Covering Muslims

We present the first systematic, large-scale analysis of American newspaper coverage of Muslims. By comparing it over time with reporting on other groups and issues as well as coverage of the subject in other countries, we demonstrate conclusively how negative American newspapers have been in their treatment of Muslims across the two-decade period between 1996 and 2016, both in an absolute sense and compared to a range of other groups. The same pattern holds in other countries, such as Australia, Canada, and the UK. While 9/11 did not make coverage more negative in the long run, it did dramatically increase the prevalence of references to terrorism and extremism.

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.