Quantifying time-dependent Media Agenda and Public Opinion by topic modeling

TL;DR

This paper develops quantitative measures to analyze the dynamics of media and public agendas over time, revealing how topics influence public interest and media coverage bias using topic detection and entropy-based metrics.

Contribution

It introduces a novel methodology to quantify agenda diversity and bias, and models the complex feedback mechanisms between media coverage and public interest.

Findings

Public agenda is less diverse than media agenda.

Attractive topics focus public attention and reduce diversity.

Detected coverage bias in newspapers and agenda-setting dynamics.

Abstract

The mass media plays a fundamental role in the formation of public opinion, either by defining the topics of discussion or by making an emphasis on certain issues. Directly or indirectly, people get informed by consuming news from the media. Naturally, two questions appear: What are the dynamics of the agenda and how the people become interested in their different topics? These questions cannot be answered without proper quantitative measures of agenda dynamics and public attention. In this work we study the agenda of newspapers in comparison with public interests by performing topic detection over the news. We define Media Agenda as the distribution of topic's coverage by the newspapers and Public Agenda as the distribution of public interest in the same topic space. We measure agenda diversity as a function of time using the Shannon entropy and differences between agendas using the Jensen-Shannon distance. We found that the Public Agenda is less diverse than the Media Agenda, especially when there is a very attractive topic and the audience naturally focuses only on this one. Using the same methodology we detect coverage bias in newspapers. Finally, it was possible to identify a complex agenda-setting dynamics within a given topic where the least sold newspaper triggered a public debate via a positive feedback mechanism with social networks discussions which install the issue in the Media Agenda.