Originally published in Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books, 1994, Vol 39(2), 225. Reviews the book, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion by John Zaller (1992). The author's commendable effort to specify a model of mass opinion formation offers readers an introduction to the prevailing vi

The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.

Deciding What's News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time

Projections of Power: Framing News, Public Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy

This paper addresses the scope for more integrated general analysis of diversity in science, technology and society. It proposes a framework recognizing three necessary but individually insufficient properties of diversity. Based on 10 quality criteria, it suggests a general quantitative non-parametric diversity heuristic. This allows the systematic exploration of diversity under different perspectives, including divergent conceptions of relevant attributes and contrasting weightings on different diversity properties. It is shown how this heuristic may be used to explore different possible trade-offs between diversity and other aspects of interest, including portfolio interactions. The resulting approach offers a way to be more systematic and transparent in the treatment of scientific and technological diversity in a range of fields, including conservation management, research governance, energy policy and sustainable innovation.

A General Framework for Analysing Diversity in Science, Technology and Society

A Virtuous Circle: Political Communications in Postindustrial Societies. Pippa Norris. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 398 pp. $59.95 hbk. $21.95 pbk. The main finding of Pippa Norris's study is that exposure to the news media is positively related to citizens' levels of political knowledge, trust, and participation, even after controlling for demographics, attitudinal factors, and cultural differences. Although various positive contributions of exposure to news media already have been documented in other research, never was the amount of evidence as monumental as in this book. Norris analyzed European Community, Eurobarometer, European Election and Post-election, British Campaign Panel, U.S. National Election, and Pew Center for the People and the Press surveys, providing individual and aggregate level, over-time and cross-sectional evidence supporting her virtuous media thesis. The book is set up as a challenge to "conventional wisdom" or "unquestioned orthodoxy" of media malaise theories that argue that "exposure to the news media discourages learning about politics, erodes trust in political leaders and government institutions, and dampens political mobilization." The problem is that there is a huge gap between the abundance of glib charges and the scarcity of empirical evidence of negative effects of news media. Consequently, Norris mostly relies on Michael Robinson's long ago retracted videomalaise claim and strays away from her main line of theorizing by reviewing studies that deal with the issues well outside the scope of her own study, such as effects of framing news stories, political advertising, and television entertainment. Findings of negative media effects in contexts other than elections and those tapping more specific types of media content and their particular features remain unchallenged by the Norris study. Norris acknowledges that "we need to compare the effects of variance in the media messages so that we can see whether people who consistently use one distinctive source (such as crime-focused local TV news) differ from those who use others (such as rightwing talk radio)" and that "our measures of media habits are often diffuse and imprecise," but she is still restricted in her research to measures of frequency of general newspaper and television news use. Nevertheless, Norris urges us to stopblaming the news media for political problems and instead to direct our attention to "the problems themselves." This call, without showing that media in many of their specific content characteristics or structures are not a part of problems that extend beyond voting and political campaigning, seems premature at best. However, Norris's study makes a significant contribution to communication research by most convincingly showing that the news media may be an important part of solutions to some of the social ills. …

A Virtuous Circle: Political Communications in Postindustrial Societies

The huge collections of news content which have become available through digital technologies both enable and warrant scientific inquiry, challenging journalism scholars to analyse unprecedented amounts of texts. We propose Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modelling as a tool to face this challenge. LDA is a cutting edge technique for content analysis, designed to automatically organize large archives of documents based on latent topics, measured as patterns of word (co-)occurrence. We explain how this technique works, how different choices by the researcher affect the results and how the results can be meaningfully interpreted. To demonstrate its usefulness for journalism research, we conducted a case study of the New York Times coverage of nuclear technology from 1945 to the present, partially replicating a study by Gamson and Modigliani. This shows that LDA is a useful tool for analysing trends and patterns in news content in large digital news archives relatively quickly.

Quantitative analysis of large amounts of journalistic texts using topic modelling

Computational text analysis has become an exciting research field with many applications in communication research. It can be a difficult method to apply, however, because it requires knowledge of various techniques, and the software required to perform most of these techniques is not readily available in common statistical software packages. In this teacher’s corner, we address these barriers by providing an overview of general steps and operations in a computational text analysis project, and demonstrate how each step can be performed using the R statistical software. As a popular open-source platform, R has an extensive user community that develops and maintains a wide range of text analysis packages. We show that these packages make it easy to perform advanced text analytics.

Text Analysis in R

Strategic framing in the BP crisis: A semantic network analysis of associative frames

On newspaper websites, journalists can observe the preferences of the audience in unprecedented detail and for low costs, based on the audience clicks (i.e. page views) for specific news articles. This article addresses whether journalists use this information to cater to audience preferences in their news selection choices. We analyzed the print and online editions of five national newspapers from the Netherlands with a mixed-method approach. Using a cross-lagged analysis covering 6 months, we found that storylines of the most-viewed articles were more likely to receive attention in subsequent reporting, which indicates that audience clicks affect news selection. However, based on interviews with editors we found that they consider the use of this information for news selection to conflict with professional norms. We elaborate on the implications of this discrepancy in the norms and behaviors of journalists, and project directions for future studies.

News selection criteria in the digital age: Professional norms versus online audience metrics

The 9/11 terrorist attacks and later attacks such as those in London and Madrid shocked the world and found their way into the newspapers of many countries. The authors study the international coverage of these events in the context of globalization versus localization and the creation of the dominant post-cold war frame of the War on Terror. Using automatic co-occurrence analysis based on the notion of associative framing, they investigate whether these events were mainly framed in a local or global way in the American, British, and Dutch press. The authors found that although proximity is still a strong determinant of attention for events, the framing of these events was more affected by the global event of 9/11 than by local considerations.

http://vanatteveldt.com/wp-content/uploads/RuigrokVanAtteveldt06GlobalAngling.pdf

Wouter van Atteveldt

Papers

Quantitative analysis of large amounts of journalistic texts using topic modelling

Text Analysis in R

Strategic framing in the BP crisis: A semantic network analysis of associative frames

News selection criteria in the digital age: Professional norms versus online audience metrics

Global Angling with a Local Angle: How U.S., British, and Dutch Newspapers Frame Global and Local Terrorist Attacks