Graduation Term

2015

Degree Name

Master of Science (MS)

Department

Department of English: Writing

Committee Chair

Elise Verzosa-Hurley

Abstract

This thesis analyzes the American mass media's narrative on the Israel-Palestine conflict to understand the power of ideographs and their influence on specific publics. I focus on two popular ideographs in mass media reporting,and, in order to examine how these ideographs are utilized to construct a narrative for the media's publics, the political ideologies they represent, the agendas they further, and the consequences their narrow use has on developing counterpublics and emerging alternative narratives around the conflict. I focus my attention on the mass media's coverage of a sixteen day Israeli shelling in Gaza and how public consent is acquired by implementing ideographs as ideological representations. I employ McGee's (1980) discussion of the ideograph's historic and social dimensions to inform my analysis. Ultimately, I argue that the mass media's use of these ideographs results in a narrow construction of both the conflict and the Middle East for its corresponding publics, preventing the rhetoricity of counterpublics and discouraging public dissent.

Access Type

Thesis-Open Access

DOI

http://doi.org/10.30707/ETD2015.Fowler.S

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