Methodology

Media Cloud Overview

Our data source, Media Cloud is a joint project created by the MIT Center for Civic Media and the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. The website allows users to search individual media sources or across media sources by grouping into collections. The media collections span over 100 countries and 1.4 billion media stories. Media Cloud crawls approximately 59,000 sources and 611,000 stories every day.

Queries

Keywords

Utilizing the datasets stored within Media Cloud, we used the following queries in our research:

• All Stories
• Stories with “socialist” OR “socialism”
• Stories with “socialist” AND “democrat” within 15 words of one another
• Stories with “socialist” OR “socialism” AND “green new deal”
• Stories with “socialist” OR “socialism” AND “squad” OR “aoc” OR “alexandria ocasio-cortez” OR “ilhan omar” OR “rashida tlaib”
• Stories with “socialist” OR “socialism” AND “medicare for all”

Timeline

All searches were for the duration of 2019.

Definitions of Progressive and Conservative Media

We use media source filters provided by Media Cloud. Their categorization is based on “relative number of tweets of election story urls by Clinton vs. Trump retweeters.” This leads to five quintiles - Left, Center Left, Center, Center Right, Right. This is a categorization based not on the ownership of media, the content of the story, nor the inclination of journalists. The list of media sources in each of these categories can be found here, along with samples of the major sources within each category.

• Left
• Center Left
• Center
• Center Right
• Right

For our research, we categorized “progressive media” as “left” and “center left” sources. We categorized “conservative media” as “right” and “center right” sources. We categorized “all media” as all five filters.

Country and Language Scope

This data is not restricted to the United States, nor is it limited to English language media. Media Cloud pulls from multiple countries and languages. More details can be found here.

Process

Objectives for users

For the purpose of building this website and analysis, we identified our primary end user persona to be a political media researcher interested in how the media reports on political ideologies. We worked towards one specific case for this persona, analysis of media coverage of the socialism in progressive and conservative sources. We hope this research is of interest to those working in this field.

Objectives for ourselves

We also worked to create user value for a second user persona: ourselves, as students. We used this project to conduct a piece of original research using Media Cloud, and to display that research in a custom built website. In particular, we focused on creating narrative visualizations. We built the front end of this site in HTML, CSS, and JS. We cleaned our data in Python. And we followed a scrum process throughout the project. In the spirit of open source movement, we have linked to our github code repositories and scrum board detailing each step of our process below.

Code

Here is our github page!