Assystem (Morocco)

The ability of news media to criticize the executive branch of government is central to media freedom and a marker of meaningful democratization. Existing indices use scoring criteria or expert surveys to develop country year measures of media criticism. In this article, we introduce a computationally inexpensive, granular, and fully open-source method for estimating media criticism using à la carte (ALC) word embedding. We validate our approach with a dataset of Arabic-language news media comprising 8.5m articles. An applied example shows how researchers can use our technique to provide credible estimates of changes in media criticism in the aftermath of a coup. A series of experiments demonstrates the method works even with sparse data. Separate analyses with synthetic news data demonstrate that the method extends to other languages. Taken together, our approach points to new possibilities in the monitoring and measurement of media freedom within authoritarian and democratizing settings.