Trends In News Coverage Research Articles

A crisis without a context? The framing of economic inequality through the pandemic

This article analyses how economic inequality was framed by UK news media during the pandemic and, drawing from framing theory, considers the implications of the coverage for news audiences. To do so, it uses a data set of 167 articles from the following UK news publications: The Guardian, The Telegraph, the Financial Times and The Sun. There are differences between the publications in terms of salience, tone and there is a wide range of causes and solutions attributed to inequality with no consensus emerging. The coverage is framed mainly by state sources, and there is very little discussion of the finance sector and corporations as causes and solutions to tackle inequality. There are some positive trends emerging, as sustainable finance, climate change and gender equality are highlighted alongside some alternative solutions, indicating a move away from historical trends in news coverage that demonize poverty and focus simply on the individual.

Bringing Shape to Textual Data – A Feasible Demonstration

The Internet has revolutionized the communication paradigm. This has led towards immense amount of unstructured data (i.e. textual data), which is a major source to get useful knowledge about people in several application domains. TM (Text Mining) extracts high quality information to discover knowledge by drawing patterns and relationships in textual data. This field has taken great attention of the research community. As a result, several attempts have been made to propose, introduce and refine techniques applied for uncovering knowledge from text data. This study aims at: (1) presenting existing TM techniques in the scientific literature, (2) reporting challenges/issues and gaps that still need attention, and (3) proposing a framework to bring shape to textual data. A prototype has been developed to demonstrate the effectiveness and potential worth of proposed approach to display how unstructured data (i.e. news articles in this study) has been brought to a shape representing interesting knowledge. The proposed framework implements basic NLP (Natural Language Processing) functions in combination of AYLIEN API (Application Programming Interface) functions. The results reveal the fact that how events, celebrities and popular news-items have been covered in the electronic media, and it also represents subjectivity of topical news events. The news coverage trends highlight the significance of daily news events, which may assist in getting insight about the media groups.

A war of words: the British Gazette and British Worker during the 1926 General Strike

ABSTRACTThe researcher used an archive of British newspapers during the 1926 General Strike. The transcripts included: the government’s British Gazette; British Worker, a trade union newspaper; and other newspapers during the conflict. The British Worker stuck to communicating strike-related information, but lost the battle for terminology control to the British Gazette and the majority of the general circulation press. Those papers stressed terms associated with disruptive effects and overall threat to the country. The findings follow past trends in news coverage of strikes, and add supporting examples to game theory, social movement theory, indexing, and political economy of communication.

Trending Twitter topics in English: An international comparison

The worldwide span of the microblogging service Twitter provides an opportunity to make international comparisons of trending topics of interest, such as news stories. Previous international comparisons of news interests have tended to use surveys and may bypass topics not well covered in the mainstream media. This study uses 9 months of English‐language Tweets from the United Kingdom, United States, India, South Africa, New Zealand, and Australia. Based upon the top 50 trending keywords in each country from the 0.5 billion Tweets collected, festivals or religious events are the most common, followed by media events, politics, human interest, and sports. U.S. trending topics have the most interest in the other countries and Indian trending topics the least. Conversely, India is the most interested in other countries’ trending topics and the United States the least. This gives evidence of an international hierarchy of perceived importance or relevance with some issues, such as the international interest in U.S. Thanksgiving celebrations, apparently not being directly driven by the media. This hierarchy echoes, and may be caused by, similar news coverage trends. Although the current imbalanced international news coverage does not seem to be out of step with public news interests, the political implication is that the Twitter‐using public reflects, and hence seems to implicitly accept, international imbalances in news media agenda setting rather than combating them. This is an issue for those believing that these imbalances make the media too powerful.

Making Sense of Cancer News Coverage Trends: A Comparison of Three Comprehensive Content Analyses

Cancer stories (N = 5,327) in the top 50 U.S. newspapers were analyzed by a team of four coders and the results were compared with the earliest analyses of this type (from 1977 and 1980). Using cancer incidence rates as a comparison, three cancers were found to be consistently underreported (male reproductive, lymphatic/Hodgkin's, and thyroid) and four cancers were found to be consistently overreported (breast, blood/Leukemia, pancreatic, and bone/muscle). In addition, cancer news coverage consistently has focused on treatment rather than on other aspects of the cancer continuum (e.g., prevention), portrayed lifestyle choices (e.g., diet, smoking) as the most common cancer risk factor, and rarely reported incidence or mortality data. Finally, the data were compatible with the idea that personalization bias (e.g., celebrity profiles, event coverage) may explain some news coverage distortions.

