scholarly journals Large scale analysis of violent death count in daily newspapers to quantify bias and censorship

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
marco casolino
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Daily Newspapers ◽  
Large Scale Analysis ◽  
Foreign Countries ◽  
The Press ◽  
Show Evidence ◽  
Changes Over Time

Abstract In this work we develop a series of techniques and tools to determine and quantify the presence of bias and censorship in newspapers. These algorithms are tested analyzing the occurrence of keywords ‘killed’ and ‘suicide’ ( ‘morti’, ‘suicidio’ in Italian) and their changes over time, gender and reported location on the complete online archives (42 million records) of the major US newspaper ( The New York Times ) and the three major Italian ones ( Il Corriere della Sera, La Repubblica, La Stampa ). Using these tools, since the Italian language distinguishes between the female and male cases, we find the presence of gender bias in all Italian newspapers, with reported single female deaths to be about one-third of those involving single men. Analyzing the historical trends, we show evidence of censorship in Italian newspapers both during World War 1 and during the Italian Fascist regime. Censorship in all countries during World Wars and in Italy during the Fascist period is a historically ascertained fact, but so far there was no estimate on the amount on censorship in newspaper reporting: in this work we estimate that about 75% of domestic deaths and suicides were not reported. This is also confirmed by statistical analysis of the distribution of the least significant digit of the number of reported deaths. We also find that the distribution function of the number of articles vs. the number of deaths reported in articles follows a power law, which is broken (with fewer articles being written) when reporting on few deaths occurring in foreign countries. The lack of articles is found to grow with geographical distance from the nation where the newspaper is being printed. Whereas the assessment of the truth of a single article or the debunking of what are now called ‘fake news’ requires specific fact-checking and becomes more difficult as time goes by, these methods can be be used in historical analysis and to evaluate quantitatively the amount of bias and censorship present in other printed or online publication and can thus contribute to quantitatively assess the freedom of the press in a given country. Furthermore, they can be applied in wider contexts such as the evaluation of bias toward specific ethnic groups or specific accidents.

Rose-Colored Glasses: Competing Media Perceptions of the Pete Rose Betting Scandal

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-21
Author(s):  
Craig Greenham
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Major League Baseball ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Press Coverage ◽  
The New York Times ◽  
Local Media ◽  
The Press ◽  
Major League ◽  
Market Coverage ◽  
The City

In a 2004 autobiography, legendary player Pete Rose confessed to gambling on baseball games, even those that included his Cincinnati Reds. The passage of time has clarified much about the betting scandal that plagued Major League Baseball (MLB) in 1989. Over the course of the six-month saga, Rose’s denials and his adversarial relationship with the Commissioner’s Office shrouded MLB’s investigation in controversy. This study explores the press coverage of the scandal in 1989 and determines that the Cincinnati press was more sympathetic to, and supportive of Rose than out-of-market coverage, represented in this investigation by The New York Times. These findings are consistent with previous research that indicates that local media favors hometown institutions during times of crisis. This study expands that theory by demonstrating that favoritism extends to individual players whose connection to the city is significant, and furthers our understanding of the media’s role in shaping the narratives of scandal.

Cross Talk in the Press

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Susan Scott Parrish
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Cross Talk ◽  
Social Issues ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Press ◽  
Human Practices ◽  
Human Failure

This chapter considers the mainstream white public's growing dissatisfaction with the particular forms of representation that the flood seemed to produce. On May 29, 1927, the New York Times complained of the flood that “the very sweep of such a tragedy makes it hard to grasp it in its full significance.” A June 15 editorial in The Nation agreed: “people can stand only so much calamity. After a while it begins to pall and finally it has no meaning whatever.” The flood had become unsatisfying news because of both its scale and its duration. What was also unsatisfying was the messy cadaverous muck of human failure. Meanwhile, as the social issues and human practices that had turned cyclical overflow into disaster in the first place began to manifest themselves still more visibly in the disaster's developments, a print practice of exposure and blame emerged.

