![Sample our Politics & International Relations journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5947/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Politics-International-Relations.jpg"})
ABSTRACT
The media are under increasing pressure by states to adopt a regime-friendly editorial line in many countries globally, raising the importance of understanding the conditions of successful and failed media capture. Unfortunately, the standard measurement of media capture – annual expert surveys – neither distinguishes between outlets nor offers the needed resolution to assess, e.g., the immediate impact of a new gag law. To remedy these shortcomings, we develop a computational measurement of media capture based on a comparison of nominally independent outlets and regime-owned outlets regarding media agenda and tone when referring to the regime. By relying on two unsupervised measurement methods – topic modelling and sentiment classification – the new method can assess the loss of editorial independence at the level of individual outlets on a monthly or even weekly basis. The methodology is validated by applying it to recent data from Nicaragua. There the two-pronged approach shows how outlets respond differently to regime pressure. While there still are limitations to consider, if further editorial aspects of media capture such as issue framing are added to the methodology, it has the potential of transforming the future study of media capture.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 Guriev and Treisman, “Informational Autocrats.”
2 Lipman, Kachkaeva, and Poyker, “The New Autocracy.”
3 Polyák, “Media in Hungary.”
4 Coşkun, “Media Capture Strategies in New Authoritarian States.”
5 Guriev and Treisman, “Informational Autocrats.”
6 Morgenbesser, “The Menu of Autocratic Innovation.”
7 Becker, Vlad, and Nusser, “An Evaluation of Press Freedom Indicators.”
8 Guriev and Treisman, “Informational Autocrats.”
9 Hellmeier et al., “State of the World 2020.”
10 Roberts et al., “The Structural Topic Model”; Roberts, Stewart, and Airoldi, “A Model of Text for Experimentation.”
11 Pérez, Giudici, and Luque, pysentimiento.
12 Steinfeld and Jagger, “Who Will Report on Nicaragua?”
13 Schlumberger and Schedler, “Authoritarianisms and Authoritarianization.”
14 Glasius, “What Authoritarianism is … and is not.”
15 Cheibub, Gandhi, and Vreeland, “Democracy and Dictatorship Revisited.”
16 Lührmann and Lindberg, “A Third Wave of Autocratization is Here.”
17 Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism.
18 Hellmeier et al., “State of the World 2020.”
19 Mechkova, Lührmann, and Lindberg, “How Much Democratic Backsliding?”
20 Durante and Knight, “Partisan Control, Media Bias, and Viewer Responses.”
21 Voltmer, The Media in Transitional Democracies; Hughes and Lawson, “The Barriers to Media Opening”; Guerrero, “Broadcasting and Democracy in Mexico”; Guerrero, “The ‘Captured Liberal’ Model.”
22 Svolik, The Politics of Authoritarian Rule.
23 Svolik, “Moral Hazard in Authoritarian Repression”; Gerschewski, “The Three Pillars of Stability.”
24 Risse and Stollenwerk, “Legitimacy in Areas of Limited Statehood.”
25 Göbel, “Authoritarian Consolidation,” 182.
26 Guriev and Treisman, “Informational Autocrats”; Guriev and Treisman, “A Theory of Informational Autocracy.”
27 Burnell, “Autocratic Opening to Democracy”; Dukalskis and Gerschewski, “What Autocracies Say (and What Citizens Hear)”; Soest and Grauvogel, “Identity, Procedures and Performance.”
28 Guriev and Treisman, “Informational Autocrats”; Guriev and Treisman, “A Theory of Informational Autocracy.”
29 Meer, “Economic Performance and Political Trust.”
30 Hellmeier et al., “State of the World 2020.”
31 Hawkins, “Responding to Radical Populism.”
32 Bogaards, “De-Democratization in Hungary”; Bermeo, “On Democratic Backsliding”; Hellmeier et al., “State of the World 2020.”
33 Lynch, After the Propaganda State; Stockmann, Media Commercialization and Authoritarian Rule in China.
34 Stockmann and Gallagher, “Remote Control.”
35 Schiffrin, “Introduction to Special Issue on Media Capture.”
36 Louis-Sidois and Mougin, Silence the Media or the Story?
37 Corneo, “Media Capture in a Democracy”; Mungiu-Pippidi, “Freedom Without Impartiality”; Guerrero, “Broadcasting and Democracy in Mexico.”
38 Whitten-Woodring and Van Belle, “The Correlates of Media Freedom.”
39 Hall and Ambrosio, “Authoritarian Learning”; Koesel and Bunce, “Diffusion-Proofing.”
40 Frisch, Belair-Gagnon, and Agur, “Media Capture with Chinese Characteristics.”
41 Levitsky and Way, Competitive Authoritarianism.
42 Ozen and Dogu, “Mobilizing in a Hybrid Political System.”
43 Hawkins, “Responding to Radical Populism”; Hughes and Lawson, “The Barriers to Media Opening”; Segura and Waisbord, Media Movements.
