“Damned if you do, damned if you don’t”: Media frames of responsibility and accountability in handling a wildfire

The United States has been increasingly concerned with the transnational threat posed by infectious diseases. Effective policy implementation to contain the spread of these diseases requires active engagement and support of the American public. To influence American public opinion and enlist support for related domestic and foreign policies, both domestic agencies and international organizations have framed infectious diseases as security threats, human rights disasters, economic risks, and as medical dangers. This study investigates whether American attitudes and opinions about infectious diseases are influenced by how the issue is framed. It also asks which issue frame has been most influential in shaping public opinion about global infectious diseases when people are exposed to multiple frames. The impact of media frames on public perception of infectious diseases is examined through content analysis of newspaper reports. Stories on SARS, avian flu, and HIV/AIDS were sampled from coverage in The New York Times and The Washington Post between 1999 and 2007. Surveys of public opinion on infectious diseases in the same time period were also drawn from databases like Health Poll Search and iPoll. Statistical analysis tests the relationship between media framing of diseases and changes in public opinion. Results indicate that no one frame was persuasive across all diseases. The economic frame had a significant effect on public opinion about SARS, as did the biomedical frame in the case of avian flu. Both the security and human rights frames affected opinion and increased public support for policies intended to prevent or treat HIV/AIDS. The findings also address the debate on the role and importance of domestic public opinion as a factor in domestic and foreign policy decisions of governments in an increasingly interconnected world. The public is able to make reasonable evaluations of the frames and the domestic and foreign policy issues emphasized in the frames.

In today's rapidly evolving media landscape, the role of news media in shaping public perception and opinion has become an increasingly important area of study. One of the most significant theoretical frameworks used to understand how the media influences its audience is media framing theory. Media framing refers to the way media outlets present and structure information to shape the public’s interpretation of events, issues, or individuals. According to this perspective, the media not only reports news but actively constructs reality by emphasizing certain aspects of an issue while downplaying or omitting others, thereby guiding how audiences perceive and evaluate the world around them. The concept of framing was first introduced by Erving Goffman (1974), who argued that individuals in everyday life use "frames" to interpret and make sense of experiences. In a similar way, media organizations apply specific frames to construct stories, highlighting certain elements that align with ideological, political, or social perspectives. These frames influence the way in which an event is understood, its importance is gauged, and how different social, political, and cultural narratives are created. A common example of framing can be seen in news coverage of political events, where the same event may be framed in different ways depending on whether the outlet adopts a liberal or conservative approach, or whether the coverage is focused on human rights, economic impact, or security concerns. Over the years, media framing research has explored how frames are created, the factors that influence framing decisions, and the impact these frames have on audiences. Scholars have identified various types of frames used by media outlets, including conflict frames, human interest frames, economic frames, and responsibility frames, among others. Each type of frame serves a particular purpose, whether it’s to inform, persuade, or shape the opinions of the audience. This study seeks to examine the role of media frames in news coverage, specifically focusing on how framing influences the public’s interpretation of news, the way issues are categorized, and how media narratives affect individuals' attitudes and behaviors. Given the power that media holds in shaping public discourse, understanding the dynamics of framing is essential for both media producers and consumers. By critically analyzing how media frames are constructed and their subsequent effects, this research aims to shed light on the intricate relationship between media content, audience perception, and the broader social implications of news representation.

News is important of component for people to access information, understand factual truths, and influence public opinions. This study examines how the media frames of Fox and CNN news affect public viewpoints. By analyzing the different aspects portrayed by these two companies on social media. It demonstrates how different social media frames emphasize varying values, event perspectives, and other factors influencing public opinion. Fox News tends to adopt a conservative perspective, while CNN favors a more liberal view. This difference in framing is reflected not only in the choice of news content, but also in the way events are portrayed and interpreted. Additionally, we found that individuals tend to lean towards their own ideologies when choosing to watch FOX News or CNN. This paper discusses the attitudes of both news media towards border immigration, each of different political party leanings. It also compares the distinct media frames of the FOX and CNN news. Media frames play an important role in shaping public opinion and emphases the importance of critical thinking and exposure to different viewpoints when watching the news. Because the issue of immigration across borders is so controversial and divides public opinion sharply, the research will focus on the separate number of frames used by Fox News and CNN.

Public relations, a field of information and communication sciences, has expanded into numerous categories in a short time and on a path of strengthening its academic position. One of them is crisis communication. Crisis communication represents a strategic approach to the phenomenon of crisis, the disruption of regular procedures in the organization, which implies the creation of communication solutions that will be effective in prevention, but also in remediation of a potential problem that represents a threat to the reputation of the actor implementing the public relations program. On the one hand, a crisis situation is a threat, while on the other, it is also an opportunity. If in the times of a crisis control, openness, clarity, credibility, and security are demonstrated, it is possible to emerge from the problem even stronger than before, and achieve a greater degree of respect, which ultimately contributes to strengthening the image. This PhD thesis thematizes crisis communication viewed from the perspective of political communication. The case analyzed is a public health crisis situation caused by the first wave of the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, which the Government of the Republic of Croatia faced in 2020. The goals of the research were to determine the characteristics of media reporting on the crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, reactive strategies of crisis communication and associated discourses and used media frames, as well as the functioning of the concept of presidentialization in the context of crisis communication. The concept of presidentialization refers to a wide-ranging increase of the influence of political leaders, which takes place because of various factors, for example the internationalization of politics and the weakening of its influence, that is, the ties that once existed between the electorate and political parties. In the conducted research, the focus is on the media dimension of the concept of presidentialization, that is, the visibility of the political leader, the Prime Minister of the Republic of Croatia, in the circumstances of a crisis situation. A strategic approach to communication generally implies a distinction between proactive and reactive models. The same dichotomy is applicable to the field of crisis communication. In a crisis situation, it is crucial to establish control. In this way, false information that can lead to an increase in the scope and complexity of the crisis is suppressed. If possible, it is recommended to act proactively. On the other hand, reactive strategies imply a kind of forced action with the aim of dealing with influences that are external. It was the crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic that influenced the activation of the reactive communication patterns by the Government of the Republic of Croatia. Framing theory originates from sociology and studies the functioning and consequences of frames that exist in social situations, and fit meaning into specific schemes. According to Semetko and Valkenburg (2000), there are five types of media frames. These are: responsibility, economic consequences, conflict, morality, and human interest. The consequences of media framing, whether it originates from the mass media, or the media used by specific organizations, can be far-reaching, and especially in the field of political communication result with shaping and strengthening of political preferences or degree of support for a certain policy, and understanding of a problem that is of public interest. Framing theory is extremely relevant to the field of public relations, where goals are set at three levels: awareness, attitude, and behavior. The concept of discourse unites values, socio-cultural heritage, and ideology. It is particularly important in the context of political relations, which are inherently of such a nature that they involve issues related to power. The research included the official website of the Government of the Republic of Croatia, as well as four news sites - Vecernji.hr, Tportal.hr, Index.hr, and Dnevno.hr. Content analysis and critical discourse analysis methods were used in the research. Using content analysis, presidential tendencies in the Government of Croatia online communication regarding the COVID-19 pandemic were examined, as well as the usage of specific media frames. The same method was used for examining the used reactive communication strategies from the Government, as well as the frames which the news sites used to approach the subject. The theoretical basis in the segment of framing was elaborated through the taxonomy of Semetko and Valkenburg (2000), which lists five types of media frames, while Smith’s (2005) typology was used to examine reactive crisis communication strategies, which consists of seven types of strategies: pre-emptive actions, defensive response, offensive response, diversionary response, vocal commiseration, rectifying behavior, and deliberate inaction. For the purposes of the research, the author created a separate matrix related to reactive crisis communication strategies, while a measuring instrument based on the work of Semetko and Valkenburg (2000) was used to examine media frames. In addition, the intensity of Government of Croatia online communication regarding COVID-19 pandemic in acute phase was examined, and also the correlation between the manifested agendas of the Government of the Republic of Croatia and news sites. Critical discourse analysis was used in order to examine the most important determinants of Government of Croatia discourse in confronting the pandemic. The discourse-cognition-society triangle model of Teun van Dijk (1993) was applied to the units of analysis, the operationalization of which consists of the grouping of “local meanings”, which refer to observable characteristics of the used language, as well as “global meanings”, in which titles and abstracts are important in defining the desired messages. In the critical discourse analysis, the non-linguistic function of language was also observed, through performative expressions that simultaneously perform a certain action. The research included one basic and four additional hypotheses. Basic hypothesis: The existence of a strong positive correlation between the intensity of the threat and the communication of the Government of the Republic of Croatia, which manifests itself through presidentialization in the Internet media. Additional hypotheses: In the releases of the Government of the Republic of Croatia on the official website, during an acute public health crisis, the media frame of responsibility prevails. -- In the reporting of Croatian news sites about the COVID-19 pandemic in an acute public health crisis, in the releases that include the statement of the prime minister or minister of the Government of the Republic of Croatia in the title, the media frame of economic consequences prevails. -- The discourse of the Government of the Republic of Croatia in an acute public health crisis indicates an increased number of performative expressions. -- In an acute public health crisis, a reactive strategy of rectifying behavior prevails in the communication of the Government of the Republic of Croatia on the Internet. The conducted research indicated a moderate positive correlation between the intensity of the threat and the intensity of communication of the Government of the Republic of Croatia. It is a result that points to the use of deliberate inaction to a certain extent. The Government's online communication during the acute crisis did not predominantly manifest itself through presidentialization. In the largest number of releases by the Government of the Republic of Croatia in the observed period, the media frame of responsibility dominates, and the analysis of the reactive communication strategies showed that in the largest number of cases, the strategy of rectifying behavior is dominant. The discourse used by the Government was based on six “global meanings”, and six “local meanings”, and in the critical period the number of performative expressions increased. As in the case of the Government of the Republic of Croatia, in most of the releases of the news sites, the media frame of responsibility is dominant, and a moderate positive correlation between the agenda of the Government and the agenda of the news sites has been established.