THE PEDIATRICIAN AND THE PUBLIC

PEDIATRICS ◽  
1953 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 88-95
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
New York Times ◽  
World Health ◽  
Executive Board ◽  
The Public ◽  
Social Council ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Press ◽  
Health Organization ◽  
Emergency Fund

The General Assembly, the Social Commission and the Economic and Social Council of the World Health Organization are to discuss the future of the United Nations' International Children's Emergency Fund during this year of 1953. Editorials have appeared in the press (New York Times, Apr. 6, 1953 and Chicago Daily Sun-Times, May 27, 1953) criticizing our government for not having paid U.N.I.C.E.F. its 1953 voluntary contribution of $9,814,000. A number of Fellows of the American Academy of Pediatrics have become concerned as to the plight in which U.N.I.C.E.F. finds itself and requested the matter be brought to the attention of the Executive Board at its meeting May 28-31, 1953 in Evanston. It was the opinion of the members contacting the Board that the work of the U.N.I.C.E.F. should be continued. The presence of this item on the agenda inspired the preparation of the enclosed resume of the evolution of W.H.O. and U.N.I.C.E.F. As the Executive Board found this information of value, they have suggested that it might be made available to other Fellows through publication in your section in Pediatrics. Our members may also be interested in the resolution passed by the Executive Board after deliberating on this subject.

scholarly journals Policy Considerations for Using Forests to Mitigate Carbon Dioxide Emissions

2001 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 241-242 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sandra Brown ◽  
R. Neil Sampson ◽  
Bernhard Schlamadinger ◽  
John Kinsman
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Carbon Dioxide Emissions ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Forest Growth ◽  
Christian Science ◽  
Climate Change Negotiations ◽  
Christian Science Monitor ◽  
The Press ◽  
International Climate

A recent article in Nature, “Soil Fertility Limits Carbon Sequestration by Forest Ecosystems in a CO2-Enriched Atmosphere” by Oren and colleagues[1], has been widely reported on, and often misinterpreted, by the press. The article dampens enthusiasm for accelerated forest growth due to CO2 fertilization and puts in question the fringe theory that the world’s forests can provide an automatic mitigation feedback. We agree that these results increase our understanding of the global carbon cycle. At the same time, their relevance in the context of the international climate change negotiations is much more complicated than portrayed by newspapers such as the New York Times (“Role of Trees in Curbing Greenhouse Gases is Challenged”, May 24, 2001) and the Christian Science Monitor (“Trees No Savior for Global Warming”, May 25, 2001).

scholarly journals Digital Paywall Design: Implications for Content Demand and Subscriptions

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sinan Aral ◽  
Paramveer S. Dhillon
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Business Models ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Total Content ◽  
Policy Changes ◽  
Activity Data ◽  
Scientific Discussion ◽  
Managerial Implications ◽  
Net Revenue

Most online content publishers have moved to subscription-based business models regulated by digital paywalls. But the managerial implications of such freemium content offerings are not well understood. We, therefore, utilized microlevel user activity data from the New York Times to conduct a large-scale study of the implications of digital paywall design for publishers. Specifically, we use a quasi-experiment that varied the (1) quantity (the number of free articles) and (2) exclusivity (the number of available sections) of free content available through the paywall to investigate the effects of paywall design on content demand, subscriptions, and total revenue. The paywall policy changes we studied suppressed total content demand by about 9.9%, reducing total advertising revenue. However, this decrease was more than offset by increased subscription revenue as the policy change led to a 31% increase in total subscriptions during our seven-month study, yielding net positive revenues of over $230,000. The results confirm an economically significant impact of the newspaper’s paywall design on content demand, subscriptions, and net revenue. Our findings can help structure the scientific discussion about digital paywall design and help managers optimize digital paywalls to maximize readership, revenue, and profit. This paper was accepted by Chris Forman, information systems.

