How Coverage Comparison Works

Overview

Main Currents compares news articles within a story across four categories: entity portrayal, framing analysis, rhetorical techniques, and source balance.

Each article is scored independently, and results are aggregated to show patterns across outlets and time periods.

The Four Categories

Entity Portrayal

An entity refers to a person, concept, organisation or event that is referenced in an article. We make best efforts to normalise these and link them to a wikipedia/wikidata webpage. We classify each entity along two dimensions.

Role

The role an entity plays in the narrative the article constructs. Most coverage can be modelled as a dialectic — a conflict between two opposing positions — giving rise to a protagonist and an antagonist. Other entities fall into neutral roles: experts cited for authority, victims used to humanise the story, or bystanders mentioned in passing. The exception is reactive, breaking-news reporting where no clear narrative has formed and entities are simply referenced for informational context.

Valence

How positively the language used to portray the entity within the article. Different outlets have different standards and guidelines for reporting and journalists have their own styles so rather than creating a universal valence metric we measure relative within the article using standard valence models. There are instances where protagonists that are portrayed negatively and the inverse showing some kind of conflict inherent in the coverage.

Example

The grid below shows how three outlets portray the same entity — the Prime Minister — with different roles and valence. Each dot represents one outlet’s portrayal, positioned by role (antagonist to protagonist) and valence (positive to negative):

Rhetorical Techniques

Persuasion tactics used in the writing, categorised by type: emotional appeal, logical fallacy, loaded language, and more. These have a set of predefined intensity modifiers for things like threat and alarm which are classified as high intensity and low intensity techniques such as credibility tactics.

Example

The stacked bar chart below shows technique counts per outlet. The crosshatch overlay marks high-intensity techniques. Notice the Daily Mail uses far more emotional appeal and language manipulation, whilst the BBC and Guardian lean on credibility tactics:

Framing Analysis

The apparent purpose behind the article: inform, persuade, attack, defend, or advocate and who benefits from that framing.

Example

The chart groups outlets by their dominant frame and strategy. Here the Guardian and BBC both use a responsibility frame, but the Guardian defends whilst the BBC informs. The Daily Mail uses a conflict frame with an attack strategy:

Source Balance

Source balance is a measure of how many sources are being presented with verifiable evidence. We do not currently verify the evidence.

Example

The scale below positions each outlet from one-sided (left) to balanced (right). The BBC scores highest at 82% with five sources cited, whilst the Daily Mail scores lowest at 25% with only one source: