Digital News Making and Sharing of Post-Pandemic Contested Political Elections

The surge in anti-government protests following the Covid-19 pandemic, particularly around contested elections, has brought questions of online visibility to the forefront. While prior research has examined news values in shared news texts, less is known about how news values influence sharing when protest narratives circulate in spaces combining traditional journalistic gatekeeping with social media amplification. This thesis investigates how news values are constructed and interpreted in digital protest coverage across diverse international contexts, and how they interact with audience sharing to make contested election outcomes visible on social media. The study addresses three questions: 1.How are news values discursively constructed and interpreted in digital protest coverage? 2.To what extent does the discursive construction of news values influence the shareability of protest news? 3.How are news values distributed between quoted speech and journalists' narratives in protest coverage? Using a mixed-methods approach combining Discursive News Values Analysis (DNVA), participatory research, and computational analysis, the research examines contested election coverage in the USA, Peru, Kenya, Benin, Iraq, and Chad since 2021, analysing both discursive construction of news values and audience sharing behaviours to examine how selection logics of media outlets and online audiences converge or diverge. The findings suggest that news sharing is likely driven not by single news values but by interactions between multiple news values, with patterns varying by platform and political context. While Negativity is frequently constructed, it appears in shared articles yet is rarely cited as a conscious sharing motivation, suggesting it functions as a gateway news value for Impact, the strongest driver of sharing. Similarly, Superlativeness appears disproportionately in shared articles despite low self-reported influence, potentially operating as another amplifying mechanism that may enhance perceived scale and urgency of human consequences. Traditional news values like Proximity and Timeliness adapt to digital contexts: geographical distance is bridged through cultural, geopolitical, and temporal dimensions, while temporal immediacy appears to influence shareability only in specific political contexts and varies by platform. Eliteness, although frequently constructed, appears to show minimal influence on sharing, potentially functioning as a byproduct rather than driver. Analysis of reported speech suggests that whose voices are quoted varies by context: some outlets amplify authorities (Eliteness) while others foreground protesters (Personalisation), reflecting editorial positioning shaped by political circumstances and information access. These results contribute to understanding media responsibility in protest visibility and inform editorial strategies in attention-driven digital markets. The thesis advances discourse analysis and media studies by demonstrating that newsworthiness and shareworthiness may be co-constructed through layered interactions between textual features, editorial strategies, platform affordances, and audience interpretive frameworks.