Since media liberalization in 2011, news media has played a critical role in shaping public opinion, impacting the government’s policy-making process. After the emergence of the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor (CMEC) in 2018, Chinese projects have increasingly attracted media attention in Myanmar. Previous studies mainly focus on Chinese projects with different perspectives, such as geopolitics and international perspectives, while lacking an understanding of media. Therefore, this article set out to study media perceptions of Chinese projects under the CMEC to examine how the news media frames Chinese projects in Myanmar. Qualitative content analysis with Entman’s four frames was applied to find media frames with Chinese investments in Myanmar. Three news media outlets, Eleven News, The Irrawaddy, and Radio Free Asia (RFA), were selected to find critical news stories related to Chinese projects under the CMEC. 15 news stories (N=15) between 2018 to the present were selected, and the study was systematically conducted, following Braun and Clarkes’ six-phase-analytical process. The study proved that four themes addressed the research question, "How do news media frame news about Chinese projects in Myanmar?” It was concluded that news media primarily framed two factors, public concerns and domestic issues, that impeded the successful implementation of Chinese investments in Myanmar. Finally, the study found that news media called for effective collaboration between China and Myanmar to ensure mutual benefits. It also further recommended that future research should consider longitudinal studies to examine media framing impacts public opinion and policy changes, and to incorporate a wider range of media sources to improve the generalizability of findings to achieve a more comprehensive understanding of media perceptions over time.

This narrative review examines how media framing in news outlets and social platforms shapes public perception across various sociopolitical and cultural contexts. Framing theory serves as the conceptual foundation, emphasizing the media’s power to define issues, influence attitudes, and guide public discourse. Literature was systematically retrieved from Scopus, Web of Science, and Google Scholar using Boolean operators and targeted keywords such as "media framing," "public opinion," and "misinformation." Inclusion criteria focused on peer-reviewed studies from the past five years involving qualitative or quantitative methodologies relevant to framing effects in digital and traditional media. The results highlight three dominant themes: the direct influence of framing on public behavior, the variation of framing effects across cultural and national contexts, and the systemic role of media in shaping policies and public attitudes. Empirical studies, such as those by Thếng & Trang (2022), Kessler & Guenther (2017), and Choi et al. (2023), show that specific linguistic strategies, including metaphors and emotional cues, significantly alter public interpretation and engagement. Discussions further reveal the interplay between framing practices and systemic factors such as political narratives and media regulations. This review concludes that media framing holds transformative power and demands both ethical attention from media practitioners and strategic policymaking. Enhancing media literacy and pursuing cross-cultural research are essential steps to mitigate risks and leverage framing's potential for social good.

