York Times Research Articles

Middletown Lives through Middle-Class Eyes: Hillbilly Elegy and the Problem with the “Liberal Media”

J.D. Vance does not become Senator Vance without the success of Hillbilly Elegy, his best-selling memoir (and later, film) about growing up in, and getting out of, rural Appalachia. Initially praised by media critics for its ability to challenge middle-class assumptions about the “white working class,” the book assuaged both liberal anxiety and conservative outrage by providing demographically appropriate explanations for the election of Donald Trump. However, the book, feature film and subsequent political campaign are also part of a much larger, lucrative culture industry built upon the commodification and fetishization of the white working class, one driven by middle-class tastes and prejudices. This was most apparent in the promotion of the book and film by the so-called liberal media establishment, represented by the New York Times, The New Yorker, Netflix, Imagine Entertainment, HarperCollins, and Harpo Productions, to name a few. However, the reinforcement of the false binary between liberal and conservative media obscured how the corporate media system helped elect a candidate who will work most certainly against the interests of actual working people, further alienating them from each other and a shared labor platform more generally. Examining Hillbilly Elegy through the five filters of the Propaganda Model will help to explain the ideological and material effects of the corporate media’s agenda upon the growing class divide.

Metadata at The New York Times : organizing and leveraging news content from 1851 to today

The New York Times has been a leader in metadata since the birth of The New York Times Index in 1913. Today, a team of taxonomists uses natural-language processing and a human-in-the-loop model to organize, analyze, and push content to readers. Looking to the future, the taxonomy team hopes to free up resources with the help of new technologies so that the metadata practices already in place can be expanded to other areas beyond core news content.

Pragmatic Analysis of News Reports on Coronavirus from Selected National and International Newspapers

The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic led to various scholarly studies both from scientific and linguistic repertoires. This study is a pragmatic analysis of news reports on Coronavirus from selected national and international newspapers from the point of view of Austin (1962) and Searle’s (1969) Speech Act Theory. A total of 40 utterances were purposively sampled from the four newspapers (Vanguard, Daily Sun, The New York Times and The Guardian). Qualitative research design was used for the data analysis. The qualitative analysis discussed the aspects of the Speech Act Theory: locutionary, illocutionary and perlocutionary. From the analysis, it is obvious that the newspaper media used more of assertives, as they majorly report, inform and assert the state of affairs in their reports on covid-19.

How Does It Look from Where You Are? A Visual Media Framing Analysis of the 2022 War in Ukraine

In this study, the authors analyzed how U.S., UK, Russian, and Ukrainian media visually framed the 2022 Russian war in Ukraine. Prior research emphasized the importance of studying media framing of conflict issues due to the potential impact on public perception and apportioning of responsibility of the parties involved. In particular, media images have been shown to be critical elements in the media framing process, but have been studied less often than textual content. A content analysis was conducted on a sample of news articles published during the first year of the war from The Guardian, The New York Times, Lenta.ru, and Ukrainska Pravda focused on denotative and connotative visual framing frameworks. Four major frames were identified: geographic location, dominant subjects/objects, patriotism, and human suffering. Quantitative analysis suggests significant differences in the visual frames adopted by Western media, Russian, and Ukrainian media. The implications of these findings are discussed.

Promises and Perils of Automated Journalism: Algorithms, Experimentation, and “Teachers of Machines” in China and the United States

ABSTRACT Automated tools for parsing and communicating information have increasingly become associated with the production of journalistic content. To study this phenomenon and to explore the development of automated journalism across two locales at the cutting edge of technology, we leverage insights from in-depth interviews with news technologists from pioneering news organizations and Internet companies specialized in the construction of “news bot” technology in the United States and China, including The Associated Press, The New York Times, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, BuzzFeed, Quartz, Xinhua Zhiyun, Southern Metropolis Daily, Toutiao, and Tencent. Based on these interviews, we document how the creation of automated journalism products is heavily dependent on the successful assembly of actor networks inside and outside organizations. While metrics for measuring the success of automated journalism are applied differently, they often center around the augmentation of existing reportorial activities and focus on replacing rote and mundane (human) work processes. Some of the biggest challenges in automated journalism lie in curating high-quality datasets and managing the associated high stakes of errors in a business defined by trust. Lastly, automated journalism can be seen as a form of experimentation, helping its protagonists to future-proof their respective organizations.

