Measuring Media Freedom
By: Christopher Barrie, Neil Ketchley, Alexandra Siegel, Mosaab Bagdouri
Abstract:Ìý
The ability of news media to criticize government is a core pillar of media freedom and is often taken as evidence of meaningful democratization. Existing indices typically use scoring criteria or expert surveys to develop over-time measures of media freedom. In this article, we use the largest existing dataset of Arabic-language news to evaluate how political reporting about the government changes over the course of successful and failed democratic transitions in Egypt and Tunisia. Using entirely unsupervised ALC wordembedding techniques, we demonstrate how to generate temporally granular measurements of media criticism that closely correlate with measurements derived from expert surveys for both countries. Crucially, the technique we propose is computationally inexpensive, opensource, and cost-free—making it eminently scalable. Our work therefore points to new possibilities in the monitoring and measurement of media capture within authoritarian and transitional settings.
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