The purpose of this project was to interview eleven Hubert H. Humphrey Fellows at the Walter Cronkite School at Arizona State University through a podcast series titled “The Global Journalist Roundtable”. During a two month period, I interviewed the eleven Fellows and through a keyword analysis of the transcripts of each interview, I determined several themes which according to the Fellows were important aspects of global media. Those themes were education, innovation, social media as a disrupter to news verifiability, polarization, censorship, the importance of truthful news, and leadership. The reason for interviewing the Humphrey Fellows specifically was due to my sheer curiosity, respect, and admiration for them as professionals in the global media industry.

The Arab Spring revolutions of 2010-11 raised important questions about how social-movement actors use new communication technologies, such as social media, for communication and organizing during episodes of contentious politics. This dissertation examines how organizers of and participants in Tunisia’s Arab Spring revolution used communication technologies such as Facebook, blogs, news websites, email, television, radio, newspapers, telephones, and interpersonal communication. The dissertation approaches the topic through the communication paradigm of framing, which the author uses to tie together theories of social movements, neo-patrimonialism, and revolution. The author traveled to Tunisia and conducted 44 interviews with organizers and participants about their uses of communication media, the frames they constructed and deployed, their framing strategies, their organizing activities, and their experiences of the revolution. The most common frames were those of the regime’s corruption, economic issues, and the security forces’ brutality. Interviewees deployed a hybrid network of media to disseminate these frames; Facebook represented a single node in the network, though many interviewees used it more than any other node. To explain the framing process and the resonance of the frames deployed by revolutionaries, the dissertation creates the concept of the alternative narrative, which describes how revolutionaries used a hybrid network to successfully construct an alternative to the narrative constructed by the regime. The dissertation also creates the concept of authoritarian weakening, to explain how citizens can potentially weaken neo-patrimonial regimes under conditions concerning corruption, poverty, and the introduction of civil society and of new communication technologies.

The mass media genre known as true crime is dismissed often as a more sensational, less reliable iteration of traditional crime journalism. Consumer and editorial confusion exists because there is no overarching criteria determining what is, and what is not, true crime. To that extent, the complete history of true crime’s origins and its best practitioners and works cannot be known with any certainty, and its future forms cannot be anticipated. Scholarship is overdue on an effective criteria to determine when nonfiction murder narratives cease to be long-form crime reporting and become something else. Against the backdrop of this long-evolving, multi-faceted literary/documentary genre, the researcher in this exploratory, qualitative study seeks to (a) examine the historical tension between formal journalism and true crime; (b) reveal how traditional journalism both reviles and plunders true crime for its rhetorical treasures; and (c) explain how this has destabilized the meaning of the term “true crime” to the degree that a more substantive understanding needs to be established. Through a textual analysis of the forms and functions of representative artifacts, the researcher will suggest that a Theory of True Crime could be patterned after time-tested analytic codes created for fiction, but structured in a simple two-stage examination that would test for dominant characteristics of established true crime texts.