How Are the Economic Conditions and Political Alignment of a Newspaper Reflected in the Events They Report On?

The paper investigates relationship between world events as reported in newspapers and characteristics of the newspapers in terms of political alignment and economic conditions. We propose a novel methodology that includes selection, representation and clustering of the newspapers to analyse relationship of the events and characteristics of the newspaper. We represent world events by a set of concepts and content categories of the news articles reporting on the event. Each newspaper is represented by a set of events they reported about over several years. We investigate different similarity measures between the newspapers to see whether the newspapers with the same characteristics are reporting on similar events over a given time span. The results indicate: 1) the representation of the news events with the Wikipedia-concepts and DMOZ-categories appears an appropriate way to understand relationships between the newspapers, 2) economic conditions of the country of the newspaper publisher reflect better in Wikipedia-concepts than when using representation with DMOZ-categories, whereas for identifying politically aligned groups of newspapers, DMOZ-categories stand out more suitable, 3) for capturing economic groups, clustering using the Dynamic Time Warping similarity between the trend lines of newspapers is better aligned with the ground truth groups than others tested similarities, whereas for capturing political group, Jaccard distance using the frequent terms and Euclidean distance between the trend lines turn up more useful.