Roberto Franzosi article examines issues related to using newspapers as research material. Some of the comments in the article related to the measurement error and coding schemes are a bit complex to get your head around but there are many great points regarding the way different newspapers report their news.
Franzosi notes how ‘some scholars see newspapers as integral parts of the ideological apparatus of capitalist society and agencies for reproduction of these societies’. ‘ According to this school of thought selection of news is not random - it reflects the intentions, will and interests of dominant economic groups. News coverage particularly misrepresents labor and class issues.’
With this point, the situation of William Martin Murphy during the 1913 Lockout springs to mind. Murphy was head of the Dublin United Tramway Company and also controlled the Irish Independant. James Larkin took the tram workers out on strike when Murphy wanted them to resign membership from the ITGWU. The strike of the tram workers began on August 26, 1913. The Evenning Herald was one of Murphy’s campaign papers and its attempt to support Murphy’s position is seen in the picture of the paper’s front page on the day the strike began. Despite the strike and its disruption the paper attempts to present a picture of minimal disturbance with the headline ‘HEIR EXAMPLE NOT FOLLOWED BY THE VAST BODY OF MEN’ and a photograph of a tram pronouncing ‘TRAMS WORKING AS USUAL’. Throw in a headline with allegations financial irregularities around Larkin’s wages and you have a good example of a newspaper trying to uphold what Franzosi calls the ‘interests of the dominant economic groups.’
The article makes an interesting point about bias in newspapers. When I look for bias in a report I may expect to find inaccurate statements but Franzosi refers to bias being detectable in a more subtle fashion. ‘Bias is likely to be silence or emphasise rather than false information...Language is a tool of media manipulation.’
The article is concluded by analysing the validity of newspaper data and newspaper data’s reliability. He says newspapers are reliable, because 'most conflict studies go through painstaking efforts to ensure that whatever is reported by newspapers is recorded without error.' On the other hand Frannzosi concludes data is often not valid, for the reason that ‘the higher the intensity of an event, the higher the probability of it being reported. Thus validity can be achieved simply by raising the threshold of events. However, this implies the loss of generality and of number of cases.’
This is something I noticed myself in looking through the papers in researching my thesis topic related to Northern Ireland between 1977 and 1979. By the late 1970s violence was an entrenched feature of northern society and this is reflected in the reporting of killings in the papers. I noticed how the deaths of a single civilian, solider, RUC officer or even lone bombing incident are mentioned in short articles in the papers. However, with an event such as the murder of Lord Louis Mountbatten the coverage surrounding the event was one of manifest outrage and it was the leading story in its aftermath. Obviously Mountbatten was a public figure but it is an example that serves to illustrate how newspapers can increase the validity of an incident.
Overall Franzosi article had a number of very interesting insights into issues of using newspapers as sources and had many points I will consider in my own research in the future.
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