering (ENG) and satellites that provide large amounts of varied material as well as improvements in production tools that assist the visual presentation of abstract concepts. The presentation of complex issues has also been enhanced by the increased skills and knowledge among newsworkers. Economic and business news has become a staple in television news programs and has evolved from ritualised reporting of data such as market indices and exchange rates to a genre that shares broader news values such as consequence, conflict, proximity, human interest, novelty, prominence, political controversy and scandal. Economic and business news also shares the normal imperatives of television such as a strong reliance on scheduled occasions and reliable and prolific sources. In between occasions of economic, business and political controversy or scandal, these programs are able to rely on a steady supply of economic, business and investment information. Dedicated economic and business segments and programs and now even whole channels meet two sets of demands. One is those of niche audiences seeking news and information on economic and business conditions, economic debate and policy making, the activities of economic and business leaders and an opportunity to hear and observe economic and business leaders. The other is from broadcasters seeking to maximise their profits by attracting viewers in the AB demographic (those with the greatest disposal income) to otherwise poorly-performing time slots, by broadcasters seeking an inexpensive and dependable supply of programming material and by broadcasters seeking to promote their institutional role and specific programs through presenting material that is followed up by other media. Economic and business reports however, continue to portray issues in a limited way that neglects business’s interaction with workers and the larger social environment. Economic events are often framed as political competition. These reports present a hierarchy of sources and privilege political and business elites. Television news favours debate that is presented by individuals as contrasting causal narratives. Political and economic sources have become adept at presenting brief causal narratives in response to the requirements of television. This approach highlights celebrities and favours the promotion of agency over structure. The increase in total economic and business reporting boosts the interdependence of television and political and economic sources. Technological development is continuing and traditional free-to-air television audiences are being eroded by pay television and the internet. Although these are altering the nature of political, economic and business debate their overall influence is difficult to determine.

The present study is one of the first attempts undertaken to study English and Vietnamese news discourse on a contrastive basis. More specifically, it investigates the structure, the lexical and syntactic features of English and Vietnamese political news discourse. It is hoped that the results of the study may help the Vietnamese teacher and student to make better use of newspapers in the process of English language teaching and learning. In addition, it is hoped that the study may benefit the journalist, to some extent, because it is generally assumed that if the knowledge of news discourse structure, the linguistic features and the factors involved are professionally known and shared, this will facilitate news discourse production and comprehension. The study reveals two different strategies used by English and Vietnamese political news writers. English news writers predominantly employ the IP structure pattern whereas Vietnamese news writers employ BTN (Background-to-News). Lexically, English newspapers use more lively, vigorous language, metaphors, puns and hyperbole. In contrast, the occurrence of serious, formal language is a very pronounced feature of Vietnamese newspapers. This is the area where Vietnamese students of English often have difficulty, as is indicated by the survey. The greatest syntactic difference is sentence order, namely, English news stories often use S + V + (O) + (A) while their Vietnamese counterparts use A + S + V + (O) +. The other difference is that English news paragraphs are mostly single sentence paragraphs as disctinct from their multi-sentence Vietnamese ones. Chapter One is an introduction explaining the rationale, the methods, and the data for analysis, of the present study. Chapter Two is concerned with the theoretical background to the study. It deals with such concepts as cohesion, coherence, structure, relevance, text and discourse. Chapter Three provides a contrastive overview of English and Vietnamese newspapers, essentially in terms of ownership and the approach to news. Chapter Four examines the different structure patterns used by English and Vietnamese reporters and journalists. Chapter Five and Six study the different lexical and syntactic features of English and Vietnamese political news discourse, respectively. In chapter Seven, a comparison of English and Vietnamese political news discourse is given, which is based on the analyses presented in chapters Four, Five and Six. In addition, it presents the results of a survey of comprehension difficulty encountered by Vietnamese students studying English now at the University of Canberra, and looks at some discourse strategies involved in news discourse production and comprehension. The last chapter offers some implications for TEFL in Vietnam, which are based on the author's own experience and results of a survey. The author hopes that these implications may be of some help to the practising teacher as well as the student.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / Television is the favoured news source for most Australians and is regarded as having the potential to influence public opinion. From its inception however, television has been regarded as ill-suited to cover economic and business issues because of a perceived reliance on visual material and an inability to deal with complex issues. This tyranny of vision has been mitigated by technological developments such as electronic news gathering (ENG) and satellites that provide large amounts of varied material as well as improvements in production tools that assist the visual presentation of abstract concepts. The presentation of complex issues has also been enhanced by the increased skills and knowledge among newsworkers. Economic and business news has become a staple in television news programs and has evolved from ritualised reporting of data such as market indices and exchange rates to a genre that shares broader news values such as consequence, conflict, proximity, human interest, novelty, prominence, political controversy and scandal. Economic and business news also shares the normal imperatives of television such as a strong reliance on scheduled occasions and reliable and prolific sources. In between occasions of economic, business and political controversy or scandal, these programs are able to rely on a steady supply of economic, business and investment information. Dedicated economic and business segments and programs and now even whole channels meet two sets of demands. One is those of niche audiences seeking news and information on economic and business conditions, economic debate and policy making, the activities of economic and business leaders and an opportunity to hear and observe economic and business leaders. The other is from broadcasters seeking to maximise their profits by attracting viewers in the AB demographic (those with the greatest disposal income) to otherwise poorly-performing time slots, by broadcasters seeking an inexpensive and dependable supply of programming material and by broadcasters seeking to promote their institutional role and specific programs through presenting material that is followed up by other media. Economic and business reports however, continue to portray issues in a limited way that neglects business’s interaction with workers and the larger social environment. Economic events are often framed as political competition. These reports present a hierarchy of sources and privilege political and business elites. Television news favours debate that is presented by individuals as contrasting causal narratives. Political and economic sources have become adept at presenting brief causal narratives in response to the requirements of television. This approach highlights celebrities and favours the promotion of agency over structure. The increase in total economic and business reporting boosts the interdependence of television and political and economic sources. Technological development is continuing and traditional free-to-air television audiences are being eroded by pay television and the internet. Although these are altering the nature of political, economic and business debate their overall influence is difficult to determine.

