News sharing as a measure of media alignment
In this note we introduce a new approach to measure media alignment derived from the story-sharing behavior of journalists. We use a large corpus of online news stories from two leading Hungarian news sites and estimate alignment scores for a large number of outlets that they cite. To the extent th...
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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
HOPE
2023-05-01
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| Series: | Journal of Quantitative Description: Digital Media |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journalqd.org/article/view/3790 |
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| Summary: | In this note we introduce a new approach to measure media alignment derived from the story-sharing behavior of journalists. We use a large corpus of online news stories from two leading Hungarian news sites and estimate alignment scores for a large number of outlets that they cite. To the extent that journalists are more likely to cite ideologically proximate sources, our measure can be used to compare a large number of media outlets on a political — in our case government vs. independent — space. We demonstrate the use of this approach with two empirical applications. First, we show that our alignment scores successfully capture known ideological variation across outlets at a single point in time. Second, we demonstrate that quarterly estimates of alignment for a captured outlet change dramatically following an abrupt change in ownership.
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| ISSN: | 2673-8813 |