Abstract
A novel curated collection of news articles and mixed-methods research approach which combines NLP techniques with qualitative content analysis supports the investigation of patterns of journalistic practice across the China Daily and the SCMP and six western newspapers. NLP speed and consistency when analyzing text emerges as especially important when investigating changes in depth or manner of reporting which over time might impact press freedom. The interplay of statistical techniques from NLP with qualitative methods results in a powerful dynamic where the predictive and convergent validity of methods corroborate our findings.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
In the post-1997 era, the most prominent acquisition was probably that of the Hong Kong Economic Journal, a daily known for its independence, in-depth analysis, and bold criticism. In late 2006, PCCW chairman Richard Li Tzar-kai, the son of tycoon Li Ka-shing, spent HK$280 million to acquire 50% of the Journal from its founder Lam Shan-muk and his wife Lok Yau-mui. Media reports of the deal highlighted the public fear that Li’s investment would put its editorial independence at risk, though Li more than once publicly denied that he would intrude into the editorship.
- 4.
The Ming Pao and the party-owned Guangzhou Daily have jointly published the North America Special Edition of Guangzhou Daily.
- 5.
See footnote no. 6
- 6.
Media self-censorship refers to “a set of editorial actions committed by media organizations aiming to curry favor and avoid offending the power stakeholders such as the government, advertisers and major business corporations.” (Lee & Chan, 2009: 112).
- 7.
- 8.
Following a tradition in communication research focusing on balance, congruence and convergence, co-orientation is understood as “the acquisition of better information and achievement of increased understanding between two individuals or groups through interactions, which may lead to convergence in attitudes towards external objects and mutual agreement on issues” (McQuail & Windahl, 1993: 27–37).
- 9.
References
Achen, C. H., & Snidal, D. (1989). Rational deterrence theory and comparative case studies. World Politics, 41(2), 143–169.
Baden, C., Pipal, C., Schoonvelde, M., Mariken, A., & van der Velden, C. G. (2021). Three gaps in computational text analysis methods for social sciences: A research agenda. Communication Methods and Measures, 16, 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/19312458.2021.2015574
Bednarek, M., Caple, H., & Huan, C. (2021). Computer-based analysis of news values: A case study on National day. Reporting, Journalism Studies, 22, 6.
Bender, E. M. (2009). Linguistically Naïve! Language Independent: Why NLP Needs Linguistic Typology. In Proceedings of the EACL 2009 Workshop on the interaction between linguistics and computational linguistics: Virtuous, vicious or vacuous? (pp. 26–32). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Bergsma, S., Post, M., & Yarowsky, D. (2012). Stylometric analysis of scientific articles. HLT-NAACL, 327–337.
Bhatia, A. (2015). Construction of discursive illusions in the ‘Umbrella Movement’. Discourse & Society, 26(4), 407–427.
Blei, D. M., & Lafferty, J. D. (2007). A correlated topic model of science. The Annals of Applied Statistics, 1(1), 17–35.
Blum, A., & Mitchell, T. (1998). Combining labeled and unlabeled data with co-training. In Proceedings of the eleventh annual conference on computational learning theory, COLT ’98 (pp. 92–100). Association for Computing Machinery.
Boydstun, A. E., Gross, J. H., Resnik, P., & Smith, N. A. (2013). Identifying media frames and frame dynamics within and across policy issues. In New directions in analyzing text as data workshop.
Chan, C. K. (2015). Contested news values and media performance during the umbrella movement. Chinese Journal of Communication, 8(4), 420–428.
Cheung, A. S. Y. (2003). Hong Kong press coverage of China-Taiwan cross-straits tension. In R. Ash, P. Ferdinand, H. Brian, R. Porter, & F. Ash (Eds.), Hong Kong in transition (pp. 210–225). Routledge.
Du, Y., Zhu, L., & Yang, F. (2018). A movement of varying faces: How “occupy central” was framed in the news in Hong Kong, Taiwan, mainland China, the UK, and the U.S. International Journal of Communication, 12, 2556.
Earl, J. M., McCarthy, J. D., & Soule, S. A. (2004). The use of newspaper data in the study of collective action. Annual Review of Sociology, 30(1), 65–80.
Field, A., Kliger, D., Wintner, S., Pan, J., Jurafsky, D., & Tsvetkov, Y. (2018). Framing and agenda-setting in Russian news: A computational analysis of intricate political strategies. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on empirical methods in natural language processing (pp. 3570–3580). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Fulcher, G. (2010). Practical language testing (1st ed.). Routledge.
Glasser, T. L. (1992). Objectivity precludes responsibility. In E. D. Cohen (Ed.), Philosophical issues in journalism (pp. 166–175). Oxford University Press.
Hallin, D., & Mancini, P. (2004). Comparing media systems: Three models of media and politics. Cambridge University Press.
Hamilton, W. L., Leskovec, J., & Jurafsky, D. (2016). Diachronic word embeddings reveal statistical laws of semantic change. In Proceedings of the 54th annual meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long papers) (pp. 1489–1501). Germany. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Hofmann, V., Pierrehumbert, J. B., & Hinrich Schutze, H. (2021). Dynamic contextualized word embeddings. Eprint 2010.12684.
Hürriyetoğlu, A., Yörük, E., Yüret, D., Yoltar, G. C. B., Durus, F., Mutlu, O., & Akdemir, A. (2019). Overview of CLEF 2019 lab protest news: Extracting protests from news in a cross-context setting. In International conference of the cross-language evaluation forum for European languages (pp. 425–432). Springer.