From 1948 to 1989, the newspaper Rudé právo was the central press authority of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. Its content that was presented to the public, was ideologically focused in accordance with the current propaganda line of the Communist Party. After the Velvet Revolution in 1989, the situation began to change and, above all, domestic political content began to go through considerable change. This thesis analyzes the domestic political articles that were published in the Rudé právo during 1989 - eleven months before the Velvet Revolution and the period after the Velvet Revolution until the end of 1989. This work captures what topics the texts dealt with, which topics were preferred and which were neglected. The thesis also captures and describes how and when exactly the content of the paper began to change, how the attitudes of editors and the tone of the texts has being changed, which new topics began to appear in the press and how the language and rhetoric of the newspaper have changed.

This thesis investigates the impact of finetuning the LLaMA 33B language model on partisan news datasets, revealing negligible changes and underscoring the enduring influence of pretraining datasets on model opinions. Training nine models across nine distinct news datasets spanning three topics and two ideologies, the study found consistent demographic representation, predominantly favoring liberal, college-educated, high-income, and non-religious demographics. Interestingly, a depolarizing effect emerged from partisan news finetuning, suggesting that intense exposure to topic-specific information might lead to depolarization, irrespective of ideological alignment. Despite the exposure to contrasting viewpoints, LLaMA 33B maintained its common sense reasoning ability, showing minimal variance on evaluation metrics like Hellaswag accuracy, ARC accuracy, and TruthfulQA MC1 and MC2. These results might indicate robustness in common sense reasoning or a deficiency in synthesizing diverse contextual information. Ultimately, this thesis demonstrates the resilience of high-performing language models like LLaMA 33B against targeted ideological bias, demonstrating their continued functionality and reasoning ability, even when subjected to highly partisan information environments.

YouTube is the second largest social media platform in the world, with a multitude of popularchannels which combine politicised commentary with news reporting. The platform providesdirect accessibility to data which makes it possible for the commentators to adjust theircontent to reach wider audiences, however done to an extreme could mean that the creatorspick topics which are the most financially beneficial or lead to fame. If this were the case itwould highlight populist newsmaking and the mechanisms behind it. To investigate theproduction-consumption interaction, data from the 10 most popular channels for 2021 wascollected. Using latent Dirichlet allocation and preferential attachment analysis, the effect ofcumulative advantage, and whether topic choice was driven by views were measured. Apositive feedback loop, where prevalent topics become more prevalent, was found in all buttwo channels, but picking topics which generated more views was only present for onechannel. The findings imply that the top political news commentators over a year have a set oftopics which they return to at a high degree, but choosing the topics which simply are themost popular for the time is not a general feature.

