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In recent decades, disruptive media events, such as major terrorist attacks, have gained increasing relevance in news coverage around the world. Despite the growing importance of such globally broadcast media events, little research to date has examined cross-national variation in event coverage or the predictors of this variation. This study examines news coverage about the 9/11 terror attacks in the United States across 51 countries to analyze whether the topical focus and emotional tone of news coverage about the attacks varied according to a country's proximity to the United States and the dominant role perceptions of its journalistic culture. We show that these macro-level predictors are associated in varying degrees with the country-level topical focus and emotional tone of reporting over the 30 days following this salient event. Moreover, our analysis also suggests that temporal developments may have uniformly structured much of this worldwide coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Understanding how useful any particular set of event data might be for conflict research requires appropriate methods for assessing validity when ground truth data about the population of interest do not exist. We argue that a total error framework can provide better leverage on these critical questions than previous methods have been able to deliver. We first define a total event data error approach for identifying 19 types of error that can affect the validity of event data. We then address the challenge of applying a total error framework when authoritative ground truth about the actual distribution of relevant events is lacking. We argue that carefully constructed gold standard datasets can effectively benchmark validity problems even in the absence of ground truth data about event populations. To illustrate the limitations of conventional strategies for validating event data, we present a case study of Boko Haram activity in Nigeria over a 3-month offensive in 2015 that compares events generated by six prominent event extraction pipelines—ACLED, SCAD, ICEWS, GDELT, PETRARCH, and the Cline Center's SPEED project. We conclude that conventional ways of assessing validity in event data using only published datasets offer little insight into potential sources of error or bias. Finally, we illustrate the benefits of validating event data using a total error approach by showing how the gold standard approach used to validate SPEED data offers a clear and robust method for detecting and evaluating the severity of temporal errors in event data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Open science and effective collaboration both require the sharing of data between researchers. This is especially true for computational methods, as the technical complexity and heterogeneous data sources often require collaboration between researchers in different institutions and jurisdictions. Many data sources, however, cannot be shared openly because of copyright law and contracts such as terms of service. These regulations can be complex, sometimes untested in case law, and vary between countries and over time. This paper details our experiences in conducting international comparative research on very large collections of news items from multiple countries. We set out the main problems we have encountered and some short- term approaches we have used to mitigate some of these problems. We end with listing some additional long-term actions that will advance our research community's ability to collaborate on computational research using sensitive data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although largely forgotten, the newsreel industry was the first news broadcasting system to convey visual news reports to a worldwide audience. This study presents the first systematic, cross-national comparison of the news content delivered through this broadcasting system. Our analysis confirms that similar news content was internationally distributed and editorially “glocalized” to fit local audience tastes. Contrary to their reputation for being light and frivolous, newsreels during World War II were usually descriptive and straightforward. We conclude that the global newsreel system should be seen as a rudimentary precursor to today’s satellite news channels. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

“Big data” in the form of unstructured text pose challenges and opportunities to social scientists committed to advancing research frontiers. Because machine-based and human-centric approaches to content analysis have different strengths for extracting information from unstructured text, the authors argue for a collaborative, hybrid approach that combines their comparative advantages. The notion of a progressive supervised-learning approach that combines data science techniques and human coders is developed and illustrated using the Social, Political and Economic Event Database (SPEED) project’s Societal Stability Protocol. SPEED’s rich event data on civil strife reveal that conventional machine-based approaches for generating event data miss a great deal of within-category variance, while conventional human-based efforts to categorize periods of civil war or political instability routinely misspecify periods of calm and unrest. To demonstrate the potential of hybrid data collection methods, SPEED data on event intensities and origins are used to trace the changing role of political, socioeconomic, and sociocultural factors in generating global civil strife in the post–World War II era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Domestic political support is an important factor constraining the use of American military power around the world. Although the dynamics of war support are thought to reflect a cost-benefit calculus, with costs represented by numbers of friendly war deaths, no previous study has examined how information about friendly, enemy, and civilian casualties is routinely presented to domestic audiences. This article establishes a baseline measure of historical casualty reporting by examining New York Times coverage of five major wars that occurred over the past century. Despite important between-war differences in the scale of casualties, the use of conscription, the type of warfare, and the use of censorship, the frequency of casualty reporting and the framing of casualty reports have remained fairly consistent over the past 100 years. Casualties are rarely mentioned in American war coverage. When casualties are reported, it is often in ways that minimize or downplay the human costs of war. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The “proximate casualties” hypothesis holds that popular support for American wars is undermined more by the deaths of American personnel from nearby areas than by the deaths of those from far away. However, no previous research has tested the mechanisms that might produce this effect. This omission contributes to three areas of lingering uncertainty within the war support literature: whether national or local losses have a greater effect on war support, whether the negative effects of war deaths are durable or temporary, and whether the negative effects of war deaths have a greater influence on the most or least attentive citizens. Analysis of Iraq War data shows that local losses have a greater effect on war support than national losses, that these casualty effects decay rapidly, and that citizens who closely follow news at the national and local levels are least affected by new information about war costs. These findings run contrary to the prevailing cost–benefit calculus model of war support. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

