Comparing Coverage of Public Events Across Different Types of News Sources

这项研究使用严格的方法比较了主流新闻通讯社和地方专业报纸对20世纪90年代和21世纪头10年相关公共事件的报道，这是美国历史上研究不足的时期。该项目同时开发了一个关于这类事件的目录--发生了什么--以及一个塑造读者对所发生事件的印象的新闻故事目录。这表明，主流国家媒体对争议的看法可以与基于更有针对性的地方媒体来源的看法有何不同。民主本质上涉及不同问题偏好的人之间的冲突，这种冲突有时会公开表达出来。新闻媒体塑造了公众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存在差异。虽然大多数事件只被提到一次，新闻报道很少，但有几个事件会在数十篇文章中讨论，并成为公共讨论的中心。理解这些媒体差异是理解多元化社会中民主讨论的重要组成部分。20世纪90年代和21世纪头10年的数据有助于为理解当前的辩论提供历史背景。这些高质量的数据也将对其他社会科学家有用，我们开发的新研究方法将促进这一领域的研究。该项目的新闻来源是：(1)语言数据联盟提供的注释英语Gigaword文件中的三个新闻通讯社服务；以及(2)ProQuest种族新闻观察中的地方专业报纸。主要研究时间为1994-2010年。这项研究提供了新颖和独特的数据，可以加强对公共事件和新闻报道之间的相互关系的调查。在方法上，该项目在利用新闻来源研究社会运动事件(以及更广泛的公共事件)方面进行了重要的创新。这些方法强调可验证性、纠错和这些事件之间的相关性。关系数据库在事件和描述事件的文章之间提供了严格的链接，这既允许对事件数据进行验证，又使数据的结构与事件和新闻报道的相互作用理论相一致。与理论一致，关系数据结构还被用来捕捉抗议活动的结构成特定的问题集群，以及一些事件的结构作为带有子事件的复杂事件。这些数据结构允许进行新的研究。通过不同来源类型的比较，可以调查他们构建的关于这一时期的不同叙事和集体记忆。人们特别注意少数事件，这些事件在新闻来源中得到了不成比例的报道，从而主导了公共话语。这一新的高质量公共事件数据将为这一正在研究的时期的历史研究提供信息，并对其他学者的二次分析有用。关系数据结构的使用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优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.