Thesis (M. A. (Media Studies)) -- University of Limpopo, 2017 / This study examines how democracy is represented in Late Nite News with Loyiso Gola (LNN) using two qualitative content analysis methods: the social semiotic approach and thematic analysis. It is based on the assumption that representation in media serves to influence how viewers draw meaning from, and understand the political process and political issues in South Africa. Literature on what constitutes parody, the meaning of representation and democracy, and the functions of the media in a democracy was reviewed. Four media theories which are agenda-setting and priming; framing theory, social responsibility theory and democratic deliberative theory formed the theoretical framework for this study. The qualitative approach using a case study design as well as focus groups proved to be a useful tool for two reasons: it enabled the researcher to penetrate the deeper layers of the messages contained in the text in order to come to an understanding of how LNN represents democracy; and it enabled the researcher to understand how viewers engage with and understand democracy through watching LNN.

國內報業在開放報禁後逐漸邁入競爭激烈的市場型態，各報先後朝以讀者需求與利潤為依歸的市場導向模式發展，而《蘋果日報》於2003年在台灣發行之後，再度對台灣報業市場產生一次極大衝擊。本研究聚焦在報紙政治新聞，觀察以往以硬性資訊為主的政治新聞在此脈絡下是否也受其影響開始出現或加劇原有的「小報化」傾向。 本研究以《自由時報》、《中國時報》、《聯合報》三大報的前三版政治新聞做為「非小報」的政治新聞樣本，並以《蘋果日報》在台發行當年、以及前後三年（2000年、2003年與2006年）做為分析期間，採用量化內容分析法，比較這三階段政治新聞的報導形式、內容與風格等面向。 在形式面，國內報紙政治新聞的報導內文篇幅並沒有顯著的減少跡象，其標題與搭配的照片面積也沒有明顯增大，改變最大之處在於報紙政治新聞搭配刊登照片的新聞比例逐漸提高，使得整體版面呈現出更加視覺圖像導向的「小報化」形式特色。 在內容面，本研究發現在報導主題的轉變上，關乎政府政策與國會等較具公共性質的新聞量明顯減少、針對政治醜聞的報導明顯增加；然而，聚焦單一政治人物的個人化報導，多年來卻維持一定比例沒有明顯增加，這部分並不吻合「小報化」的新聞主題發展。 在風格面，政治人物的個人報導朝軟性化發展，含納更多私領域動態或是人情趣味元素；而記者在撰寫特稿與評論時，更容易以明顯字句對特定政治人物或黨派進行負面批評；聚焦政治衝突的新聞量雖然沒有顯著增加，但衝突事件的主角卻也逐漸轉移到政治人物彼此的個人恩怨上。 最後，本研究以四個客觀性報導處理手法做為觀察指標，檢視國內政治新聞報導是否受「小報化」負面影響而在新聞專業與報導素質上做出讓步。在純淨新聞裡不摻記者個人意見、和明確提供消息來源等基本處理方式上，《蘋果日報》登台前後的政治新聞差異並不大；然而，國內報紙政治新聞的解釋與評論性質報導卻帶有了更多的黨派色彩，且平衡陳述對立意見的報導比例也逐漸減少。 / Apple Daily has made an impact on the strongly competitive newspaper market in Taiwan since its publication in 2003, spilling over tabloid news values into other media outlets. This study focuses solely on traditionally serious and hard political news and sets out to examine whether it has been influenced, or tabloidized, over time. Quantitative content analysis on political news items from three largest non-tabloid newspapers - Liberty Times, United Daily and China Times - was carried out and measured at three different levels: form, main topic and style. News samples were randomly selected in 2000, 2003 and 2006. In terms of form, more and more political news incorporated visual elements, such as photographs, as means for presenting information, while the page space devoted to text remained relatively stable. As for main topic, the overall decrease of coverage on government, parliament and policies was evident, and the focus has been shifted toward political scandal. With regard to style, the personalized coverage on political figures was done with a more softer approach by focusing more on human interest stories. And personal conflicts of politicians were highlighted in coverage on political conflict. Finally, measurement of objective reporting was adopted to gauge whether there was an overall decrease in journalistic standards of political reporting. The results were mixed. While the basic practices of not presenting subjective opinion and anonymous news source were maintained over the period, the news comments have become more partisan and the balanced presentation of conflicting political views has decreased.

