All the News Fit to Print

by Seth P. Fiderer

The rapidly changing media landscapes and press codes throughout Egypt and Tunisia have been prone to changes in values, regulation, and practices. This thesis explores how a landscape in flux leads to changes in coverage through the process of democratization and regime change. It demonstrates the change in coverage and sentiment around political opposition as journalists explored their newfound freedom to cover topics that had previously been off-limits. It finds that, as a result of rapidly changing political conditions, coverage of political opposition by state publications has been mostly ambiguous, while independent papers have used their new openness to take full advantage of their possibility for bias.

Text analysis methods used: machine translation, sentiment analysis, topic modeling.