Greetings, everyone. We are delighted to have been invited to author our first Bad Hessians guest post. We are a couple of graduate students in the sociology department at University of North Carolina – Brandon Gorman and Charles Seguin. Our post is about a project we began last year after we noticed that, during the Arab Spring, between January 25th and February 11th 2011, western media completely shifted from describing Hosni Mubarak as a “key US ally” to an “entrenched dictator.” This made us wonder – what structures US media attention to foreign leaders?
Scholars have studied media coverage of foreign leaders and countries in the past, but these studies have generally been based on single cases or small-n comparisons. We wanted to look at coverage of a wide range of foreign leaders across a long time span. In order to gather these data, we wrote a Python script to scrape the New York Times, alongside other media outlets, for mentions of foreign leaders from 1950 to 2008. We focused on countries contained in the Correlates of War Project datasets. These include 165 countries—from small island nations to the world’s largest and most influential countries.
In order to scrape these media outlets, we first had to build a database of foreign leaders. We began by using the Archigos dataset, which provides names of foreign leaders and the years in which they were in power. The names in this dataset formed basic search terms, which then had to be refined to match specific spellings of leaders’ names used in the media. Iran’s Mohammad Mossadeq, for example, is referred to alternatively as “Mohamed Mossadeq”, “Mohammad Mossadegh”, “Mohammad Mosadeq”, etc. Likewise, one Armenian leader, Levon Ter-Petrosyan, had four different spellings of his last name. We’re very close to having a finalized dataset here (after far too many iterations) but there may be a few errors to deal with.
In the first stage of this project, we are looking strictly at the quantity of media attention as opposed to framing or sentiment analysis – although in later stages we plan to categorize the full text of the articles using text classification. For this stage, we scraped the yearly number of articles for each foreign leader and merged these data with other political science datasets such as the CoW, PITF, and Polity IV. We’re using these data to test a number of hypotheses related to media attention of foreign leaders, as well as more general sociological theories of media attention and politics; for now we’ll just give some descriptive tables.
Here are the thirty most covered leaders in the New York Times from 1950-2008:
Notice that while many of these leaders are heads of large, powerful countries such as the USSR, many are not.
We can break this down further into the leader-years with the most coverage. Each entry in the next table represents the number of articles mentioning a specific leader in a given year.
At a glance, these years and leaders make a lot of sense. Years when the US was at war with Iraq saw high coverage to Saddam Hussein. We can also see the influence of the Cuban Missile Crisis with Kruschev and Castro in the early 1960s, Nasser and the Suez Crisis in the mid-1950s, Sadat and the Egyptian-Israeli peace treaty in the late 1970s, and so forth.
Finally the relative share of attention to different regions has changed over time. The figure below shows the percentage of New York Times articles mentioning foreign leaders by region. Note that this is both a function of the (generally increasing) number of nation-states within these regions over time and the amount of attention each leader is getting.
Europe tends to dominate the field, but there are notable exceptions. Notice the spike in coverage of Middle Eastern leaders around 1979 during the oil crisis, and again around 2003 during the second Gulf War. It seems like there may be a trend towards more diversity in coverage – but it’s hard to parse out in figures like these because of countries popping in-and-out-of-existence between 1950 and 2008 – notice, for instance, the rise in attention share to Sub-Saharan Africa after decolonization.
This is just a teaser. You’ll have to wait for next year’s ASA for our real results. We know it’s hard but trust us – it’ll be worth the wait.