Honors Theses (Journalism and Communication)

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Browsing Honors Theses (Journalism and Communication) by Subject "Collective action injustice frames"

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    Agenda Setting and Framing International News at the Headline
    (2019-06) Niedermeyer, Jillian
    Modern media is predominantly controlled by large organizations, and even more by first-world, ‘Western’ countries, known in communication studies as ‘core nations.’ This study explores the intersection of international mass communication studies and the traditional communication theoretical studies of agenda setting and framing. This thesis is guided by three key research questions that ask how these theories create audience salience, how it occurs at the headline level, and the overall implications of this use. Using headlines collected from two different news sources, the Washington Post and the British Broadcasting Corporation, I analyzed over 700 headlines to evaluate how journalists in these countries frame stories about other countries and, for the Washington Post, their own. This research found that the majority of international news stories are framed negatively and only arise when an impactful incident occurs to make the country timely. Whether or not these organizations frame foreign countries as the ‘other’ is inconclusive. Ultimately, the elements of conflict and novelty in a story are the most predictive of story salience. Additionally, this study found a critical correlation between a country’s world economic influence and the frequency of headlines about it. Moving forward, this study could gain from studying how each country’s journalists write about their own countries versus how they write about international news, not looking only at two English-speaking countries; it could benefit from a two-sided approach. Additionally, it could benefit from looking at additional news sources over an extended period of time to get a more complete understanding.