In search of a non-anthropocentric middle-range theory of the firm: On how the Patagonia Purpose Trust granted a controlling stake to nature

Patagonia, an outdoor clothing company thrust into the limelight by a New York Times full-page ad that in 2001 invited customers not to buy its own gear, has recently responded to the inherently low capacity of firms to supply ecosystem services. Since the firm is a generic term encompassing many different bundles of property rights, the specific mechanism of the Patagonia Purpose Trust is researched to find whether it has plausibly locked the company in on preserving ecosystems through its environmentally driven community investment, product re-design, and supply chain overhaul. A mechanism-based methodology is employed, organizing the units of observation in keeping with a formal ontology and benchmarking Patagonia's mechanism against the generic templates of a corporation and a charitable Trust to highlight what is distinct about Patagonia. The findings are that, in a nutshell, Patagonia's mechanism consists of: 1) increasing the opportunity cost of not redressing a breach of purpose by designating an ascertained beneficiary with an unequivocal interest in Nature's preservation; 2) offsetting fiduciaries' influence on asset management with a countervailing mechanism; and 3) designing a procedure centered on the renewal of credible co-trustees to keep checking on fiduciaries in the long run.

Selling hope versus hate: the impact of partisan social media messaging on social distancing during the COVID-19 pandemic

PurposeThis study aims to examine the role of hope and hate in political leaders’ messages in influencing liberals versus conservatives’ social-distancing behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the increasing political partisanship across the world today, using the appropriate message framing has important implications for social and public policy.Design/methodology/approachThe authors use two Natural Language Processing (NLP) methods – a pretrained package (HateSonar) and a classifier built to implement our supervised neural network-based model architecture using RoBERTa – to analyze 61,466 tweets by each US state’s governor and two senators with the goal of examining the association between message factors invoking hate and hope and increased or decreased social distancing from March to May 2020. The authors examine individuals’ social-distancing behaviors (the amount of nonessential driving undertaken) using data from 3,047 US counties between March 13 and May 31, 2020, as reported by Google COVID-19 Community Mobility Reports and the New York Times repository of COVID-19 data.FindingsThe results show that for conservative state leaders, the use of hate increases nonessential driving of state residents. However, when these leaders use hope in their speech, nonessential driving of state residents decreases. For liberal state leaders, the use of hate displays a directionally different result as compared to their conservative counterparts.Research limitations/implicationsAmid the emergence of new analytic techniques and novel data sources, the findings demonstrate that the use of global positioning systems data and social media analysis can provide valuable and precise insights into individual behavior. They also contribute to the literature on political ideology and emotion by demonstrating the use of specific emotion appeals in targeting specific consumer segments based on their political ideology.Practical implicationsThe findings have significant implications for policymakers and public health officials regarding the importance of considering partisanship when developing and implementing public health policies. As partisanship continues to increase, applying the appropriate emotion appeal in messages will become increasingly crucial. The findings can help marketers and policymakers develop more effective social marketing campaigns by tailoring specific appeals given the political identity of the consumer.Originality/valueUsing Neural NLP methods, this study identifies the specific factors linking social media messaging from political leaders and increased compliance with health directives in a partisan population.

Social Actors and the Language of Othering: A Corpus-Assisted Analysis of the Representation of Covid-19 in Selected Western and Asian English Newspapers

As of May 2021, the Covid-19 pandemic has caused approximately 3.5 million deaths and 168 million confirmed cases worldwide. Unfortunately, this crisis has not only resulted in a devastating loss of human life but has also given rise to racism, national insecurity, and general xenophobia. This phenomenon can be understood through the concept of ”othering,” which refers to the exclusion of individuals or entire groups based on their ascribed or enacted identities. This study aims to investigate how social actors are constructed by selected Western and Asian English newspapers in relation to Covid-19. Specifically, it seeks to examine whether language of othering is used by different English users (West vs. Asia, inner circle vs. outer circle) in representing the 2020’s deadliest pandemic. To achieve this, the researcher has custom-collected six different newspapers: New Straits Times (Malaysia), The Straits Times (Singapore), Philippines Daily Inquirer (Philippines), The New York Times (US), The Guardian (UK), and The Australian (Australia). A simple corpus query language is used to analyze common nouns in the corpus, focusing on proper nouns and possessive nouns, which will be ranked by frequency. The semantic preference of the most frequent nomination strategy for social actors will be further explored through tagging and categorization of collocates. This study aims to reveal if any social actors were dehumanized or discriminated against through the language used in relation to Covid-19 across the selected Western and Asian newspapers.
 Keywords: Covid-19, othering, newspapers, social actors, corpus

