The purpose of this paper is to describe the current communication techniques and strategies used by political parties resulting in these parties achieving significant growth, understand the components of those communication techniques in order to isolate the factors attributing to this achieved success and develop a model that can be replicated from a business organization in order to achieve similar beneficial results.The study revealed that there is a clear connection between political parties and business organizations, broadening the research fields of both entities respectively. Furthermore, the findings were categorized based on potential value, with practices such as “thriving on dissatisfaction”, “taking advantage of emotions”, “showing visible structures as an organization / political party”, “intentional use of weak signals”, “leader’s direct connection to audience” and “formulating receiver interpretation of signals” appearing to have high potential in achieving success if implemented correctly in the communication strategy.

This research paper studied the first two weeks after President Donald Trump allegedly called African countries “shithole countries” in a bi-partisan meeting on immigration. It explored the frames and emerging themes used by the media when covering the incident and the surrounding issues. Using the framing theory as a theoretical framework, the study examined the six identified news frames through qualitative content analysis. The six frames used in the coverage of the “shithole countries” incident are racial, conflict, consequences, morality, human interest, and policy. The study examined articles from four news sources that lean liberal, conservative, central-liberal, and central conservative. The study indicated that the four news sources all used five of the six frames, as the Wall Street Journal did not use the morality frame at all. The most used frame was the human interest frame, followed by conflict and consequences. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal used the conflict frame the most. And CNN and FOX used the consequences frame the most.

abstract: The purpose of this project is to better understand police perceptions of sexual assault complainants by assessing their likelihood of questioning a complainant’s credibility and by examining police attitudes toward victims of sexual assault. To advance understanding of these issues, this dissertation (1) expands upon prior research by drawing on a sample of officers from one of the largest metropolitan police departments in the United States and, (2) through the use of framing theory, contributes to the literature by focusing on the attitudes of police toward sexual assault complainants and how these beliefs are shaped by day-to-day experiences. This dissertation investigates two research questions using a mixed-methods approach. The data come from 400 sexual assault complaints that were reported to the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) and 52 LAPD detective interviews. I quantitatively examine the factors that influence officer perceptions of complainant credibility, focusing on indicators of “real rape,” “genuine” victims, “inappropriate” victim behavior, and “character flaws.” I contextualize this work by examining police attitudes toward sexual assault victims using qualitative data taken from interviews of sex crimes detectives. This research contributes to the broader case processing literature by focusing on victim credibility, a factor consistently found to influence case processing decisions. Moreover, this study contributes to research on the frames officers assign to women who report sexual assault. Analyses from the quantitative portion of the study confirm that indicators of “real rape,” and complainant “character issues” were key explanatory factors influencing credibility assessments. Regarding qualitative results, three sexual assault victim frames were identified. These frames include depictions of victims as they relate to: (a) the suspect/victim relationship, (b) problematic victim behavior, and (c) age. These three frames indicate that certain types of victims are viewed as problematic. This dissertation contributes to three broad bodies of literature: law enforcement decision making, law enforcement perceptions of sexual assault victims, and framing theory. This dissertation was able to tap into officer attitudes to shed light on the ways officers treat women who come forward to report sexual assault, providing valuable insight into officer attitudes, credibility assessments, and victim framing. / Dissertation/Thesis / Doctoral Dissertation Criminology and Criminal Justice 2015

This essay aims at studying the use of social media by states and state actors. More specifically, the study is exploring how the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) are using their official Twitter account @IDFSpokesperson in relation to the 2018 Gaza protests. The study is utilizing a quantitative content analysis as well as a framing analysis for the analysis of the Twitter account and is having a theoretical base in framing theory. The findings suggest that there is a problem when democratic states use social media – there is a fine line between being transparent and disseminating propaganda.

Grounded in framing theory, this thesis presents a quantitative content analysis of newspaper reporting of the Hong Kong protests, also known as the Occupy Central Movement or the Umbrella Revolution, between September 28 and December 11, 2014. The political, economic and legal implications involved have made the protests one of the most newsworthy events in the history of Hong Kong since the transfer of its sovereignty from the United Kingdom to China in 1997. This study aims to examine the various frames used in the coverage of the protests in three major newspapers that operate within different political, economic and ideological boundaries: South China Morning Post, The New York Times, and The Guardian. Results of the content analysis supported the research hypotheses that significant differences existed in the newspapers in their framing of the protests, the protesters, the government, news censorship, and politically sensitive issues. While the frames used by The New York Times and The Guardian were in agreement with the Western democratic-liberal press system, the frames used by South China Morning Post reflected the authoritarian-liberal nature of the Hong Kong press system.