Trends in news coverage about skin cancer prevention, 1993‐2006: increasingly mixed messages for the public

To provide a comprehensive overview of trends in news coverage about sun protection issues in an Australian setting over a 14-year period. A content analysis was performed on all relevant articles (N=547) published in two major daily newspapers, The Age and the Herald Sun, from 1993 to 2006. Articles were coded for article type, prominence, theme, spokesperson, topic slant and opinion slant. The most frequent themes were the health effects of ultraviolet (UV) radiation exposure (24% of articles), education/prevention (14%) and product issues (12%). Themes that became more dominant over time were vitamin D issues, solaria issues and fake tans. Sixty per cent of articles included a pro-sun protection spokesperson and 12% an anti-sun protection spokesperson, with the profile of anti-sun protection spokespeople increasing over time. Half the articles reported on topics positive for sun protection, whereas 18% reported on negative topics; however, this difference narrowed considerably from 2001 onwards. In opinionated articles, the opinions expressed by authors were mainly positive (57%) rather than negative (7%) for sun protection. The findings suggest that the mix of sun protection issues covered and views of sun protection have changed over time, resulting in greater coverage of controversies and issues not necessarily positive for sun protection objectives. These findings imply that evaluation of paid skin cancer prevention public education campaigns may need to take account of the changing news media environment in which they take place.

Risk Perception and News Coverage Across Nations

Studies reported here explicate “quantity of coverage theory” (QCT), which explains how The New York Times and other US mass media are influential but not all powerful in setting the world's environmental risk agenda. Beginning in 1987, the Times and its news sources brought an array of global environmental problems – ozone depletion, greenhouse warming, rain forest destruction, and biodiversity – to American attention, and these concerns quickly spread to other nations. However, by 1991 journalists were turning to other news, and the “endangered earth” lost their importance as a public problem. News media of each nation pay most attention to their own problems. Beyond that natural consideration, it appears from a variety of data that foreign journalists attend more to risks regarded important in the US, than American journalists attend to risks regarded important elsewhere. This is well illustrated by the deep concern of Europeans and the European press about genetically modified food, an issue to which the US press and public remain largely indifferent. Sixteen nations, all participants in the International Social Survey Programme, measured risk perceptions in surveys given in 1993 and repeated in 2000. Between these years, changes in risk perception varied considerably from one nation to another. Filipinos, especially, but also the Spanish, Israelis, Russians, and Japanese considerably increased their ratings of danger for nearly all hazards. Conversely, Germans, Bulgarians, and the Irish saw the same hazards as less dangerous in 2000 than they did in 1993. Were changing risk perceptions the result of changes in media coverage within each nation? For ten of the 16 nations, trends in news coverage of “environment” could be obtained from computer databases. Except Ireland, the nations with rising news coverage were those with increasing perceptions of environmental danger, while nations with falling news coverage showed decreasing perceptions of environmental danger. These results support QCT. The implication of QCT for risk managers is inescapably simple: public concern about an alleged hazard waxes with increasing news coverage and wanes with diminishing coverage. The specific content of the news is not particularly relevant as long as it suggests the possibility of danger or simply of uncertainty.

Death Makes News: The Social Impact of Disease on Newspaper Coverage

This paper is an integrated analysis of newspaper coverage, epidemiological rates, and recent social history of six prominent diseases. Newspaper coverage of a disease has three developmental stages (emergence, maturation, and decline & death). Trends in newspaper coverage of a disease reflect trends in its mortality, prevalence, and incidence. Magnitudes of newspaper coverage of diseases reflect their differential mortality rates. Using the LEXIS-NEXIS news archive for major U.S. newspapers, we retrieve articles about cancer, heart disease, AIDS, diabetes, Alzheimer disease, and arthritis for the period 1977-1997. We also obtain mortality, prevalence, and incidence trends for the six diseases. During the two decades, newspaper coverage emerges for AIDS and Alzheimer disease and is in the mature stage for the other diseases; declines begin for heart disease and AIDS. Trends in news coverage closely parallel mortality trends, and less consistently prevalence and incidence trends. Sharp downturns and upturns in mortality are mirrored in news volume. High-mortality diseases prompt both the most news coverage and the largest proportions of articles with death topics. Newspaper coverage of diseases is responsive to their mortality levels and trends.

Humanitarian crises and U.S. foreign policy: Somalia and the CNN effect reconsidered

This article explores the relationship between foreign policy making and news media coverage. Specifically, we examine the CNN effect, understood here as elite decision makers’ loss of policy control to news media. The initial decisions concerning U.S. intervention in Somalia are examined and related to the nature and extent of media coverage devoted to the humanitarian crisis there. We find that in the case of Somalia, news coverage trends do not support the claim that news attention to Somalia led to the Bush administration's decision to intervene. On the basis of content analysis and interviews of officials in Washington and Africa, we argue that the decision to intervene was the result of diplomatic and bureaucratic operations, with news coverage coming in response to those decisions.

Public diplomacy and international politics: the symbolic constructs of summits and international radio news

Introduction International Broadcasting as Public Diplomacy Symbolic Constructs in International Broadcasting The 1987 Washington Superpower Summit The 1988 Moscow Superpower Summit The 1989 Summits The 1990 Washington Superpower Summit Conclusions: Trends in News Coverage and Propaganda, 1987-1990 Symbolic Constructs and Historical Circumstances: Effects on the Global Information Order Appendix 1: Treatment Coefficients for NSC Themes Appendix 2: Treatment Coefficients for Summit Principals and Their Countries Appendix 3: Percentage of Stories Devoted to Selected Summit Issues, by Summit and Service Appendix 4: Rank Order of Principal Superpower Summit Issues, References Index