METAPHOR OF WAR IN AMERICAN AND RUSSIAN MEDIA DISCOURSE: A CASE STUDY OF THE 2022 RUSSIAN INVASION OF UKRAINE

The aim of this article is to analyse the use of war metaphors in the articles published on February 24, 2022, by the "New York Times" and the "Moscow Times" thematising Russian aggression against Ukraine. Building on Lakoff and Johnson's theory of conceptual metaphor, we observe how war and its various aspects are conceptualised metaphorically in the media discourse. The analysis confirms opposing ideological viewpoints on the Russian-Ukrainian war presented in the two online newspapers that shape public opinion and influence global narratives.

A Comparative Investigation on the Metaphors in Chinese and American Mainstream Media

Since COVID-19 outbreak in December 2019, there is a “narrative battle” between China and the US. Through rhetorical devices, such as metaphors, mainstream media plays a significant role in society in shaping public opinions. Although scholars have started to explore the metaphors employed between Chinese and American media during the pandemic, there is less information about a systematic comparative study on the COVID-19 related metaphors in Chinese and American media. This study provides a comparison of the metaphors in the COVID-19 editorials in the China Daily (CD) and the New York Times (NYT) through grounded theory. In general, it determines CD employs more metaphors than that in the NYT. In addition, the employment of war metaphor in NYT to describe the coronavirus is way more less than that in CD. Also, both CD and NYT tries to envoke the public through the employment of impressive historical issues.

Conversational Strategies Used by Kim Kardashian and Kris Jenner at The New York Times DealBook Conference

This study analyzed the conversational strategies of Kim Kardashian and Kris Jenner at The New York Times conference, focusing on their business-related discussions and exploring similarities and differences based on age and status. Following Coates' (2013) theory, seven strategy aspects were examined: minimal responses, hedges, tag questions, questions, commands and directives, swearing and taboo languages, and compliments. Using a descriptive qualitative approach, the study identified the strategies employed by each speaker. Kim Kardashian used five strategies, while Kris Jenner used six. Overall, the findings indicated more similarity than difference in their conversational strategies, suggesting there are influences from context, status, and age.

The Transitive Construction of China’s National Image in the Editorials of The New York Times

The construction of a country’s national image depends not only on its promotion and construction in media but also on other countries’ reports on and comments about it, especially when they are in conflicting states. Taking the transitivity system theory within systemic functional linguistics as its theoretical basis, this study employed a qualitative method to investigate the construction of China’s national image in the editorials about the Sino-US trade dispute in The New York Times. This study first calculated the frequency of each process; then, it analyzed the distribution and function of each process regarding its role in the construction of China’s national image. The findings showed that, at 75.85%, the material process comprised the largest proportion, depicting the actions China has taken or the things that have been done to China. The verbal process ranked second, through which editorials aimed to persuade the readers and ensure authority. The percentages of mental and relational processes were similar. Moreover, an analysis of the relational process showed the attributes and values added to China. The images constructed by the editorials in The New York Times were mixed and conflicting. China was simultaneously constructed as the victim of the trade dispute and also as a country of over-production capacity, a voracious consumer of world raw materials, and a competitor with unfair techniques. Furthermore, China’s damages to the United States were highlighted and emphasized.

Linguistic means of forming the image of the head of a foreign state in the American media (based on the material of The New York Times)

This article is devoted to the study of linguistic means of forming the image of the former president of the Federative Republic of Brazil – Jair Bolsonaro. The purpose of this study is to study the linguistic means of forming the image of the head of a foreign state, who receives representation on the pages of The New York Times. The subject of the study is the lexical and semantic field (LSF) of Personal Names as a model of representation of knowledge about the leader of a foreign state, as well as the contexts of the linguistic implementation of the core of the studied LSF. The main objectives of the study included the study of the structure and composition of the lexico-semantic field of Personal Names, as well as concordance analysis of the contexts of the linguistic implementation of the Personal Names LSF core. The research material is presented by The New York Times newspaper's 2019 issues of articles about Brazil. Using the method of corpus analysis of the texts of articles using the Wmatrix computer program made it possible to identify the lexical and semantic field of Personal Names in the structure of the cognitive matrix Brazil. Concordance analysis of the contexts of the linguistic implementation of the Bolsonaro lexical unit allowed us to identify 3 leading typical arguments that are formed by the newspaper around the name of the politician. The novelty of the study lies in the choice of the material and the subject of the study: the image of President Jair Bolsonaro in the American media has not been studied by linguists to date. The results of the study showed that the image of a politician is formed, among other things, by building contextual connections between the core of the lexico-semantic field under study and the units that make up the structure of this field, while the majority of lexical units relate to figures of political figures in Brazil and foreign countries who do not support the policy of J. Bolsonaro. The nature of the typical arguments identified by examining the concordance of the core of the studied LSF allows us to confirm that the image of this politician, formed by The New York Times newspaper, tends to be negatively biased. Readers are being shown the image of Jair Bolsonaro as a politician advocating the disappearance of the Amazon forests, being an ultra-right populist and not supporting the rights of the indigenous peoples of Brazil.