Cette étude trouve son origine dans un double étonnement. Les années 1680-1740 sont marquées par la publication aux Provinces-Unies d’ouvrages en français qualifiés d’« historiques » et consacrés à l’actualité politique européenne immédiate et à son analyse. Ce phénomène trouve sa plus belle illustration dans la parution, à Leyde, à la fin du mois de juillet 1686, de l’Histoire abrégée de l’Europe, le premier mensuel politique de langue française. À l’apparition de cette nouvelle forme éditoriale vouée à un bel avenir, que nous désignons sous le qualificatif de « mercures historiques et politiques », s’ajoute l’impression d’Histoires consacrées aux évènements récents mais aussi de collections diplomatiques, recueils qui compilent les pièces ayant trait aux relations internationales. Or, ces trois types d’ouvrages sont rédigés par les mêmes auteurs, une douzaine d’exilés français installés en Hollande qui n’avaient rien publié avant leur départ de France. Ce corpus qualifié d’« histoire du temps présent européen » permet de saisir comment, dans la Hollande des années 1680-1740, publier l’actualité politique est devenu une profession caractérisée par des pratiques d’écriture et des compétences valorisables auprès du public mais également auprès des autorités politiques grâce à l’entretien de correspondances. En observant comment ces hommes qui s’érigent en spécialistes ont participé à la constitution d’un marché de l’information politique, cette étude analyse les procédés par lesquels ils ont rendu publics la politique et ses instruments et interroge les implications qu’un tel phénomène éditorial peut induire sur le rapport des lecteurs à l’action des gouvernements. / This study started from two surprising facts. Between 1680 and 1740, numerous works, written in French and published in the Dutch Republic, were labeled “historical” and devoted to describing and analyzing current European political events. The best example of this phenomenon is the publication in Leyden in late July 1686 of the “Histoire abrégée de l’Europe”, the first political monthly in French. This new editorial format (which we call “mercures historiques et politiques”) emerged was to know a great success. At the same time, some Histoires dealing with current events were also printed, as well as diplomatic collections, compiling all the pieces related to international relations. In fact all three types of books were penned by the same people, a dozen of exiled Frenchmen living in Holland who had never published anything before leaving France.These several printings, called “histoire du temps present européen” allow us to understand how, in late 17th and early 18th century Holland, writing about current political affairs turned into an profession, characterized by writing practices and skills that can help these authors to live by their pen, thanks to their public via several editorial media, and thanks the political authorities with which they entertained correspondences. By studying how these self-styled “specialists” have contributed to the emergence of a market for political information, I will analyze the processes they used to publicize political life and its instruments, and investigate the implications of this phenomenon on the way readers perceive the government’s action.

The recent political events in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Tunisia (2011) have confirmed the key role of social networks (SNSs), as well as online political news in supporting citizens with their self-determination. Furthermore, “changes in the media landscape present new challenges for scholars interested in the relationship between the media and civil society. Additionally, the explosion of the Internet that started in advanced democracies and has spread through much of the globe provides new and unexplored pathways for communication. Moreover, the inclusion of the Internet in the media environment raises new questions for citizens, politicians, researchers, journalists, and government” (Oates, Owen & Gibson, 2006, p. 1). This study looks at the relationships between young people’s exposure to political news on the Internet and their political awareness. It develops and applies an index for political participation composed of several variables measuring political interest, discussion, knowledge, and participation. The survey among students in both countries was administered in Arabic and German, while the master questionnaire was developed in English. The survey was conducted between April and June 2010 in Egypt at Minia University and in Germany at Technical university of Dresden. The sample size was 1000 (500 in each country) students from several departments representing different academic fields: three departments of Engineering, three departments of Humanities and Social Science, and finally three departments of Natural Science. The study’s main research question was: “What is the impact of students’ exposure to political news on the Internet on their political awareness and civic activities?” The researcher started from the hypothesis that heavy use of political news on the Internet is positively related to political awareness. A further research question aimed at gauging the role of intervening variables such as gender and field of study for the relationship between the use of political news on the Internet and the level of political awareness. Results show that there is a positive relationship between using political online news and political awareness. German students’ political awareness for German students was higher than Egypt student’s political awareness (M=63.02, SD=15.65, comparing to M=45.72, SD= 17.65 for Egyptians).