Measuring Media Criticism with ALC Word Embeddings

Public confidence in Congress, the government, and social institutions has reached new lows. Healthy skepticism may have given way to corrosive cynicism. Some media watchers and critics blame the media for their preoccupation with the game and strategy of politics rather than social problems and their solution. Others deny that changes in news have affected the quality of democracy or the depth of political alienation. Studies that we have conducted over the past four years show that subtle changes in the way news stories are framed can affect consumers' responses, activating their cynicism when strategic or conflict-oriented frames are used. The studies directly implicate media framing of political news in activating, if not creating, cynicism about campaigns, policy, and governance and imply that cynicism about the news media may be an indirect consequence.

On digital platforms, users can express public opinions in relation to the content of major organizations, e.g. public service broadcasters. Although media criticism has been a subject of scholarly interest, research has not primarily regarded communicative aspects of media criticism, despite such criticism potentially changing the premises for e.g. social media news reporting as a discursive practice. Building on a concept of communicative acts, this study investigates news media criticism in comments on a Facebook news post by Swedish public service broadcaster SVT on electricity housekeeping. Eleven news media critical arguments were identified according to two research questions – 1) what is the object of the criticism; 2) what is the communicative purpose of it? – resulting in seven groups of arguments. Focusing on both single instances of argument groups and combinations of groups within individual comments, the study emphasizes the communicative dynamics of news media criticism in altering between objects and purposes. Even though the result is heterogenous, some tendencies arise. Unlike constructive criticism, meant to change news reporting by media’s own standards, a majority of the most common argument groups consist of those who express strategic criticism, seemingly aiming to change media perceptions among a general news audience. Since this criticism regularly also addresses politics, the study further stresses the possibility of viewing media criticism as extended into e.g. political criticism.

At this time of the year, there are the usual platitudes and rhetoric about "media freedom" in the Pacific. The Fiji Times, for example, complained in an editorial about politicians with a "misguided theory" that Fiji was not ready for a critical and aggresssive media because of the traditional system of values and its developing nation status.

This article introduces and overviews New Testament media criticism. Media criticism is an emerging biblical methodology that encompasses four related fields: orality studies, social memory theory, performance criticism, and the Bible in modern media. The article addresses the methodological foundations of these fields and reviews recent contributions in each of them.

Just because a nation regularly holds elections does not mean the path to democratization—and media freedom—is smooth. Chapter 4 shows that external measures indicate that Kenya has more press freedom than neighbouring Uganda and Rwanda, and journalists in the country perceive that to be true and have an optimistic outlook. However, data show ups and downs of media freedom that have mirrored varying political administrations and events, including spurts of post-election violence, largely due to politicians being deeply entangled with the news media. Despite the challenges, the nation has more press freedom than its neighbours, which journalists attribute to the vast international connections that the country and its leaders have, as well as an empowered civil society, which stems from both a space for dissent given by public officials as well as the culture and spirit of Kenyans which has promoted the growth of human rights, including media freedoms.

The enlightenment activity of the media is aimed at raising the cultural level of people, is associated with the dissemination of information, knowledge, norms and values from the field of intangible production. The purpose of the article is to describe the main directions of enlightenment activities of the media. It talks about the importance of the enlightenment function of journalism and how to implement it. Informing consists in familiarising society with any facts or results of intellectual activity – politics, philosophy, religion, science, culture, art. These data contain socially significant knowledge, norms, values and correspond to humanistic tendencies of social development. Popularisation means the presentation of information in a form accessible to a mass audience. Media criticism is considered in the article as the ability to evaluate, analyse, interpret media content. Propaganda as a type of enlightenment activity is aimed at spreading knowledge and other information in order to form certain views, ideas, principles. The materials published in the weeklies “Rossiyskaya Gazeta” (Russian Gazette), “Argumenty i Fakty” (Arguments and Facts), “Literaturnaya Gazeta” (Literary Newspaper) are involved in the research. The main attention is paid to the current state of enlightenment in the press, its impact on the social role of journalism.

Freedom of the press has always been boisterous, from the earliest days of the American republic, but it has always been viewed as an essential check on government power. In the 20th century, when news media generally adhered to common (and high) standards of objectivity, public trust was robust. In the 21st century, social media have revived an earlier tradition of highly opinionated information and questionable accuracy. When everyone is a publisher, and even basic facts are often in dispute, how can the news consumer know what to believe? Public television has retained the trust of a remarkable range of ideological competitors, but views of other media now reflect sharp political divides. Can anything be done to restore widespread trust in the news media?

Freedom of the press is one of our country's indispensable blessings. The news media are the senses of a democracy. The senses are of value, as we all know, even when they include not only touch, sight and hearing, but also pain perception and smell. Thomas Jefferson correctly identified "eternal vigilance" as "the price of freedom," and vigilance without senses is difficult to imagine.Yet who in the medical profession has not lately been distressed by the spate of gaudy reporting that has attended medical progress as well as unproved experimentation? Lest anyone ask him who has not sinned to . . .

The annaliste historian Fernand Braudel asserts that dealing with the concept of liberty, “in all its connotations including ‘taking liberties,’” is the distinguishing mark of western civilization, the socio‐political problem that most persistently occurs from the fifth century to the present. The liberty to communicate, to impart and receive information of all kinds, is at the heart of the western idea of liberty. “This process has never been peaceful; yet it is one of the secrets that explains Europe's progress” (Braudel 1993). The struggle for the practice of free “mass” communication begins with the emergence of newspapers in the seventeenth century, but the press freedoms gained over the next 300 years have been limited to print (→ Newspaper, History of; Freedom of the Press, Concept of). Even in the west a media‐blind right of free expression has never been established, and newer media from film through broadcasting and beyond have been subject to the imposition, or the attempted imposition, of specific controls.