Mainstream media often simply download information posted on social media from unreliable sources without critical thinking and verifying the content. Nowadays, the accuracy of information in all types of media is less important than the number of clicks and views per media content. Due to the fact that there is a proven correlation between the level of media literacy and democratic development of a society, as well as the fact that the media have a great influence on the shaping of public opinion via media framing and agendas, this paper explores the awareness on media literacy of Twitter users in Croatia (primarily journalists) and their perception of their own consumption and dissemination of fake news across social networks and traditional mass media. Although Twitter is not popular in Croatia, it is intensively used by Croatian journalists, and tweets often serve as topics for media processing, which gives Twitter great importance in creating the Croatian media discourse. The research was conducted by encouraging a discussion and undertaking further content analysis of tweets regarding the role of media literacy in combating the impact of fake news, especially on social networks. This was followed by semi-structured in-depth interviews with six journalists who are active Twitter users and content analysis of articles on media literacy and fake news available on Croatian web portals. Triangulation was used in order to reduce the echo chamber effect on the results of the study. The research has shown that respondents, i.e. Twitter users in Croatia – including journalists – are not sufficiently informed about media literacy and its impact on combating fake news. It has also pinpointed their lack of awareness regarding their own consumption and dissemination of fake news across social networks and mass media. The objective of the research was to create a model for analyzing the interrelationship between media literacy and creating fake news from two perspectives: (1) evaluating self-perception of Twitter users via content analysis and in-depth interviews, and (2) analyzing media publications on the topic of media literacy and fake news, whose content reflects the perception of the media on these topics.