China's smog air pollution has become an increasingly urgent environmental crisis in China. Using framing as theoretical framework, this research examined how much media attention is focused on smog air pollution and how print media frame smog air pollution. An empirical content analysis of 339 articles in the People’s Daily newspaper was conducted from 2000 to 2016, and the results showed that “non-voluntary solutions” and “problem” frames were the two frames that had been most utilized to construct stories about air pollution. Smog air pollution crisis also discussed in terms of Downs issue-attention cycle, a five-stage model explaining the rise and down of social attention to a social issue. The smog air pollution crisis in China been found that exhibiting three cycles that relate to media attention. Also, the research found that the prominence of the frames varied at different cycles. It is worth noting that the prominence of the frames moved away from the “problem “and “effects on social economic” frames to the “government responsibility,” “individual responsibility,” and the “voluntary” frames. The finding suggests that media attention and media concerns and journalists’ narrative considerations change across the different phases of development, that natural instincts, political influence, and media norms can all affect it.

The study aims to analyse how China, under the Xi Jinping administration, assimilates its ethnic minorities by exploring white papers' underlying motives. The ambition is to understand China’s actions and how they can affect the future. The research asks three questions: How does China frame ethnic minorities in white papers? What arguments are used to justify assimilation and sinicisation? How and why is China assimilating its ethnic minorities now? The results show that China depicts ethnic minorities through two accounts, oneness and backwardness. The former stresses the significance of unity within ethnic minorities and between ethnic groups. The latter describes the condition that ethnic minorities end up in if they do not conform to China’s socialist values. One can be stuck by backwardness if one follows declared enemies or shows signs of separatism, terrorism and religious extremism. The results reveal how China uses ‘war on terror’ and modernisation narratives to justify its assimilation and sinicisation acts. The results also point to three areas where ethnic minorities can stick to backwardness and should, therefore, assimilate Han Chinese. These are language, religion and employment. The study reveals that the CPC and Xi Jinping intend to fix anything that disturbs them from realising the Chinese Dream of national rejuvenation. Consequently, China’s attempt to attain uniformity means that anything which may be prioritised above the party must be eradicated or sinicised.

The increasingly entangled correlation between media, sport and activism in the United States has generated an upsurge in new media research that focuses on athletes’ political social media posts from an ‘outsider’s’ perspective. To clearer comprehend the complex relationship of media, sport and activism from an ‘insider’s’ perspective, this thesis aims to converse with collegiate athletes in the United States about how they experience their personalized politics on social media, as well as it observes the collegiate athletes’ activist practices on particularly Twitter and Facebook. As an auxiliary ‘prop’, I utilize former NFL (National Football League) player Colin Kaepernick’s approach to athlete activism to start the discussions about the topic with the collegiate athletes. Kaepernick’s kneel during the national anthem in 2016, prior to a football game displayed on national television, gained a variety of negative responses, but also sparked a difference in conversations about the politization of sport, and ultimately lead to a swift re-appearance of athlete activism on social media (Serazio and Thorson, 2020). Thus, by collecting interview data and observations of the media practices of collegiate athletes, the analysis draws on bottom-up framing and practice theory to better understand how such sportspersons experience the intersection between sports and politics on social media, the implications of athlete activism, and the media practices involved in such performance. Ultimately, the results of this study suggest that appearances of tensions, anxieties and pressures subsist in collegiate athletes’ activism practices on social media, making it an auspicious site for further research seeking to investigate the intersection of media, sport, and activism.

