Application of Multiple Regressions & Network Agenda Setting theory on online newspapers coverage of Human Trafficking

• In Event: 3267 - Section on Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology Refereed Roundtables (1 hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: 2. News Media & Society

Abstract

Despite the accessibility of online news and availability of sophisticated methods for analyzing news content, very few studies have focused on the simultaneous examination of news coverage on human trafficking and audiences’ interpretations of this coverage from different sources. In this research, I have examined both journalists’ and commenters’ topic choices in coverage and discussion of human trafficking from the online platforms of three British newspapers covering the period 2009–2015. I used latent semantic analysis (LSA) to identify emergent topics in the corpus of newspaper articles and readers’ comments, and then quantitatively investigated topic preferences to identify convergence and divergence on the topics discussed by journalists and their readers. The findings indicate that the theories of “agenda setting” and of “active audience” are not mutually exclusive, and the scope of explanation of each depends partly on the specific topic or subtopic that is analyzed. Taking into account further theoretical concepts related to agenda setting, this study introduces the possibility of applying the new type of network agenda setting theory, to corpuses of digital text obtained through text analysis and subsequent statistical techniques on the same or different sociological and criminological topics

Authors

• Maria Eirini Papadouka, Middlesex University, UK

• Gabe Ignatow, University of North Texas