The “Not-So-Genial” Conspiracy: The New York Times and Six Presidential “Honeymoons,” 1953–1993

1995 ◽  
Vol 72 (4) ◽  
pp. 841-850 ◽  
Author(s):  
William J. Hughes
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Content Analysis ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Front Page ◽  
The New York Times ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
The Press

Scholars and political actors generally believe that presidents enjoy a period of sanguine rapport with the press gallery during a honeymoon of about two months at the beginning of each new administration. The honeymoon is characterized by a minimum of hostile questions by reporters and relatively gentle media treatment of the new president. However, this content analysis of front-page headlines in the New York Times during the first 100 days of the Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, and Clinton administrations suggests that all honeymoons are not equal.

scholarly journals Constructing Narrative Event Evolutionary Graph for Script Event Prediction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Zhongyang Li ◽  
Xiao Ding ◽  
Ting Liu
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
New York Times ◽  
Inference Problem ◽  
Candidate Event ◽  
Event Prediction ◽  
Subsequent Event ◽  
Narrative Event ◽  
Event Chains ◽  
Event Representations

Script event prediction requires a model to predict the subsequent event given an existing event context. Previous models based on event pairs or event chains cannot make full use of dense event connections, which may limit their capability of event prediction. To remedy this, we propose constructing an event graph to better utilize the event network information for script event prediction. In particular, we first extract narrative event chains from large quantities of news corpus, and then construct a narrative event evolutionary graph (NEEG) based on the extracted chains. NEEG can be seen as a knowledge base that describes event evolutionary principles and patterns. To solve the inference problem on NEEG, we present a scaled graph neural network (SGNN) to model event interactions and learn better event representations. Instead of computing the representations on the whole graph, SGNN processes only the concerned nodes each time, which makes our model feasible to large-scale graphs. By comparing the similarity between input context event representations and candidate event representations, we can choose the most reasonable subsequent event. Experimental results on widely used New York Times corpus demonstrate that our model significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baseline methods, by using standard multiple choice narrative cloze evaluation.

How and Why the U.S. Finally Joined the Berne International Copyright Convention

1989 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-90
Author(s):  
Michiel van Bremen ◽  
David J. Thibodeau
Keyword(s):  
New York ◽  
Los Angeles ◽  
Copyright Protection ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The United States ◽  
Washington Post ◽  
Berne Convention ◽  
Los Angeles Times ◽  
Daily Newspapers ◽  
The U.S

On October 31, 1988, in a ceremony at the Beverly Hilton Hotel attended by Congressmen and members of the artistic community. President Reagan signed the 1988 Berne Convention implementation Act. This Act allowed the United States to join the international Berne Convention lor the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works as of March, 1989. Although the Act somewhat expands the availability of U.S. copyright protection to European atilhors, it affects U.S. authors' rights even less, practically speaking. Perhaps that explains why only three major U.S. daily newspapers, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, briefly mentioned this historic moment for the internal ional copyright environment. This article explores why and how the U.S. has joined the Berne Convention after more than 102 years, and the effect that this will have un the availability of U.S. copyright protection to foreign authors. Before considering the technical consequences of the Berne Convention Implementation Act, we give a brief overview of two relevant international copyright treaties and their major differences.

Allen Dulles and Covert Intervention

2019 ◽  
pp. 42-63
Author(s):  
David P. Hadley
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
New York ◽  
National Security ◽  
New York Times ◽  
The United States ◽  
Eisenhower Administration ◽  
Covert Action ◽  
The Press ◽  
Ultimate Outcome ◽  
Substantial Degree

This chapter examines the CIA in one of its most activist periods in the 1950s, under the leadership of Allen Dulles. An advocate for covert action and a man with considerable connections to the press, Dulles oversaw successful CIA interventions in Iran (Operation TPAJAX) in 1953 and Guatemala (Operation PBSUCCESS) in 1954. Though the ultimate outcome of the interventions would prove detrimental to the countries involved and to the United States’ own national security interests, the CIA and the Eisenhower administration viewed them as unalloyed successes. The press also generally did not report that the United States had been involved—with some notable exceptions. Dulles leaked details of the operations to a friendly reporter, so the CIA could take credit for its activities without formal acknowledgment. The New York Times also acquiesced to a request to keep a reporter out of Guatemala, but internal deliberations reveal a substantial degree of caution on the part of the Times’s management where the CIA was concerned.

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