Browsing by Subject "media framing"
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Item Open Access Differences in the Media’s Framing of Fracking/Shale Gas in New York, Pennsylvania, Germany, and the United Kingdom(2014-04-25) Beresford, HenryOver the past decade, commercial mining firms in the United States have increasingly used horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing (fracking) to extract natural gas from shale rock formations (shale gas). The production of shale gas in the United States is booming: according to data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), the percentage of U.S. domestic natural gas withdrawals from shale gas increased from 8.1% to 34.9% between 2007 and 2012, and U.S. wellhead natural gas prices dropped 57%. In contrast, Europe has not yet begun to produce shale gas on a commercial scale, even though EU natural gas prices are multiple times’ more expensive than U.S. natural gas prices. Others have proposed various historic, economic, political, and geologic reasons for this disparity, but comparatively little attention has been paid to the hypothesis that differences in news coverage may have contributed to disparity, or even towards describing differences in news coverage. The question remains: have European news media outlets framed shale gas any differently than American news media outlets? This paper presents the results of an original, preliminary inquiry into whether there exist differences in media framing of the shale gas/fracking in the U.S. versus the EU. A content analysis was performed on a representative sample of 712 fracking-related or shale gas-related texts from eight newspapers in New York, Pennsylvania, Germany, and the United Kingdom. All texts were published between January 1, 2007 and December 31, 2013. Ultimately, this study found significant differences in framing between the newspapers when analyzed individually (p<0.01) and when grouped by state (p<0.1). However, no significant differences in media frames were found between the shale-gas friendly jurisdictions (Pennsylvania & the United Kingdom) compared to shale-gas hostile jurisdictions (New York & Germany). Despite greater shale gas production in the U.S., the four U.S. papers on the whole were found to have presented a more negative frame towards shale gas than the four European newspapers (p<0.1). These results provide evidence that media coverage of shale gas varies strongly by state and local jurisdictions, suggest that U.S. and EU media representations of shale gas are more similar than a casual observer might guess, and indicate that grand generalizations about media representations of shale gas in the U.S. and the EU are to be avoided.Item Open Access Media Framing of Public School Diversity Policy Changes, Wake County, N.C., 1975-2010(2010-12-10) Klein, AlexAmerican public education commands a workforce of millions of people, a budget in the trillions of dollars, and a significant share of one’s childhood. It is a vast, complex system run simultaneously by local, state, and federal government, each of which has different goals from the others. The media have an amazing number of topics to explore but limited time and space to do so. This giant educational system—one that affects anyone with a child, a teaching degree, a taxable home, a niece, a competing interest, an innovative idea—is not easily pushed in one direction. To the extent that the acquisition of knowledge changes an individual’s mind, and that change affects a group of citizens, and that group affects the status quo, the news media occupy an important slice of the educational system in America. Which educational issues the news media choose to cover, and with which “slant,” “angle,” or “frame,” can have an important influence on political decision-makers and the general public. This undergraduate thesis seeks to show how local coverage of public school diversity policies in Wake County, North Carolina, was framed during three times of great policy change. The (Raleigh, N.C.) News & Observer, a regional newspaper that primarily covers the city of Raleigh, Wake County, and state politics, is the news source of interest for this project. Three specific changes—all covered in detail by the News & Observer—are used to focus the study.Understanding how the news media couched their coverage of each of these three pivotal periods in the history of Wake County public schools has the potential to generate insights into both why decisions were made to change the system and how the news media might have played a role.Item Open Access Reconsidering Occupy Oakland and Its Horizons: Media Misframing, Decolonizing Fractures, and Enduring Resistance Hub(2021-04) Alvarado, MadisoonReconsidering Occupy Oakland and Its Horizons is an archival study of the creation, reception, evolution, and remembrance of Occupy Oakland using a feminist lens. I investigate how Occupy Oakland’s radically democratic mobilization against economic violence, racism, and police violence was undermined by local and regional news coverage—namely in the San Francisco Chronicle and Oakland Tribune—through framing devices that demonized protesters and delegitimized the movement. I nevertheless found differences between local and regional coverage. Occupy Oakland challenged existing hegemonic boundaries regarding participatory democracy as its activists –seasoned and less experienced people from multiple generations – experimented with horizontal world-building through community structures, methods, and processes. This horizontal radical movement nevertheless struggled with the same divisions and inequalities that existed outside its camps: heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and classism. The “stickiness” of embodied and structural inequalities persisted in Occupy Oakland camps despite efforts to create a radically egalitarian community. The nature of this stickiness can only be understood by taking seriously the local material and institutional conditions, obstacles, and histories that shaped the spaces of protest and its participants. Though news coverage often describes the movement as a failure, several new projects and coalitions formed during and after Occupy Oakland, illustrating its dynamic legacy and challenging social movement scholarship that reproduces temporal demise frameworks in its analysis. A feminist examination of these projects demonstrates how stories of Occupy Oakland’s “failure” or “death” miss the nature of projects attempting to radically reimagine a patriarchal, racist, neoliberal social world along more egalitarian and just lines. The problems Occupy Oakland struggled against and challenged have only intensified during the CoVid-19 pandemic.