Assessing the Impact of Media Polarization on Public Health Emergencies

Media plays a big role in how citizens evaluate public health emergencies. This project seeks to understand how public health emergencies such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the opioid crisis are reported. In order to assess the polarization and politicization of U.S. news coverage, we are comparing news by political leaning (left, center, right) as segmented by AllSides media bias ratings. We use the Archer web application to search news data from the Cline Center’s Global News Index and we are experimenting with Cline’s new Data Capsule environment for full-text processing of in-copyright text, which will allow us to do topic modeling. Read more.