Researcher Haneen Bajis Ghosna, a student in the Master’s Program in Contemporary Public Relations, has defended her thesis titled: “Utilizing Palestinian Non-Profit Institutions for their Relations with Mass Media.”
This study aims to reveal the level of Palestinian non-profit institutions’ use of their media relations by studying the case of human rights institutions in the West Bank. This is to understand how human rights institutions employ their media relations, and to explore the most important strategies that govern the relationship of human rights institutions with the media, and the obstacles they face in communicating with media.
This study is descriptive analytical, as the researcher used the mixed method, both quantitative, represented by the questionnaire instrument that was distributed to 83 human rights institutions, and qualitative, represented by the interview instrument.
The study concluded that most Palestinian non-profit human rights institutions are keen to exploit their relations with the media and establish relationships with them. The study also revealed that only 34% of human rights institutions have a specialized media staff. The study also concluded that the nature of the relationship between Palestinian human rights institutions and the media was dominated by participation and facilitating the dissemination of its news and information by making information available to the media at a percentage of 49% of the institutions, and 38% of them were keen to involve the media in the various issues they deal with. On the other hand, there was weakness in the nature of media relations in terms of interaction with the media and focusing its structure on the interest in publishing and not as a strategy in building relationships. As such, 40% of human rights institutions are not keen to hold meetings with media officials, and 39% of them do not participate in the activities organized by the media.
One of the most prominent contributions of the study was that it provided a clear vision of the level of employment of human rights institutions of their media relations and clarified the nature of the strategies that govern the relationship between the two parties and the goals for which human rights institutions communicate with the media, in a way that benefits those working in this field in order to improve the level of employment of their media relations with the media.
The thesis was supervised by Dr. Abdullah Adawi. The committee of examiners included Dr. Ibrahim Hroub and Dr. Omar Abu Arqoub.