ATLANTA—Georgia State University Presidential Fellow Michael Jablonski to receive his PhD in Communications, having successfully defended his dissertation “Image Frames, Cascading Activation, and Formation of Foreign Policy: A Case Study of the 2012 Benghazi Attacks.”
Utilizing testimony from thirty-three Congressional hearings, depositions taken by Congressional investigative trash, recently declassified State Department and CIA documents, court records from trials of Benghazi attacks leaders, information obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests, and a content analysis of the four top circulated newspapers in the United States, Jablonski’s work questions Robert Entman’s Cascade Model of Information Flow in foreign policy contexts. Jablonski finds that the text-based assumptions of Entman’s model were not applicable in the one-year aftermath of the Benghazi attacks and he theorizes a new approach. The dissertation is particularly interesting in its thorough examination of the events of the attack that led to the death of Ambassador Stevens and the response by various actors to that incident.
Jablonski is an attorney and author of the book The Real Cyber War: The Political Economy of Internet Freedom with Dr. Shawn Powers. The book won the ISA International Communication (ICOMM) Best Book Award in 2017.