If one morning I walked on top of the water across the Potomac River, the headline that afternoon would read: "President Can't Swim". —Lyndon B. Johnson Introduction The term “spin” implies manipulating the truth, and this concept, along with “spin doctoring,” is now common in media and public discourse. The prevalence of “spin zones” in American politics is undeniable; media outlets themselves, such as Bill O’Reilly’s “No Spin Zone” on Fox News, now run segments on the topic. Despite this apparent media certainty about what constitutes “spin” there is a lack of conceptual clarity regarding the term among those who study media and politics. This article will draw on previous literature to identify two competing yet overlapping spin zones in American politics: the media’s spin zone and the President’s spin zone. Highlighting examples from the two most recent American presidential election campaigns, the article will evaluate the interplay of these zones and the consequences for future campaigns. Spin Zones In the United States, the press and the President are engaged in a struggle over providing information. Ever since the Watergate Scandal, the media is increasingly expected to be a “watchdog” that informs citizens and keeps the Executive accountable (Coronel 13) The President, conversely, may attempt to use the power of his position to set the discursive agenda or frame the political debate in his favor. Furthermore, with the rise of multi-media access and information provision, the lines between the spin doctoring of the Executive and the media have become even more blurred. Because of the complexities of these overlapping spin zones, many scholars disagree on how to define and/or precisely measure these effects. The following section briefly describes the ‘spin zone’ tools of agenda setting, framing, and priming, and then considers the example of a candidate who failed to prime his negative evaluation and a President who primes his image and successfully counterattacks his negative evaluation. The literature recognises two separate, yet interrelated zones that are integral to understanding these media/presidential relations: what we term the presidential spin zone and the media spin zone. The interplay between these zones comes together around three key concepts—agenda setting, framing, and priming. A key difficulty for scholars is that the President, his electoral challengers, and the press are engaged in agenda setting, framing and priming, sometimes simultaneously. Agenda setting is a broad concept and refers to focusing on certain issues to the exclusion of others. Framing is defined as the decision by the news media to “emphasise certain elements to define the ‘public’s belief’ about social and political issues” (Van Gorp 488). Other scholars describe priming as “a disproportionate amount of public comments with the hope . . . of causing voters to base their selection among the candidates on [that] issue” (Druckman et al. 1181; see also Druckman “Framing Effects”; Nelson, Clawson and Oxley; Van Gorp). Candidates may also undertake “image priming,” which is proposed by James Druckman et al., as a tool that can be used to counteract negative candidate evaluations (1182–1183). The definition of the media spin zone is, in most instances, synonymous with priming. Defining the presidential spin zone is more complex. Clearly the presidential spin zone involves both the previously-discussed “issue framing abilities of the president” and how he “set[s] the agenda” (Miller and Krosnick 301; see also, Gamson and Modigliano, Baumgardner and Jones; Druckman, “Framing Effects”). Mark Rozell, for instance, found that the Ford and Carter administrations had difficulty controlling the public agenda since many issues were either beyond their control, or because the president and his advisors lacked the strategy or skill to affect media coverage. The Reagan White House however was able to use his “image” to control the media (85–86). Similarly, George W. Bush’s administration was able to implement policies concerning the invasion of Iraq after the 9-11 through “issue framing” scare tactics, which were constantly reinforced by media outlets (Kellner 643). However, the President can also be engaged in priming at any given time. In other words, the President (or candidate) may attempt to prime what the media has already spun about him/her. A problem, of course, is that the President or candidate, in attempting to prime an issue that has already been spun in a sense tacitly admits they have lost the opportunity to set the agenda in the first place. However, this is when he can seize the aforementioned opportunity to use “image priming” to counterattack the media. In the examples that follow we examine whether the President or candidate can use priming to effectively counterattack the media spin zone, with a focus on two political tools that have been historically reserved for the President or candidates, namely, holding the base and wedge issues. Holding the Base and the Media Spin Zone Holding the base has been defined as a way in which candidates or Presidents can use the media to strengthen support among voters who already identify with their political party (Iyengar and McGrady 246). A classic example of this is the 1984 Reagan/Bush re-election campaign, the “The Bear.” This featured a bear in the woods that “some” could “see” and others didn’t “see at all” which was an implicit threat regarding Soviet communism and a reminder that Reagan was tough on foreign policy (“The Bear”). However, the evidence indicates that the media has increasingly begun “holding the base” on its own to facilitate its partisan framing and priming of candidates or Presidents. The Swift Boat Veterans for Truth attack advertisements on 2004 Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry is a key example of a media attempt to “hold the base.” In these advertisements, former “Swift Boat Veterans attack[ed] his [Kerry’s] military record” (Muravchik A17). While this initiative began as a means to collect Republican donations, Shanto Iyengar and Jennifer McGrady maintain that the amount was “trivial” and that the real impact came with “the torrent of news reports across the country” (150). Indeed, Kathleen Jamieson and Joseph Capella found that by August 2004, “viewers of Fox News were more likely than other network viewers to say that candidate John Kerry did not earn his Vietnam medals” (279). Their evaluation of this data demonstrated the power of the media spin zone: “He (Limbaugh) employs intense language, disparaging information and negative framing to distance perceptions of the Democratic candidate from those of the anointed Republican candidate” (Jamieson and Capella 228). The coverage of disputes surrounding Kerry’s military record was augmented by the media’s simultaneous coverage of the threat of terrorism. This priming “in the media continued, reaching a high peak of 55 threat messages in August 2004, a month later 25% of the public was very concerned about another major terrorist attack in the US—two months before the presidential election” (Nacos, Bloch-Elkon and Shapiro 120). Both President Bush and Candidate Kerry acknowledged that their respective win/loss could be attributed in some measure to the press coverage of the “war on terror” (Nacos, Bloch-Elkon and Shapiro 124). While questions loomed about his military experience against the backdrop of the war on terror, Senator Kerry won the first two Presidential debates by significant margins. Alec Gallup and Frank Newport suggested that the Kerry camp had “won the spin contest … to characterize their own candidate as the winner” (406). So, what happened to Kerry? The media spin zone stopped him. The presidential debate wins were 30 September 2004 and 8 October 2004, respectively. Iyengar and McGrady demonstrate that before the debates even began the number of Swift Boat veteran stories primed in the national and international press went from under 100 to over 500 (151). According to Kim Fridkin et al. the media’s spin was a significant factor in the third debate. They found that media coverage concerning Senator Kerry’s response to one question on whether homosexuality was a choice affected citizens’ evaluations of the candidate. In the post debate coverage, the tone “in newspapers, on the Internet, and on television was uniformly negative in its assessment of Senator Kerry’s comments” (Fridkin et al. 30). The impact of this negative framing was sufficiently strong to override positive evaluations of Kerry held by those who watched the debate. In sum, the “perfect storm of media coverage lessened the bounce that Senator Kerry received from the actual debate and led people to develop negative impressions of Kerry a mere three weeks before Election Day” (Fridkin 43). Despite these liabilities, Kerry should have counterattacked the media spin zone. He should have “counterpunched,” as noted by Drew Westen, priming the media that he was “a different kind of Democrat”—“one who knows when it’s time to take off the gloves” (337). Westen’s advice is echoed in Druckman’s call for further research in this area as well as by his own research findings. The media’s framing and priming led to negative evaluations of Kerry, which afforded him the opportunity to prime his “image” in a counterattack, as Druckman suggests (1183). Overcoming the Wedge Issues of the Media Spin Zone President Obama, however, orchestrates a different outcome in dealing with the media spin zone attack against him which centered on a “wedge” or “us verses them” issue. Iyengar and McGrady note that “wedge issues are designed to pit groups against each other, to appeal to voters’ sense of group identity” (145). However, they define wedge issues within the context of presidential spin zones; thus, the candidate or the president would be framing the “us versus them” topic. In this instance,

