Automatic Discovery of Partisan campaigns, Agenda Setting and Political Spin in Press releases

Press releases (PR) serve as an important tool by which political figures (and business) communicate their messages to news editors and journalists, which in turn deliver it to their audience. Indeed, much of the media coverage of political events is based on, responds to or quotes press releases submitted by politicians. With the increasing number of PR communications it is important to provide journalists with tools for easy processing of press releases at large scale. In this paper we present a system for automatic discovery of agenda setting efforts, framing strategies and political spin as evident in a large corpus of press releases. The system combines topic models, sentiment analysis and autoregressive-distributed-lag models. We automatically analyze over 130000 PR communications released by members of the House and the Senate in the years 2010-2013 and find significant differences in topic ownership and sentiment as well as significant evidence for coordinated campaigns for agenda setting and political spin. We provide a detailed analysis of agenda setting campaigns related to two important issues in American politics: the health care reform and energy related issues.