Suchergebnisse

The 9/11 attacks were a watershed in the history of the United States as it greatly influenced different aspects of the American society including its economy, politics, culture, and dominant ideology. It is no exaggeration to say that the 2001 terrorist attacks altered the American domestic and foreign policies. In this policy shift, the media played an important role since they were one of the main instruments which propagated and controlled the representation of different groups, especially Muslims, who came to be held accountable by the American mind for 9/11 attacks. The present thesis applies Saeid Reza Ameli's theory with regard to the representation of Muslims by westerners, classified into four major categories: Islamophilia, Islamoromia, Islamoverita, and Islamophobia. The present study aims to discuss the Islamophobic representational strategy as employed by the American weekly magazine of Newsweek two months before and two months after the 9/11 attacks. The research project uses Stuart Hall's representation theory to analyze Newsweek's articles about Islam before and after the 9/11 attacks. It also employs content analysis, and particularly SPSS, to come to a quantitative result about the dominant representational strategy of the magazine. After analyzing the findings, the researcher demonstrates the dominance of the Islamophobic representational strategy in the Newsweek magazine. DOI:10.5901/mjss.2014.v5n16p561

Given the immense shifts the social networking sites and applications have brought about, a considerable number of researchers in the field of communication studies have turned to study different aspects of social media usage and factors influencing it. This study gathered data from 33318 US non-institutionalized citizens over 18 including 17079 females and 16239 males; they were members of web panelists of Pew, and their answers revealed that a majority of this online participants used a kind of social media. The results of this study revealed women use social media more than men, and religious people more than non-religious people. In addition, the results indicated that married people are the least users of social media in comparison with other marital groups. Our results showed that all demographics are significantly related to social media usage. But this significance can be somehow misleading because of weak practical effect sizes. Except for marital status and age Cramer's V values are too small and their significance may have nothing to say but sensitivity to the degree of freedom.

Cinema is a powerful media that can shape people's minds about different issues. Movies can focus on very detailed or hidden matters in society, and critical issues that profoundly affect the lives of large populations are usually at the center of cinema's attention. Among these issues are wars that can affect tens of millions of people financially, mentally and of course physically.Films can question or justify wars. To answer if they questioned wars or justified them one should choose a specific war, a period and maybe a particular group of films and analyze their content and discourse. However, to do so, it would be helpful and maybe necessary to first better understand how films may question or justify wars.The present research is an effort to analyze a specific number of movies to see in what ways they may have justified the role of the United States in the Second World War. The results include eight issues that the movies raised regarding the legitimacy of the war and America's role in it.

In the last presidential election of the United States (2016), the interaction between the Donald Trump and the American media was remarkable and unprecedented from both political and communication perspectives. The present paper is interested in observing the interactions between then the Republican Party candidate, Donald Trump, and the media of the United States. As there were major verbal confrontations between Trump, and some media, specifically CNN, this paper observes how Trump campaign reacted to CNN that turned out to be one of his biggest opponents. The relations and reactions are explained using "agenda setting" and "selective exposure" as theories and "thematic analysis" as the research methodology. The paper analyzes CNN videos from October 7 to October 31, and Trump's tweets during the same period. The reason for conducting the research during October is that this month is regarded as one of the most critical periods in US presidential election, known as "October surprise". Then a thematic analysis of the data is conducted to extract all accusations and allegations against Trump. Research results show that President Trump did not react to most of the accusations and attacks raised by CNN. Apparently Trump had decided that ignoring and not responding is a better strategy. There was an exception to this rule: Trump's treatment toward women. He did address that issue frequently and tried to justify himself and apologize. Accordingly, Trump's presidential campaign aim was to ignore accusations, keep attacking, and answering accusations only if they are already known to too many people.