News outlets cannot serve as reliable conveyors of social facts, nor do their audiences crave such content. Nonetheless, much political science scholarship assumes that objective information about social, political, and economic topics is routinely transmitted to the mass public through the news. This article addresses the problem of selection bias in news content and illustrates the problem with a content analytic study of New York Times coverage given to American war deaths in five major conflicts that occurred over the past century. We find that news coverage of war deaths is unrelated to how many American combatants have recently died. News coverage is more likely to mention war deaths when reporting combat operations and less likely to mention them when a war is going well. These findings underscore the need to document selection biases in information flows before theorizing about proximate causes underlying the relationships between political systems and public opinion. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Contemporary theories of opinion dynamics—exemplified by Zaller's “receive-accept-sample” model—tend to assume that attitude change should occur only following exposure to new, attitude-relevant information. Within this prevailing view, the expected direction and magnitude of opinion change is largely a function of the tone and content of the new information to which one is exposed. In contrast, social identification theories show how opinion change can occur when a person's environmental context activates social knowledge stored in long-term memory. These theories propose that attitude change can result merely from increasing the perceived salience of a social conflict. They further propose that the direction and magnitude of opinion change should be unrelated to the tone or content of the information that draws attention to the conflict. This study examines how the ebb and flow of war news on the front page of the New York Times is related to changes in levels of domestic public support for major American military conflicts from 1950 to the present. We find no consistent or compelling evidence that levels of aggregate war support change in ways predicted by information updating models. To the contrary, a social identification process appears to be underlying the aggregate dynamics of war support. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Political communication scholars often mark the increasing popularity of electronically broadcast news film as a dividing line between a text-based information culture that survived through World War II and a visually oriented electronic information culture that was in place by the late 1960s. Yet this standard view is incomplete, for it neglects a forgotten but extremely popular worldwide system of visual news reporting based on documentary film shorts. A global system for distributing twice-weekly newsreels was already in place before the First World War, nearly half a century before television news would begin to attract large national audiences and seven decades before CNN would begin distributing news footage once again to all corners of the world. This article aims to reorient political communication scholarship to the historical importance of the newsreel medium and to direct political communication scholars to the rich trove of newsreel film stock that recently became available for analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The turnout literature has identified individual, social, and institutional factors that increase citizen voting. Our article shows that local television market size also affects turnout. Larger television markets tend to give disproportionate attention to higher-level races involving statewide or national offices. Because voters in larger markets should be exposed to less information about the lower-ticket races in which they are eligible to vote, we expect market size to affect levels of turnout. This article tests market size impact using a novel combination of aggregate turnout data for local voting areas, census data giving contextual information about these areas, and data detailing the boundaries of local television media markets. Using the Record of American Democracy data set, our aggregate-level analysis covers four election cycles (1986 to 1990) and nearly every county in the continental United States. Our analysis shows that voter turnout is negatively associated with television market size, a relationship that is stronger in midterm election years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper revisits the original psychological literature on priming in order to assess new possibilities for research on priming effects stimulated by news discourse. We detail some important theoretical limitations of existing priming research; propose a method for studying the dynamics of priming effects in real-world, complex information environments; and illustrate the usefulness of this approach with a case study of opinion change during the 1990–91 Persian Gulf Crisis. This case study documents for the first time the daily dynamics of priming effects in a complex information environment and confirms that priming effects are not merely a function of changes in the volume of news coverage about a given topic. Our findings suggest that news priming effects can be produced by changes in the applicability of relevant knowledge constructs, rather than merely by their temporary accessibility in long-term memory, and by cumulative as well as recent exposure to news coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scholars rely upon the Vanderbilt Television News Index and Abstracts to represent the topics covered by network broadcast news, Earlier research has shown that the Abstracts do not adequately capture the evaluative tone of news, but the degree of topical correspondence between the abstracts and the full transcripts of newscasts has never been formally tested. This paper uses content analysis of transcripts of ABC's coverage of the 1991 Gulf War and the corresponding Vanderbilt Abstracts entries to assess the relationship between the topical content of newscasts and that of their abstracts. It demonstrates that under the right conditions, the topical content of news can be effectively represented in abstracts, but emerging topics and those not discussed by the White House are likely to be underrepresented in abstracts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Presents an obituary for David Swanson, a figure in research on the media and international affairs.