The 2019 Asrama Papua conflict in Surabaya initiated many discourses on racial discrimination and police brutality towards Papuan students in Indonesia. The question arises as to how the public perceive news framing and its effects on public opinion. This question will be answered by examining reports in the newspapers Kompas (published in Jakarta) and Jubi (Jayapura, Papua) which display quite different thematic and rhetorical structures. As secondary research, this article aims to assess the public opinion on the framing of the incident based on Berger and Luckmann’s Social Construction of Reality. Through qualitative focus group discussion, this study examines people’s perceptions of news media framing and its effect on the shaping of public opinion towards an ethnic minority group. The results show that media framing reinforces a certain idea of public opinion towards minority groups through various factors such as Perspective of Reporting and Depth of Reporting, both of which differ in Kompas and Jubi as a result of differences in their audiences. Differences were also found in such factors as the thematic structure between lens of sympathy and lens of antagonism. Ultimately, this research suggests that the public possess an awareness of news framing, thus giving them the capability to construct their own critical viewpoints towards media and the incident.

1. Introduction What is the role of a foreign policy ideal--democracy promotion--in shaping public opinion on foreign policy? (1) The experience of the 9/11 attacks on American soil, the ensuing wars against Iraq and Afghanistan, and the Bush administration's adoption of a new foreign policy doctrine brought the ideal of democracy promotion to the forefront of American foreign policy. While studies of public opinion on foreign policy have focused mainly on examining the existence of organized belief systems and the reasonableness of public opinion in foreign affairs, we know little about the role of democracy promotion in forming public opinion. The experience of the Bush administration's emphasis on democracy promotion in U.S. foreign policy and the debate about the role of idealism and realism in accounting for citizens' opinion on foreign policy demands a closer examination of the role of belief in this ideal in shaping public opinion in foreign policy. In addition, the way in which citizens' belief in democracy promotion defines their opinions on foreign policy also needs to be elaborated. Specifically, it is necessary to explore the working mechanisms of this ideal goal in relation to political context. In studying public opinion on foreign policy, a major concern has been whether the mass public can make reasonable decisions. The majority of studies have attempted to counter negative views on the capacity of the mass public to do so. Lippmann (1955), Almond (1960[1950]), and Converse (1964) criticized public opinion on foreign policy as unstable, unorganized, and unreliable due to the lack of interests, information, and ideological constraints. However, along with the emerging studies that emphasized positive views of mass public opinion regarding domestic policy (e.g. Kinder 1983, Feldman 1988), studies on public opinion on foreign policy shifted toward optimistic views by showing the existence of organized belief systems (e.g. Wittkopf 1986, Chittick, Billingsley, and Travis 1995, Holsti 1992), the role of social and psychological constraints in maintaining the belief systems (e.g. Hurwitz and Peffley 1987), and citizens' strategic and instrumental considerations in foreign policy choices (e.g. Jentleson 1992, Jentleson and Britton 1998, Herrmann, Tetlock, and Visser 1999). While these studies provide us with persuasive theories and evidence regarding the existence of structure and organization of the public's foreign policy attitudes and capacity to come up with reasonable decisions, they have a limitation in understanding the role of democracy promotion, since most of the studies that focused on the structure did not pay attention to the ideal itself, let alone to its role in shaping public opinion on foreign policy. This lack of interest in democracy promotion is ironic in that the debate about the relevance and effectiveness of idealism in American foreign policy has been around for a long time among scholars of international politics (e.g. Morgenthau 1952, Kennan 1984, Osgood 1953, Cox, Ikenberry, and Inoguchi 2000). Furthermore, democracy promotion is the core concern of liberal idealists (e.g. Cox, Ikenberry and Inoguchi 2000, Diamond 1992) and neo-conservatists (e.g. Kristol and Kagan 1996) alike. However, we know little about the characteristics and working mechanisms of this ideal in forming public opinion on foreign policy. What will be the effect of democracy promotion on foreign policy opinion? Under what conditions will the effect of the belief in this ideal be strengthened, weakened or remain stable in accounting for citizens' foreign policy choices? This study finds that individuals' belief in democracy promotion as a foreign policy goal plays a significant role in accounting for their support for U.S. troop deployments in defending allies from potential enemies and hostile countries. Also it shows that the effect of democracy promotion depends on political context. 2. …