Digital Archives: How Western Newspapers Frame Our Remembrance of the Gezi Park Protest

Abstract We analyze the coverage of the Gezi Park protests by two major Western newspapers—The New York Times and The Guardian—through the lens of media framing, rhetoric, and collective memory. We argue that these digital archives frame Turkey’s Gezi Park protests as a challenge to an authoritarian government by promoting the themes of unrest as a conflict of ideologies, oppression of citizens, and the park as a site of memory. In a concluding section, we focus on the significance of digital archives as repositories of collective memory and the role of media framing in shaping these reconstructions of events in the past.

Emerging Writer's Contest Winner: Nonfiction

Abstract: The Winter 2023-24 Issue. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Since 1971, Ploughshares has discovered and cultivated the freshest voices in contemporary American literature, and now provides readers with thoughtful and entertaining literature in a variety of formats. Find out why the New York Times named Ploughshares "the Triton among minnows." The Winter 2023-24 Issue, edited by Ladette Randolph, features poetry and prose by Richard Bausch, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Ian Stansel, Ariana Benson, Rebecca Morgan Frank, Marie Howe, and more.

Minerva

Abstract: The Winter 2023-24 Issue. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Since 1971, Ploughshares has discovered and cultivated the freshest voices in contemporary American literature, and now provides readers with thoughtful and entertaining literature in a variety of formats. Find out why the New York Times named Ploughshares "the Triton among minnows." The Winter 2023-24 Issue, edited by Ladette Randolph, features poetry and prose by Richard Bausch, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Ian Stansel, Ariana Benson, Rebecca Morgan Frank, Marie Howe, and more.

Is Copyright Law the New Turing Test?

In December 2023, the New York Times Company filed a lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft for the "defendants' unlawful use of The Time's work to create artificial intelligence products..." [8]. While this lawsuit alone should interest the Computers and Society community, it struck me that its eventual judgment might serve as an interesting exhibit as to whether computers are creative in their intelligent thinking? 1 This Parting Opinion focuses on this question. As usual, I'll present some background context to set the stage , before diving into the primary question at hand. As a bit of nostalgia, let's begin with the early days of Artificial Intelligence (AI) and quickly move to the present.

Earth Day

Abstract: The Winter 2023-24 Issue. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Since 1971, Ploughshares has discovered and cultivated the freshest voices in contemporary American literature, and now provides readers with thoughtful and entertaining literature in a variety of formats. Find out why the New York Times named Ploughshares "the Triton among minnows." The Winter 2023-24 Issue, edited by Ladette Randolph, features poetry and prose by Richard Bausch, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Ian Stansel, Ariana Benson, Rebecca Morgan Frank, Marie Howe, and more.

Customer Appreciation Day

Abstract: The Winter 2023-24 Issue. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Since 1971, Ploughshares has discovered and cultivated the freshest voices in contemporary American literature, and now provides readers with thoughtful and entertaining literature in a variety of formats. Find out why the New York Times named Ploughshares "the Triton among minnows." The Winter 2023-24 Issue, edited by Ladette Randolph, features poetry and prose by Richard Bausch, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Ian Stansel, Ariana Benson, Rebecca Morgan Frank, Marie Howe, and more.

Oddballs & Relationships: Character sketches + stories

Abstract: The Winter 2023-24 Issue. Ploughshares is an award-winning journal of new writing. Since 1971, Ploughshares has discovered and cultivated the freshest voices in contemporary American literature, and now provides readers with thoughtful and entertaining literature in a variety of formats. Find out why the New York Times named Ploughshares "the Triton among minnows." The Winter 2023-24 Issue, edited by Ladette Randolph, features poetry and prose by Richard Bausch, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Ian Stansel, Ariana Benson, Rebecca Morgan Frank, Marie Howe, and more.