Comparing Coverage of Public Events Across Different Types of News Sources

本研究采用严格的方法，比较主流新闻通讯社和当地专业报纸在20世纪90年代和21世纪初对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这样的事件目录发生了什么，以及一个新闻故事目录，塑造了读者对所发生的事情的印象。 这就可以证明，基于主流国家媒体的争议的看法如何不同于那些基于更有针对性的地方媒体来源。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，但新闻来源在强调哪些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，并且很少得到新闻报道，但少数事件在数十篇文章中进行了讨论，并成为公众讨论的核心。理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21世纪初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改善这一领域的研究。本项目的新闻来源是：（1）三个新闻通讯服务存档在注释英语千兆字文件中，可从语言数据联盟获得;（2）当地专业报纸存档在Proquest Ethnic Newswatch。 主要研究时期为1994-2010年。 这项研究提供了新颖和独特的数据，允许加强调查的相互关系的公共事件和新闻报道。 在方法上，该项目开发了使用新闻来源研究社会运动事件（以及更广泛的公共事件）的重要创新。 这些方法强调可验证性、纠错性和这些事件的相关性。 关系型数据库在事件和描述它们的文章之间提供了严格的联系，这既允许事件数据被验证，又允许数据的结构与事件和新闻报道的相互作用的理论相一致。与理论相一致，关系数据结构还用于捕获抗议的结构化到特定的问题集群和结构化的一些事件作为复杂的事件与子事件。这些数据结构允许新的研究路线。 通过对不同类型的资料进行比较，可以对它们所构建的关于这一时期的不同叙述和集体记忆进行调查。特别注意的是，少数事件得到新闻来源不成比例的报道，从而主导了公众的话语。这一新的高质量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NSF的法定使命，并被认为值得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来支持。

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.