Byline: Meital Balmas, Tamir Sheafer This study is the first comparative analysis of mediated political personalization in the international arena; its contribution to the research in the field is twofold: (a) through a longitudinal analysis, it shows that media coverage of foreign countries focuses increasingly on state leaders rather than on the countries per se; and (b) it accounts for variations in the level of mediated political personalization between pairs of countries: the greater the distance between a pair of countries, in terms of values, political interests, economic relations, and geographical distance, the more their news coverage of each other focuses on the foreign country's leader at the expense of other political aspects. Author Affiliation:

The goal of this article is to place the role that social media plays in collective action within a more general theoretical structure, using the events of the Arab Spring as a case study. The article presents two broad theoretical principles. The first is that one cannot understand the role of social media in collective action without first taking into account the political environment in which they operate. The second principle states that a significant increase in the use of the new media is much more likely to follow a significant amount of protest activity than to precede it. The study examines these two principles using political, media, and protest data from twenty Arab countries and the Palestinian Authority. The findings provide strong support for the validity of the claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study presents a new approach to analyzing structural changes in networks over time and explores how newspapers such as the 'New York Times' and 'Der Spiegel' have changed their representation of the world over a period of 50 years. Results reveal a constant gap between the most and least central countries over the years as well as a convergence trend in both newspapers, that is, a more equal centrality of European, Middle Eastern, and Asian nations in the news.

Antagonists’ images in the international news media can play a significant role in determining their level of political success in the international arena, which explains why so many political actors invest considerable resources in public diplomacy. The goal of the present study is to explain the level of success that various actors (countries and non-state actors) have in promoting their preferred frames about terror to the international news media. Four types of explanatory variables are proposed, divided into context and focal event factors. Context factors include the political values and policy proximity between the country attacked (the victimized country) and a country whose news media have been targeted for influence (the target country), as well as the target country’s experience in dealing with terror. Focal event factors refer to the nature of the trigger events that generate news coverage of terrorism. Apart from one exception (the policy proximity), all of the hypotheses