44 Hill, “Learning Together Slowly.”
45 Scheufele, “Framing as a Theory of Media Effects”; Valkenburg and Oliver, “Media Effects Theories.”
46 Brady, “Mass Persuasion as a Means of Legitimation and China’s Popular Authoritarianism.”
47 McCombs and Shaw, “The Agenda-Setting Function of Mass Media.”
48 Rudolph, “Political Trust as a Heuristic.”
49 Chan, “From Propaganda to Hegemony.”
50 Field et al., Framing and Agenda-Setting in Russian News.
51 Hamborg, Donnay, and Gipp, “Automated Identification of Media Bias in News Articles.”
52 Eberl, Boomgaarden, and Wagner, “One Bias Fits All?”
53 Zaller, The Nature and Origins of Mass Opinion.
54 Druckman and Parkin, “The Impact of Media Bias.”
55 Enikolopov, Petrova, and Zhuravskaya, “Media and Political Persuasion.”
56 Zhong, “Legitimacy Crisis and Legitimation in China.”
57 Tucker, “The Rise of Stalin’s Personality Cult.”
58 Tertitskiy, “The Ascension of the Ordinary Man.”
59 Sperling, “Putin’s Macho Personality Cult.”
60 Luqiu, “The Reappearance of the Cult of Personality in China.”
61 Yilmaz and Bashirov, “The AKP after 15 Years.”
62 Polese and Horák, “A Tale of Two Presidents.”
63 D’Angelo, Doing News Framing Analysis II.
64 Walter and Ophir, “News Frame Analysis”; Burscher, Vliegenthart, and Vreese, “Frames Beyond Words”; Nicholls and Culpepper, “Computational Identification of Media Frames.”
65 Jacobi, Atteveldt, and Welbers, “Quantitative Analysis of Large Amounts of Journalistic.”
66 Roberts et al., “The Structural Topic Model”; Roberts, Stewart, and Airoldi, “A Model of Text for Experimentation.”
67 For more information on other methods for identifying topics that we considered, but discarded, see Appendix A.
68 Soroka, “Good News and Bad News.”
69 Boukes et al., “What’s the Tone?”
70 Atteveldt, Velden, and Boukes, “The Validity of Sentiment Analysis.”
71 Pérez, Giudici, and Luque, pysentimiento. See Appendix B for more information on the model.
72 Burnell, “Autocratic Opening to Democracy”; Dukalskis and Gerschewski, “What Autocracies Say (and What Citizens Hear)”; Soest and Grauvogel, “Identity, Procedures and Performance.”
73 Russia’s Parliament Approves Jail for ‘Fake’ War Reports.
74 Coppedge, V-Dem Dataset 2020.
75 Thaler, “Nicaragua.”
76 EFE, “ONG establece en 568.”
77 Martí i Puig and Serra, “Nicaragua.”
78 Kottasová, “Seven Nicaraguan Opposition Leaders”; “Nicaragua Vote.”
79 “Under Fire for ‘Sham’ Vote.”
80 Huete-Pérez and Hildebrand, “Nicaragua’s COVID-19 Crisis Demands A Response”; Thaler, “Nicaragua and Covid-19.”
81 “Nicaragua llega a 225 muertes.”
82 Pearson, Prado, and Colburn, “The Puzzle of COVID-19.”
83 Cortés and Ocampo Almazan, “Latin America.”
84 Bravo, “Familia Ortega monopoliza medios de comunicación en Nicaragua.”
85 Steinfeld and Jagger, “Who Will Report on Nicaragua?”
86 Nicaragua’s Press Resists; Vílchez, Eight Press Freedom Threats.
87 Miranda Aburto, “Ortega destapa la persecución contra Canal 10.”
88 Rodrígez Navarrete, Nicaragua.
89 Ibid.
90 Vílchez, Eight Press Freedom Threats.
91 Jacobi, Atteveldt, and Welbers, “Quantitative Analysis of Large Amounts of Journalistic.”
92 Maier et al., “How Document Sampling and Vocabulary Pruning.”
93 Do the top words per topic exclusively identify that topic?
94 Do the top words of a topic co-occur within documents?
95 Can the researcher link the identified topics to real-life phenomena? Do the top words per topic coherently identify a real-life phenomenon? Do the top documents associated with each topic reflect the linked phenomena?
97 The analysed time frame for agenda and tone begins in 2018, when sufficient articles were available for all nominally independent outlets.
98 See Appendix B for the results of a validation of the sentiment classification performance.
99 Canal10 is excluded from this analysis, because it contained too few mentions of Ortega for the computation of a valid polarity score. The results for Canal 10 can be seen in the annual aggregation in Annex B.
100 The polarity score of Canal 14 is available for the second quarter of 2022, because its data was collected in May 2022 as opposed to February and March for the other outlets.
101 Alzada et al., Autocratization Turns Viral.
102 Voltmer, The Media in Transitional Democracies; Voltmer, “Comparing Media Systems in New Democracies”; Segura and Waisbord, Media Movements.
103 Griffen, “Hungary”; Bajomi-Lázár, “The Party Colonisation of the Media.”
104 Lawson and McCann, “Television News, Mexico’s 2000 Elections.”
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Hennes-Michel Barnehl
Hennes-Michel Barnehl is a PhD student in the Department of Political Science at the University of California San Diego. His research interests lie in the intersection of computational methods and non-democratic politics where he is focussed on advancing measurement.
Gijs Schumacher
Gijs Schumacher is an Associate Professor at the Department of Political Science of the University of Amsterdam. He is specialized in Political Psychology and the cofounder of the Hot Politics Lab. His work is published in journals such as Nature Human Behaviour, Scientific Reports, American Political Science Review and the American Journal of Political Science.