To date much of the comparative literature on mainstream news has focused on transnational or national news without paying attention to regional news sources. In our Research Paper no. 12 we set out to compare how media frame one of the EU’s most important policy areas, Cohesion policy. In particular, our aim was to uncover territorial and temporal patterns in the EU Cohesion Policy coverage and tone in the online news and social media.
One of our initial problems was the difficulties in finding relevant articles from mainstream media at various levels of territoriality, from the regional through to the transnational. While third party providers offer services to identify news we found that many of the returned articles were non-relevant and coverage at the regional level was limited. Furthermore, we were interested in not only what journalists’ reported but also how this was received and discussed among readers. Through their comments and discussions, the community of readers generate their own content, what we refer to as user-generated content. In addition, we were also interested in social media. To that end, we developed our own crawlers to collect and filter data from online sources.
Our filtered corpus covered 4,000 Cohesion Policy-related news stories and 33,000 user comments. On social media, the dataset includes more than 3,700 posts and 19,500 tweets from Facebook and Twitter respectively as well as comments and reactions. To explore patterns in the data, we applied various methods commonly used in computational text analysis. These included topic modeling and sentiment analysis.
In terms of the news media we found a relatively high degree of topic convergence in both English and Spanish in terms of the main topics discussed. For English we distinguished between UK media and Transnational media (i.e., EU sources in English and International press such as The Economist) while for Spanish language we only included media from Spain.
The topic discussed in the media largely dovetail Cohesion Policy thematic objectives/priorities. We found that major topics discussed included low-carbon economy, R+D and Innovation, Employment and Training, Entrepreneurship, Transport and Infrastructure, and Local Development and Cultural Heritage. We also found that Cohesion Policy was frequently mentioned in connection with broader EU political themes. In all cases, broader themes were uncovered which tended to bundle EU affairs (primarily articles about the Eurozone crisis or the Migration crisis); EU budgetary politics related to issues such as Conditionality, and a separate topic related to Spending Irregularities. Figure 1 shows an example of topic breakdown in the case of Spain.
Figure 1: Distribution of estimated topic proportions for Spain