Environmental issues have been described as one of society’s wicked problems. In contrast to widespread technological responses to environmental issues, I spotlight social aspects as chief barriers to productive change. I posit that socially constructed frames can influence people’s perspectives, opinions, and behaviors regarding environmental issues. In this project, I explored organizational work and framing processes as a means to bridge the chasm between technological and social approaches to environmental issues. To date, researchers using framing theory have narrowed their focus to testing the effectiveness of different frames. By doing so, however, researchers remain limited to discursive explanations regarding how frames are constructed at a micro level. In contrast, I adopted a multimodal approach that accounts for both discursive and non-discursive modalities to investigate how organizations deploy visual, material, and textual approaches to shape environmental meaning through framing processes. Specifically, I focused on organizational campaigns to construct meaning around the contentious issue of bottled water. I adopted a qualitative approach, using a multimodal analysis, to explore advertisements and campaigns used by bottled water companies and environmental activist groups to shape perspectives, opinions and behaviors of plastic containers and bottled water usage. I found that visual, material, and textual modalities can be used as value-neutral tools to help stakeholders construct different frames and shape the public’s opinion of bottled water. Different multimodal elements serve different functions in constructing different frames. I also identified particular barriers for the framing construction process.

This study is an attempt to comprehend how Palestinians and Israelis perceive the conflict and the peace process. It identifies the channels and dynamics related to the shaping of their perceptions on the individual, community, and political levels. The main objectives of this study are to probe the degree of homogeneity between these levels for both Palestinians and Israelis as well as the degree of discord between them on the same levels and to pinpoint intervening factors that contribute to carving out the ultimate perceptions that individuals hold. Unlike previous work, this study employs a multi-method approach to measure and benchmark of the topic at hand. To bridge further gaps, a developed matrix extends the analyses on temporalspatial dimensions of individuals’ cognitions, affections, and behaviors pertaining to the conflict. This study falls within the descriptive research that seeks probing the effect of macro-level factors (the media, and political parties/leaders) on microlevel ones (the audience cognitive processing), and is involved in describing and identifying its elements and components through the collection and analysis of data. Interpretation of data is based on a combination of content analysis for eight major newspapers, two public opinion surveys and a document analysis affiliated to the main four political parties. The analysis of the Palestinians and Israelis’ perspective of the conflict and the peace process revealed that the actual conflict has three main dimensions: First, the struggle between individuals, which is full of self-contradictions, as each party describes a conflict in a way different than the other. It is a conflict, in which the past and present of the two sides of the conflict are different - the bitter past itself with different narratives, yet the motives are the same but conducive to different results. Whereas each party is blaming the other on these three levels, the conflict is rooted in different forms, but intertwined with one another. Both nations differ entirely in prioritizing the core issues of the conflict. For example, the study reveals that for Palestinians the issue of Jerusalem ranks first, followed by the issue of releasing of prisoners. The issue of the refugees ranks third, and paradoxically recognizing Israel as a Jewish state ranks last according to Palestinians. As for the Israelis, the issue of security and safety ranks first, the recognition of the Jewishness of their state ranks second, followed by the issue of Jerusalem that comes in the third place, whereas and at loggerheads with the Palestinians’ aspirations, the establishing of a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders ranks last on their part. The same applies to the proposed solutions of the conflict. The future is fuzzy, and everyone sees the most appropriate solutions that fit their own interest, as a part of the zero-sum game. Both peoples yearn for peace, and both peoples are tired and bored of the conflict, but the majority in both sides, however, are not willing to make concessions towards this end and consequently are not optimistic in reaching peace in the near future. Furthermore, each party does not view the political leadership of the other party as a partner for peace. Secondly, a media conflict, where the analysis illustrates a similarity in the issues raised in the Palestinian and Israeli newspapers, but there were distinct statistical differences in the extent of coverage and in the display of those issues and their interpretation between the Israeli and Palestinian media, the matter which is clearly reflects on the individuals’ view on the causes of the conflict, its consequences and solutions. Regarding the third level of the conflict i.e. the conflict between political leaders and parties, a strong statistical relationship has been established between political affiliation to a particular party and the perspective of both, the Palestinian and Israeli peoples, on the most significant issues of the conflict. This is reflected in the homogeneity degree of the priorities of the parties and political leaders in the analysis of documents and media, in the analysis of the content with the order of priorities in the Palestinian and Israeli mindset. The statistical results have particularly shown a strong reciprocal correlation between the angles of this triangle. The relationship boosts wrong inherited notions and beliefs, which necessitates their eradication and adoption of new strategies on the part of political stakeholders. In that case, the media will publish them in a positive way that serves the peace process and bring the Palestinian-Israeli conflict to an end. Finally, on the basis of the results and conclusions of this dissertation a model was developed that illustrated how these interactions frame realities into new realities that let the peace process sink even more day by day.