The Battle of Framing on you Tube: Exploring How Citizen Journalists Covered The Dispersal of Muslim Brotherhood Sit-ins in Egypt.

Abstract

This study presents a quantitative analysis of citizen-generated content uploaded on You Tube to discover the presence, valence, and substance of dominant news frames employed in the coverage of Muslim Brotherhood sit-ins dispersal in Cairo. Results showed that a highly polarized political environment caused citizen journalists to replicate the ‘protest paradigm’ found in mainstream media emphasizing the negative aspects of the dispersal. Even though substantive frames were used most of the time, the amount of ambiguous frames cannot be ignored.