Linking event archives to news: a computational method for analyzing the gatekeeping process

Communication Methods and Measures
,
vi, 59-78 S.
,
2022,

Welbers, Kasper, Wouter van Atteveldt, Joe Bajjalieh, Dan Shalmon, Pradnyesh Joshi, Scott Althaus, Chung-hong Chan, Hartmut Wessler, Marc Jungblut
ISSN: 1931-2458 (print), 1931-2466 (online)
DOI: 
10.1080/19312458.2021.1953455
Abstract

Digital archives that document real-world events provide new opportunities for large-scale analyses of how news coverage represents reality. We present a method and open-source tool for linking event data to news articles, and demonstrate its application with an analysis of event and country level predictors of terrorism coverage in The Guardian from 2006 to 2018, using event data from the Global Terrorism Database (GTD). Our method builds on established techniques for calculating document similarity, and we propose a novel strategy for fine-tuning parameters of the event matching algorithm that requires no manual coding. An online appendix is provided that documents all code to replicate our analysis and reuse our tools.