Frequency Analysis as a Way of Uncovering News Foci: Evidence from the Guardian and the New York Times

Abstract

Institutions or people can express their political stances or attitudes toward a specific topic if they keep using some words rather than others repetitively and consistently. This study uses the corpus linguistic technique of frequency to examine the influence of the country where the newspaper is published on its agenda and coverage using a corpus of about 7 million words of news articles about Libya and Qaddafi in the Guardian (Britain) and the New York Times (the U.S.) from 2009 to 2013. The compiled corpus is divided into three time periods, namely: before, during, and after the 2011 Arab uprisings. The analysis shows that the two newspapers had different news foci/themes in the three investigated time periods, and that they are influenced by the stock of ideas circulating in the culture in which they are working. Both newspapers covered more news of events that draw the attention of the people of the countries where they are located and published. The paper concludes that there is a strong relationship between media and politics where media is a central arena for viewing the political events.

A Corpus-Driven Study of Terms Used to Refer to Articles and Methods in Research Abstracts in the Fields of Economics, Education, English Literature, Nursing, and Political Science

“…Tognini-Bonelli (2001, p. 86) argues that "the unexpectedness of the findings derived from corpus evidence leads to the conclusion that intuition is not comprehensively reliable as a source of information about language." In the present study, the corpus linguistic technique of frequency is mainly used to generate a list of all words in the corpus under study, and then compare and contrast the results with the frequency lists of other corpora and sub-corpora (Haider, 2017;Haider, 2019b;Haider, 2019c).…”

Die Medienberichterstattung zur Vermögens- und Erbschaftsbesteuerung in Deutschland: eine korpuslinguistische Analyse

“…Zum anderen wurden die Stichworte mittels KWIC-Konkordanzen einer eingehenden Analyse unterzogen. KWIC ("keywords-in-context")-Konkordanzen ermöglichen es zu untersuchen, welche Art von Worten ein bestimmtes Schlüsselwort umgeben (Haider 2017;Mautner 2015). Letztlich wurde die inverse Dokumenthäufigkeit von Wörtern berechnet, um festzustellen, welche Worte in einzelnen Zeitungen einzigartig sind und somit nicht oder nur sehr selten 7 Mit den folgenden Stichworten wurden die Zeitungsartikel ausgewählt: Vermögenssteuer, Vermögensteuer, Vermögensbesteuerung, Vermögenbesteuerung, Vermögensabgabe, Vermögenabgabe, Reichensteuer, Erbschaftssteuer, Erbschaftsteuer, Erbschaftsbesteuerung, Erbschaftbesteuerung, Erbschaftsabgabe, Erbschaftabgabe, Reichenabgabe, Reichenbesteuerung.…”