preview

Youtube As A Public Sphere Platform For The `` Last Week Tonight With John Oliver

Better Essays

YouTube as a Public Sphere Platform for the “Last Week Tonight With John Oliver” Audience. (Content Analysis of Discussion Generated by Political Satire Program on a Social Video Sharing Platform)

Content analysis is a precise quantitative approach to understand media through measurement. Bernard Berelson (1952) “a research technique for the objective, systematic and quantitative description of the manifest content of communication” (Beck n.d.)
Content analysis is used to study a broad range of ‘texts’ from transcripts of interviews and discussions in clinical and social research to the narrative and form of films, TV programs and the editorial and advertising content of newspapers and magazines.
Lasswell’s (Macnamara 2006) better known …show more content…

Then we decided to analyze all the 24 episodes of Last Week Tonight with John Oliver but we could not get to a question while deciding to analyze all the episodes as many of them were specific to US domestic issues and it won’t be relevant for a study, as what would the study achieve. So we decided to focus on topics which are relevant to a larger audience, like FIFA and Global Warming. These were topics of world relevance and not confined to US or UK. But the problem with Content Analysis is that you cannot analyze the color, tone, music, sarcasm, the tone of his arguments on the basis of what he says. So there was again a problem, and we were 2 days to go to our presentation now. Then we researched about it and thought of using the public discussion generated by the show in these specific episodes and that could be found on Youtube. But again all the rationale of why YouTube? How does the discussion matter? Why are we researching it? And so on...

The technical questions we had to deal with
- The research question, its scope.
- The universe of analysis, nature of sample.
- What were we actually looking for?
- Was the sample enough or was it too big
- Is what we were researching relevant to the academic structure, is there academic referencing to the questions we are analyzing.

Get Access