Nel Ruigrok

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

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.

Good news or bad news: Conducting sentiment analysis on Dutch texts to distinguish between positive and negative relations

ABSTRACT Many research questions in political communication can be answered by representing text as a network of positive or negative relations between actors and issues such as conducted by semantic network analysis. This article presents a system for automatically determining the polarity (positivity/negativity) of these relations by using techniques from sentiment analysis. We used a machine learning model trained on the manually annotated news coverage of the Dutch 2006 elections, collecting lexical, syntactic, and word-similarity based features, and using the syntactic analysis to focus on the relevant part of the sentence. The performance of the full system is significantly better than the baseline with an F1 score of .63. Additionally, we replicate four studies from an earlier analysis of these elections, attaining correlations of greater than .8 in three out of four cases. This shows that the presented system can be immediately used for a number of analyses.

Pandemic alarm in the Dutch media: Media coverage of the 2009 influenza A (H1N1) pandemic and the role of the expert sources

In 2009, the outbreak of a new flu virus in Mexico developed into the first pandemic in more than 40 years. For years the world had been warned about such a catastrophic global epidemic, but influenza A/H1N1 (also called swine flu or Mexican flu) turned out to be even milder than the common flu. This study is based on a content analysis of newspaper and television coverage from April to December 2009, and focuses on the volume and the content of the news coverage of the pandemic in the Netherlands. The research shows that media coverage was intensive and alarming, especially during the first and third stages of the epidemic. As it turns out, news sources had about the same share of alarming messages as the media. Therefore, although the media were indeed alarming in their coverage, they were so on the authority of their sources, the experts and the public health officials.

A Model for Evaluating Risk Reporting The Case of UMTS and Fine Particles

The medias coverage of risk issues is often criticized for neglecting the scientific perspective on risk. This criticism, however, ignores the social context in which journalists operate: they have to report on peoples worries about health-threatening issues and they have to cover actions taken by the government to address these worries. The media have to report on such issues, irrespective of the fact that in terms of scientific risk assessment the risk may be negligible. In this article, a new evaluation model for media coverage of risk is developed on the basis of a content analysis of two risk issues — universal mobile telecommunications system (UMTS) base stations and fine particle pollution (FPP) — and extensive consultation with prominent journalists, scientists and stakeholders in the Netherlands. The model defines criteria regarding sources, frames, amplification, risk perception, scientific data and the language used in the coverage. This approach offers a concrete starting point for the reporters who cover these issues in the daily news pages.

News Coverage of the Bosnian War in Dutch Newspapers

In April 1992 war in Bosnia broke out. Media coverage was initially modest, but eventually the war received full media attention after the discovery of detention camps in Bosnia. Images of emaciated men behind barbed wire shown worldwide on television provoked memories of pictures from the death camps of World War II and a public outcry to “do something” followed.