| Abstract: |
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| American’s election and international press
My graduation work is based upon the study of the topics of the 2008 USA electoral campaign for the White House as they have been observed by the international press. It has been developed in different phases. First, the selection of press material: in October 2008 I have been making press-reviews on a weekly basis on a selection of European (Frenaci, British, Spanish, Italian), Arabian and Chinese daily papers.
After an intermediate, more technical phase of translation of the materials, work went on to a following phase in which I established connections between a main topic and each article. This work allowed me to point on the so-called “hot topics”, so widely treated by nearly all of the daily papers which have shaped a great part of the international public opinion. The work resulted in the individuation of eighteen “conceptual areas”. Each of them is different by size and contains “sub-topics”, basically referred to the “key-points” of both the GOP and the Democrats’ campaign.
In order to make this work even more attractive and to underline the distinctive features of each press review, I developed each topics in chapter one describing it’s main aspect; in chapter two I probed into the press-review of each Country by deeper analysis of the contents of each piece, adding my own point of view about what was emerging from the research.
The second part of my work was based upon a paper-reviewing made with the identical method but with a different purpose. During the first week of the campaign, terminated on November 4th 2008, I surveyed my selection of the international daily papers to taste the public opinion’s general climate about the election of Barack Obama as president of the United States. It emerges a widespread enthusiasm, which leaves no room for a closer deeper analysis of the new Administration.
In the third chapter I examined closely the press reviews of each country, trying to focus the most peculiar and less “enthusiasm-based” among the ones which have monopolized the international press throughout the whole week. This work has been propedeutic to the fourth chapter. There I showed how the whole spread enthusiasm and the public opinion’s support as weel may turn into a “double-cut weapon” because of its high expectation which may easily reveal themselves deceiving.
The example I used as a proof to this theory concerns the riots occurred during the last Presidential election in Iran, where the police injured and even killed some political opponents which accused the government of corruption at election.
Barack Obama’s diplomatic attitude showed here its first “crack in the wall”; by avoiding to condemn the repression and virtually saying nothing. The public opinion strongly criticized this behavior. In chapter four I probe into this critical aspect, confronting it with the main features of the on line press and with the consequences of mediatic exposure in politics.
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