The annaliste historian Fernand Braudel asserts that dealing with the concept of liberty, “in all its connotations including ‘taking liberties,’” is the distinguishing mark of western civilization, the socio‐political problem that most persistently occurs from the fifth century to the present. The liberty to communicate, to impart and receive information of all kinds, is at the heart of the western idea of liberty. “This process has never been peaceful; yet it is one of the secrets that explains Europe's progress” (Braudel 1993). The struggle for the practice of free “mass” communication began with the emergence of newspapers in the seventeenth century, but the press freedoms gained over the next 300 years have been limited to print (→ Newspaper, History of; Freedom of the Press, Concept of). Even in the west, a media‐blind right of free expression has never been established, and newer media from film through broadcasting and beyond have been subject to the imposition, or the attempted imposition, of specific controls.

Background: Despite a 2010 Kenyan constitutional amendment limiting members of elected public bodies to < two-thirds of the same gender, only 22 percent of the 12th Parliament members inaugurated in 2017 were women. Investigating gender bias in the media is a useful tool for understanding socio-cultural barriers to implementing legislation for gender equality. Natural language processing (NLP) methods, such as word embedding and sentiment analysis, can efficiently quantify media biases at a scope previously unavailable in the social sciences.Methods: We trained GloVe and word2vec word embeddings on text from 1998 to 2019 from Kenya’s Daily Nation newspaper. We measured gender bias in these embeddings and used sentiment analysis to predict quantitative sentiment scores for sentences surrounding female leader names compared to male leader names.Results: Bias in leadership words for men and women measured from Daily Nation word embeddings corresponded to temporal trends in men and women’s participation in political leadership (i.e., parliamentary seats) using GloVe (correlation 0.8936, p = 0.0067, r2 = 0.799) and word2vec (correlation 0.844, p = 0.0169, r2 = 0.712) algorithms. Women continue to be associated with domestic terms while men continue to be associated with influence terms, for both regular gender words and female and male political leaders’ names. Male words (e.g., he, him, man) were mentioned 1.84 million more times than female words from 1998 to 2019. Sentiment analysis showed an increase in relative negative sentiment associated with female leaders (p = 0.0152) and an increase in positive sentiment associated with male leaders over time (p = 0.0216).Conclusion: Natural language processing is a powerful method for gaining insights into and quantifying trends in gender biases and sentiment in news media. We found evidence of improvement in gender equality but also a backlash from increased female representation in high-level governmental leadership.

Text classification often faces the problem of imbalanced training data. This is true in sentiment analysis and particularly prominent in emotion classification where multiple emotion categories are very likely to produce naturally skewed training data. Different sampling methods have been proposed to improve classification performance by reducing the imbalance ratio between training classes. However, data sparseness and the small disjunct problem remain obstacles in generating new samples for minority classes when the data are skewed and limited. Methods to produce meaningful samples for smaller classes rather than simple duplication are essential in overcoming this problem. In this paper, we present an oversampling method based on word embedding compositionality which produces meaningful balanced training data. We first use a large corpus to train a continuous skip-gram model to form a word embedding model maintaining the syntactic and semantic integrity of the word features. Then, a compositional algorithm based on recursive neural tensor networks is used to construct sentence vectors based on the word embedding model. Finally, we use the SMOTE algorithm as an oversampling method to generate samples for the minority classes and produce a fully balanced training set. Evaluation results on two quite different tasks show that the feature composition method and the oversampling method are both important in obtaining improved classification results. Our method effectively addresses the data imbalance issue and consequently achieves improved results for both sentiment and emotion classification.

This article examines the diversification of the news media in Korea since the 1990s as a result of deregulation and democratization. It also examines the impact of media diversity on the public’s use patterns and its trust in the media, and evaluates the current state of freedom of the press in Korea. Contrary to scholarly research, which holds that freedom of the press has increased significantly over the last decade, this study found that the Korean press still faces a variety of restraints despite improvements in a few areas.

A decade after the Jasmine Revolution ushered in the Arab Spring, Tunisia remains a bright spot for democratic reform and press freedom in the Middle East and North Africa. However, this transition is still tentative, and the reforms remain fragile. This study examines Tunisian journalism students ( N = 193) to understand their motivations for earning a degree in the field and how they conceptualize journalism’s role in society. By studying Tunisian journalism students’ motivations for entering this transforming field, and how those students perceive their pre-professional roles, we may gain a glimpse into how they are internalizing the lessons of the revolution. The results of this survey showed that students emphasized social responsibility motivations for studying journalism. Participants most strongly valued the role of journalists in promoting tolerance and cultural diversity, educating the audience, letting people express their views, reporting things as they are, and supporting national development. These results suggest that Tunisian students view their work as assuming monitorial and interventionist roles.

The press in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) is closely tied to its communist sociopolitical structures. The North Korean press finds its modus operandi in the ‘Soviet Communist’ theory for its relationship with its government. This study examines the press laws and regulations in North Korea, pursuing three questions: (1) What is the status of the press as a sociopolitical institution in North Korea?; (2) What is the constitutional and statutory scheme relating to press freedom in North Korea?; and (3) What is the impact of the statutory mechanisms on the press in North Korea? The press and other mass media in North Korea are totally controlled by the Korean Worker's Party. No dissenting voice is permitted in the news media. North Korea recognizes freedom of the press as a Constitutional right of their citizens. Nevertheless, there is a considerable disparity between the constitutional guarantee of press freedom and its practical application. In the name of ‘collective good’ as de...