Comparing Coverage of Public Events Across Different Types of News Sources

比较不同类型新闻来源对公共事件的报道

基本信息

批准号：
2214160
负责人：
Pamela Oliver
金额：
$ 31.38万
依托单位：
University of Wisconsin-Madison
依托单位国家：
美国
项目类别：
Standard Grant
财政年份：
2022
资助国家：
美国
起止时间：
2022-07-01 至 2024-06-30
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2214160&HistoricalAwards=false
关键词：
Comparing Coverage Public Events Across

项目摘要

This study uses rigorous methods to compare mainstream newswires to local specialty newspapers in their coverage of related public events in the 1990s and 2000s, an under-studied period in US history. The project simultaneously develops a catalog of such events–what happened–and a catalog of news stories that shape the impressions a reader would form about what happened. This allows demonstration of how perceptions of controversies based in mainstream national media can differ from those based in more local targeted media sources. Democracy inherently involves conflicts between people with different issue preferences, and this conflict is sometimes expressed publicly. News media shape public perceptions of controversial issues and events, but news sources differ in which issues and events they emphasize and how they cover them. While most events are mentioned only once and receive sparse news coverage, a few events are discussed in dozens of articles and become central to public discussions. Understanding these media differences is an important part of understanding democratic deliberations in a diverse society. Data about the 1990s and 2000s helps provide historical context for understanding current debates. These high-quality data will also be useful to other social scientists, and the new research methods we have developed will improve research in this area.News sources for this project are: (1) Three newswire services archived in the Annotated English Gigaword file available from the Linguistic Data Consortium; and (2) local specialty newspapers archived in Proquest Ethnic Newswatch. The main study period is 1994-2010. This study provides novel and unique data that permit enhanced investigation of the mutual relationship of public events and news coverage. Methodologically, this project develops important innovations in studying social movement events (and public events more broadly) using news sources. The methods emphasize verifiability, error-correction, and the relationality of these events. Relational databases provide rigorous links between events and the articles describing them, which both permits event data to be verified and structures the data to be consistent with theories of the interplay of events and news coverage. Consistent with theory, relational data structures are used additionally to capture the structuring of protests into specific issue clusters and the structuring of some events as complex events with subevents. These data structures permit new lines of research. Comparison across source types permits investigation of the different narratives and collective memories they construct about this period. Special attention is paid to the small number of events that receive disproportionate coverage in news sources and thus dominate public discourses. This new high-quality public event data will inform historical studies of this under-studied period and be useful for secondary analyses by other scholars. The use of relational data structures will improve data collection protocols.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

这项研究使用严格的方法来比较主流新闻通讯社和当地专业报纸对 20 世纪 90 年代和 2000 年代相关公共事件的报道，这是美国历史上一个未被充分研究的时期。该项目同时开发了此类事件的目录（发生了什么）和塑造读者对所发生事件的印象的新闻报道目录，这可以证明主流国家媒体对争议的看法与更多地方目标媒体来源的争议有何不同。民主本质上涉及冲突。新闻媒体有时会公开表达对有争议的问题和事件的看法，但新闻来源在强调哪些问题和事件以及如何报道它们方面有所不同，而大多数事件只被提及一次。一些事件在数十篇文章中得到讨论，并得到稀疏的新闻报道，并成为公众讨论的核心。了解这些媒体差异是理解多元化社会中民主审议的重要组成部分。有关 20 世纪 90 年代和 2000 年代的数据有助于提供历史背景。了解当前这些高质量的数据对其他社会科学家也很有用，我们开发的新研究方法将改善这一领域的研究。该项目的新闻来源是：（1）注释英语 Gigaword 中存档的三个新闻专线服务。语言数据联盟提供的文件；以及 (2) Proquest Ethnic Newswatch 中存档的当地专业报纸主要研究期间为 1994 年至 2010 年。公共事件和新闻报道的相互关系在方法上，该项目在使用新闻来源研究社会运动事件（以及更广泛的公共事件）方面取得了重要的创新，强调这些事件的可验证性、纠错性和相关性。提供事件和描述事件的文章之间的严格联系，这既允许验证事件数据，又可以将数据结构化为与事件和新闻报道相互作用的理论相一致，此外还使用关系数据结构来捕获事件。将抗议结构化为特定的问题群，并将某些事件结构化为包含子事件的复杂事件。这些新的高质量公共事件数据将为这一未被充分研究的时期的历史研究提供信息，并有助于其他学者的二次分析。关系型的数据结构将改进数据收集协议。该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。