J ournalists, pollsters, and pundits use categories of political analysis that they do not always clearly define and whose meanings are ambiguous. To make sense of the political rhetoric even the informed public must struggle hard. A single news analysis in the New York Times used the following ambiguous expressions: "social conservatism," "economic conservatism," "pragmatic conservatives," "do...

Analyses of text corpora over time can reveal trends in beliefs, interest, and sentiment about a topic. We focus on views expressed about artificial intelligence (AI) in the New York Times over a 30-year period. General interest, awareness, and discussion about AI has waxed and waned since the field was founded in 1956. We present a set of measures that captures levels of engagement, measures o...

In March 1996, some five years into an economic recovery, the New York Times ran a series of front-page articles entitled, "Downsizing in America." The stories chronicled the fortunes (and misfortunes) of American workers recently downsized and restructured out of their jobs. The series fueled ongoing concern and public debate about the changing prospects for U.S. workers, particularly those wi...

"Chaos," "disarray," "unprecedented political wrangling," Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson on bended knee pleading for a lifeline, and President George W. Bush warning, "if money isn't loosened up, this sucker could go down [2]." These were the dramatic scenes in Washington yesterday where the historic $700 billion bailout plan now looks very much in doubt, The New York Times, Wall Street Journ...

Intersectional scholarship argues that women of color have distinct experiences of rape compared to white women and highlights their relative invisibility as victims compared to white women victims in news media. While the bulk of intersectional work has examined such issues within one nation and particularly within the US, in an era of increasingly transnationalized media content, we explore s...

The independence of editorial content from advertisers’ influence is a cornerstone of journalistic ethics. In this paper we test whether this independence is observed in practice in the financial print media. We find that some publications that recommend mutual funds are more likely to recommend those of past advertisers, controlling for observable product characteristics such as sales loads, e...

The number of losses due to the 1932-34 Famine in Ukraine has been the subject of many studies and controversies (Commission on the Ukrainian Famine, 1988; Kulchytskyj, 2003; Wolowyna, 2007). The different estimates vary from around 2.6 millions to more than 10 millions. The figure of 10 million, extensively used by the government of Ukraine and some Ukrainian diaspora leaders, seems to be base...

On a recent Sunday morning, The Times-Picayune, a newspaper from New Orleans, carried news that two young people had been arrested for an arson death, that a jury had convicted a man of killing a waitress in a robbery, and that a 15-year-old escapee from a youth detention facility had been recaptured. Those three stories were among the six main stories making up the first two pages of the local...

I nternational trade has become a contentious topic in many industrial democracies, including the United States. In sharp contrast to earlier periods, President Bush was barely able to secure fast track or trade promotion authority in the Trade Act of 2002. In the end, the act survived three votes in the House of Representatives, twice by a one-vote margin and once by three votes. Trade has als...

Media outlets often bias their news reports. It can be difficult to test the motives behind such biased reporting. We develop models of news provision that detail how the environment and preferences affect demand for, and provision of, news. We examine the implications of these models of media bias, and then test the predictions using weather reports by the New York Times in the late 19th centu...