Honors Program

Midway Honors

Date of Award

5-2013

Thesis Professor(s)

Megan Fannon

Thesis Professor Department

Communication

Thesis Reader(s)

Dilshod Achilov, Andrew Herrmann

Abstract

In a broad sense, public relations is the communication between an organization and its audience. Public relations helps create and maintain a relationship between the two. When an organization experiences a success or failure public relations is put into place to help rally public support.

The intent of this thesis aims to determine the tone of President Obama in U.S. newspapers and social media in association with the capturing and killing of terrorist Osama bin Laden.

This thesis examines a variety of U.S. newspapers by region and social media. Newspaper articles related to the topic were retrieved from six regional newspapers: Columbus Dispatch, Houston Chronicle, Charlotte Observer, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post. From these papers, a specific time period was chosen to examine articles. The months of April, June, and August 2012 were chosen. During these months, a keyword search for “osama bin laden” was used. Articles that contained this keyword were then examined and coded. Blogs and Facebook pages of the Republican and Democratic Party were examined. Two political blogs, Daily Kos and Red State, were chosen. From these blogs and Facebook pages, the same time period was chosen as for the newspapers. The keyword search was also the same, “osama bin laden”.

Document Type

Honors Thesis - Open Access

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

Copyright

Copyright by the authors.

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