| Summary: | Drawing on social movement literature, my thesis examines if news media, NGO,
business and government engagement of the BP Oil Spill in the Gulf of Mexico is
affected by issue or event complexity, visuality, or issue build-up. To engage this, data
from English language newspaper articles in the US, Canada, and the UK, press releases
by Greenpeace and Sierra Club, press releases by BP, ExxonMobil, and Shell as well as
press releases by the White House are analyzed using both quantitative and qualitative
methods. I find that as an issue or event’s casual narrative becomes less complicated and
as it becomes easier to portray visually its engagement by social and political actors
increases. I also find that issue engagement is influenced by whether or not social and
political actors signal an issue or an event’s importance to others.
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