What Movies Teach about Race: Exceptionalism, Erasure, & Entitlement reveals the way that media frames in entertainment content persuade audiences to see themselves and others through a prescriptive lens that favors whiteness. These media representations threaten democracy as conglomeration and convergence concentrate the media’s global influence in the hands of a few corporations. By linking film’s political economy with the movie content in the most influential films, this critical discourse study uncovers the socially-shared cognitive structures that the movie industry passes down from one generation to another. Roslyn M. Satchel encourages media literacy and proposes an entertainment media cascading network activation theory that uncovers racialized rhetoric in media content that cyclically begins in historic ideologies, influences elite discourse, embeds in media systems, produces media frames and representations, shapes public opinion, and then is recycled and perpetuated generationally.

Refugee and migration crises has been an integral part of the continuous and successive crises that the world has been experiencing. Media has played a crucial role in shaping public opinion over migration and asylum-seeking. Within this context, this paper aims to discuss Greek media coverage of the migrant shipwreck off the Greek coast of Pylos, in June 2023, in which more than 600 people mostly from Syria, Egypt, and Pakistan are thought to have drowned. Based on data from a quantitative content analysis and a sample of news stories stemming from the online version of five Greek news media outlets, representing diverse political spaces, a broader set of criteria for content analysis, including the absence of refugee and migrant voice in media content, dehumanization, absence of solutions and context, among many others, was used in order to explore how the Greek media framed what has been labeled as one of the deadliest migrant shipwrecks in the Mediterranean. Results revealed (i) frames of dehumanization, (ii) insufficient reporting of injustice and discrimination stemming from (state) structures and practices, and an (iii) overemphasis on migrant smuggling.

Media frame development of direct air capture 2011–2023: A comparative analysis of Europe and North America

Media framing significantly influences public perception of government decisions related to conservation policies in botanical gardens. Media framing through current public sentiment also has an impact on the sustainable development of botanical gardens. The media plays an important role in promoting tourist destinations and shaping public opinion. This has an impact on media narratives around tourism that evoke an emotional response to the existence of botanical gardens. This research aims to interpret public opinion on the sustainability of botanical gardens through Google Business Reviews using qualitative methodology with public sentiment analysis. Participants are consumers who provide reviews about botanical gardens on Google Business. The number of top 100 reviews resulted in negative public sentiment towards the botanical garden facilities of 82 percent and they focused on the aspects of lodging and varied tourism rides so that visitors expect development that is impactful and sustainable to support tourism in the future. This research recommends that botanical garden managers pay attention to environmentally friendly development, with supporting educational rides.

We study the effect of a victimization narrative on national identity and public opinion in China experimentally. Previous research has suggested that governments can shape public opinion by guiding citizens’ collective memories of historical events, but few studies have established a clear causal link. By conducting an online survey experiment among 1890 urban Chinese citizens, we examine the causal impact of historical narratives on political attitudes. We find that, compared to control conditions, a narrative focusing on China’s humiliating past in the late Qing significantly reinforces respondents’ attachment to the victim side of the Chinese national identity, raises suspicion of the intention of foreign governments in international disputes, stimulates preference for more hawkish foreign policies, and strengthens support for China’s current political system. These effects are particularly strong among respondents without a college degree.