The literature on media independence shows that the public statements of government officials can simultaneously stimulate news coverage and regulate the discursive parameters of that coverage. This study investigates two sources of uncertainty in that literature which have limited the ability of researchers to draw firm conclusions about the nature of media independence: how critical the news actually is, and how journalists put the indexing norm into practice. I examine policy discourse appearing in evening news broadcasts during the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf crisis, and find that sources outside the institutions of American government produced far more discourse critical of American involvement in the Gulf crisis than was produced by the "official" debate among domestic political leaders. Moreover, changes in the amount of governmental criticism coming from official circles did not tend to produce parallel changes in the amount of critical news coverage. This suggests that criticism of government in evening news discourse was not triggered by or closely tied to patterns of gatekeeping among elected officials. Television news coverage did not merely toe the "line in the sand" drawn by the Bush administration. Instead, the evidence from this case suggests that journalists exercised considerable discretion in locating and airing oppositional voices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the validity of using television abstracts as substitutes for full-text transcripts in broadcasting. Analysis of the abstract writing process; Details on the potential sources of broadcasting error; Analysis on the correspondence between transcripts and abstracts.

This study examines whether readers of the paper and online versions of a national newspaper acquire different perceptions of the importance of political issues. Using data from a weeklong experiment in which subjects either read the print version of the New York Times, the online version of that paper, or received no special exposure, this study finds evidence that people exposed to the Times for 5 days adjusted their agendas in response to that exposure and that print readers modified their agendas differently than did online readers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although many recent studies have examined presidential campaigns, most have concentrated on television advertising or news media coverage as the key variables of interest. Few empirical analyses have focused on the pattern of candidate appearances, and almost none have considered changes in these patterns over time. This gap is intriguing because some places should tend to receive more attention than others, and yet we know very little about the electoral strategies that determine where and why candidates make appearances. We expect that presidential campaigns have increasingly emphasized visits to particular locales because these visits are critical for driving the agenda and shaping voter perceptions through local news media coverage. Our analysis of presidential campaign appearances at the county, media market, and state levels in general elections from 1972–2000 indicates that presidential candidate appearances are increasing both in number and in geographic scope over time. While candidate appearances are concentrated in areas with especially dense and large populations, most eligible voters live in media markets that receive at least one visit by a presidential candidate, and the percentage of eligible voters exposed to especially intense personal campaigning has been on the rise. In contrast to our expectations, our findings suggest that presidential campaign appearances have not become more narrowly focused on smaller segments of the American population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examines the validity of newspaper indexes, lead paragraphs, and headlines as representations of full-text media content. Effects of production decisions on content and categorization in the newspaper 'New York Times' Index section; Content analysis of 'New York Times' stories covering the 1986 Libya crisis; Use of proxy data to estimate the broad contours of the newspaper's coverage.

Presents a study which compared the differential effects of exposure to print and online versions of the `New York Times'periodical. Design and procedures; Results and discussion.

The growing popularity of the World Wide Web as a source of news raises questions about the future of traditional news media. Is the Web likely to become a supplement to newspapers and television news, or a substitute for these media? Among people who have access to newspapers, television, and the World Wide Web, why do some prefer to use the Web as a source of news, while others prefer traditional news media? Drawing from a survey of 520 undergraduate students at a large public university where Internet use is woven into the fabric of daily life, this study suggests that use of the Web as a news source is positively related with reading newspapers but has no relationship with viewing television news. Members of this community use the Web mainly as a source of entertainment. Patterns of Web and traditional media exposure are examined in light of computer anxiety, desire for control, and political knowledge. This study suggests that even when computer skills and Internet access become more widespread in the general population, use of the World Wide Web as a news source seems unlikely to diminish substantially use of traditional news media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contends that the low levels and uneven social distribution of political knowledge among the public of the United States has caused opinion surveys to misrepresent the mix of voices in a society. Description of the how the bias of information effects is assessed; Analysis of policy questions from the 1988 and 1992 American National Election Studies; Implications of uneven knowledge distribution on the responsiveness of governments to their citizens.