Degree
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Department
Manship School of Mass Communication
Document Type
Dissertation
Abstract
Vietnam’s press restructuring plan (to 2025) reshapes and consolidates the country’s media outlets through mergers and closures. This dissertation examines how this policy is narrated in mainstream media coverage and how journalists who experienced it firsthand perceive and interpret its consequences. The dissertation includes three interrelated studies, drawing from media capture theory, the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF), metajournalistic discourse theory, (re)centralized media control model, and policy reception frameworks.
Study 1 employs computational, quantitative, and qualitative content analysis of 1,608 news articles published between 2015 and 2024 to examine how Vietnamese mainstream media construct policy narratives around the press restructuring plan. Findings demonstrate that centralization and professionalization narratives dominate coverage throughout the decade, functioning as foundational policy paradigm assumptions. Character constructions shift significantly after 2019, with the state and the “revolutionary press” consolidated as heroes and beneficiaries, while hostile external forces and fraudulent media emerge as villains.
Study 2 draws on in-depth interviews with 17 Vietnamese journalists across platforms and career stages to examine how they perceive and experience the restructuring. Analysis of metajournalistic discourse reveals that journalists engage in strategic rhetorical legitimation of the policy while simultaneously negotiating deep professional insecurity, income loss, geographic displacement, and exclusion from policy design. Journalists' adaptive responses, including opportunistic reframing, upskilling, and career diversification, are shown to inadvertently facilitate (re)centralization rather than resist it.
Study 3 integrates both empirical strands to identify systematic matches and mismatches between policy narratives and journalists’ accounts. While both sources acknowledge structural inefficiency as a core problem and digital transformation as a necessary goal, substantive divergences emerge over press portrayal, policy agency, professional identity, and geographical consequences.
Together, the three studies contribute to scholarship on media capture, policy communication, and journalism studies in the Global South.
Date
3-22-2026
Recommended Citation
Diep, Pham Phuong Uyen, "Narrating Reform, Navigating Consolidation: Media Coverage and Journalists’ Experiences of Press Restructuring in Vietnam" (2026). LSU Doctoral Dissertations. 7063.
https://repository.lsu.edu/gradschool_dissertations/7063
Committee Chair
Ruth Moon
LSU Acknowledgement
1
LSU Accessibility Acknowledgment
1
Included in
Journalism Studies Commons, Mass Communication Commons, Public Affairs Commons, Public Policy Commons