Comparing Coverage of Public Events Across Different Types of News Sources

本研究采用严格的方法，比较了20世纪90年代和21世纪初美国历史上一个研究不足的时期，主流新闻通讯社和当地专业报纸对相关公共事件的报道。该项目同时开发了一个此类事件的目录——发生了什么——以及一个新闻故事的目录，这些新闻故事塑造了读者对所发生事件的印象。这证明了基于主流国家媒体对争议的看法如何与基于更有针对性的地方媒体来源的看法不同。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。新闻媒体塑造公众对有争议的问题和事件的看法，但新闻来源在强调的问题和事件以及如何报道这些问题和事件方面有所不同。虽然大多数事件只被提及一次，新闻报道也很少，但有一些事件在几十篇文章中被讨论，并成为公众讨论的中心。理解这些媒体差异是理解多元化社会中的民主审议的重要组成部分。1990年代和2000年代的数据有助于为理解当前的争论提供历史背景。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改善这一领域的研究。本项目的新闻来源为：(1)从语言数据联盟（Linguistic Data Consortium）获得的注释英语Gigaword文件中存档的三个新闻专线服务；(2)保存在Proquest Ethnic Newswatch的地方特色报纸。主要研究时期为1994-2010年。本研究提供了新颖和独特的数据，允许加强调查公共事件和新闻报道的相互关系。在方法上，本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）方面进行了重要创新。这些方法强调这些事件的可验证性、纠错性和相关性。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保持一致。与理论一致，关系数据结构还被用于捕获抗议的特定问题集群结构，以及将一些事件结构为具有子事件的复杂事件。这些数据结构允许新的研究方向。跨来源类型的比较允许调查关于这一时期的不同叙述和集体记忆。特别注意的是少数事件在新闻来源中得到不成比例的报道，从而主导了公共话语。这些新的高质量的公共事件数据将为这一研究不足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。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值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.