To Do or Not to Do: the Role of Agendas for Action in Analyzing News Coverage of Violent Conflict

摘要

One critical function that news narratives perform is orienting action: Providing a selective, coherent account of events, they suggest what needs to be done, coordinating and motivating public agendas. The importance of news narratives' agendas for action has been particularly salient in the coverage of conflict (Wolfsfeld 1997, Robinson et al. 2010): Conflict spurns heated debates wherein advocated courses of action collide, while audiences rely heavily on various media to comprehend ongoing events. Keeping track of the cacophony of agendas advanced in print and online newspapers and magazines, social media, and other public discourse confronts news readers, journalists, decision makers, and scholars alike with a major challenge. Computer assisted analyses have the potential to help comprehending conflict news, distilling agendas for action and possibly predicting the mobilization of consensus and collective action (Snow and Benford 1988). This paper presents the INFOCORE consortium's ongoing efforts at automatically capturing agendas in conflict discourse, employing NLP technology and statistical analysis. We demonstrate the utility and potential of our approach using coverage of the Syrian chemical weapons crisis in 2013.