Hutcheon, T. (1998). Pressing concerns: Hong Kong’s Media in an era of transition. Discussion paper D-32. The Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government. Harvard University Press.
Jatowt, A., & Duh, K. (2014). A framework for analyzing semantic change of words across time. In IEEE/ACM joint conference on digital libraries (pp. 229–238). https://doi.org/10.1109/JCDL.2014.6970173
Koppel, M., Schler, J., & Zigdon, K. (2005). Determining an author’s native language by mining a text for errors. In Proceedings of the eleventh ACM SIGKDD international conference on knowledge discovery in data mining, KDD ’05 (pp. 624–628). Association for Computing Machinery.
Kulkarni, V., Al-Rfou, R., Perozzi, B., & Skiena, S. (2015). Statistically significant detection of linguistic change. In Proceedings of the 24th international conference on World Wide Web, WWW ’15 (pp. 625–635). Republic and Canton of Geneva, CHE. International World Wide Web Conferences Steering Committee.
Kwong, Y. (2015). The dynamics of mainstream and internet alternative Media in Hong Kong: A case study of the umbrella movement. International Journal of China Studies, 6(3), 273–295.
Lau, T., & To, Y.-m. (2002). Walking a tight rope: Hong Kong’s media facing political and economic challenges since sovereignty transfer. In K. C. Ming & Y. A. So (Eds.), Crisis and transformation in China’s Hong Kong. Routledge.
Lee, F. L. F. (2007). Strategic interaction, cultural co-orientation, and press freedom in Hong Kong. Asian Journal of Communication, 17(2), 134–147.
Lee, F. L. F. (2014). Triggering the protest paradigm: Examining factors affecting news coverage of protests. International Journal of Communication, 8.
Lee, F. L. F. (2018). Changing political economy of the Hong Kong media. China Perspectives [Online], 2018/3 | 2018, Online since 1 Sept 2018.
Lee, F. L. F., & Chan, J. (2009). Organizational production of self-censorship in the Hong Kong media. The International Journal of Press/Politics, 14(1), 112–133.
Lee, P. S. N., & Chu, L. (1998). Inherent dependence on power: The Hong Kong Press in Political Transition. Media, Culture & Society, 20(1), 59–77.
Lucy, L., Demszky, D., Bromley, P., & Jurafsky, D. (2020). Content analysis of textbooks via natural language processing: Findings on gender, race, and ethnicity in Texas U.S. history textbooks. AERA Open, 6(3), 2332858420940312.
McQuail, D., & Windahl, S. (1993). Communication models for the study of mass communications. Routledge.
Mihalcea, R. (2012). Multilingual natural language processing. In Proceedings of the workshop on innovative hybrid approaches to the processing of textual data (p. 45). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Mosteller, F., & Wallace, D. L. (1984). Applied Bayesian and classical inference: The case of the federalist papers. Springer.
Ngok, K. (2007). Chinese education policy in the context of decentralization and marketization: Evolution and implications. Asia Pacific Education Review, 8(1), 142–157.
Ott, M., Cardie, C., & Hancock, J. T. (2013). Negative deceptive opinion spam. In Proceedings of the 2013 conference of the North American chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human language technologies (pp. 497–501). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Rudolph, M., & Blei, D. (2018). Dynamic embeddings for language evolution. In WWW 2018: The 2018 Web conference, April 23–27, 2018. ACM.
Shen, J. C. Y. (1972). The law and mass media in Hong Kong. Mass Communications Center, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
Shirk, S. (Ed.). (2011). Changing media, changing China. Oxford University Press.
Sparks, C. (2015). Business as usual: The UK national daily press and the occupy central movement. Chinese Journal of Communication, 8(4), 429–446.
Tsfati, Y. & Walter, N. (2019). The world of news and politics. Media Effects: Advances in Theory and Research.
Tuchman, G., & Tuchman, B. W. (1978). Making news: A study in the construction of reality. Free Press.
van der Pas, D. J., van der Brug, W., & Rens, V. (2017). Political parallelism in media and political agenda-setting. Political Communication, 34(4), 491–510.
Verba, S. (1996). The citizen as respondent: Sample surveys and American democracy. American Political Science Review, 90(1), 1–7.
Verba, S., Schlozman, K. L., Brady, H., & Nie, N. H. (1993). Citizen activity: Who participates? What do they say? The American Political Science Review, 87(2), 303–318.
Verba, S., Schlozman, K. L., & Brady, H. E. (1995). Voice and equality: Civic voluntarism in American politics. Harvard University Press.
Wijaya, D. T., & Yeniterzi, R. (2011). Understanding semantic change of words over centuries. In Proceedings of the 2011 international workshop on DETecting and Exploiting Cultural diversiTy on the social web (DETECT ’11) (pp. 35–40). Association for Computing Machinery.
Wong, H. T., & Liu, S.-D. (2018). Cultural activism during the Hong Kong umbrella movement. Journal of Creative Communications, 13(2), 157–165.
Wueest, B., Rothenhäusler, K., & Hutter, S. (2013). Using computational linguistics to enhance protest event analysis. ENCoRe workshop ‘Tools and techniques for conflict event data collection’.
Yu, M. (2015). Framing occupy central: A content analysis of Hong Kong, American and British newspaper coverage. University of South Florida, Graduate Theses and Dissertations.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Dore, G.M.D., McCarthy, A.D., Scharf, J.A. (2023). Methodological Approach and Data. In: A Free Press, If You Can Keep It. SpringerBriefs in Political Science. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27584-5_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-27584-5_2
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-27583-8
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-27584-5
eBook Packages: Political Science and International StudiesPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)