The assessment of political news in the media agenda: a methodological proposal for more extensive content analysis

Abstract

Evaluating the tone of assessment of the news has been a frequent concern for different theoretical perspectives in the field of political communication. Among these perspectives, Agenda Setting theory has emphasized addressing the climate of political news analysis in investigations within and outside of election contexts. However, in most of these studies, they continue to repeat “positive”, “neutral” and “negative” as categories that process an evaluative tone, as if these adjectives were well defined. This investigation proposes a general objective of creating a more useful and expansive Assessment index that is composed of various complementary variables: the assessment of the main event/occasions/activities of the news story, the assessment of the actors and the evaluation of the role of the State referred to in each article. As an example, this study employs a quantitative analysis of the journalistic content published by daily Argentine newspapers Clarín, La Nación, and Página/12 on the 2008 conflict between President Cristina Fernández’ government and the major agricultural corporations in the country, following the Executive decision that hoped to raise export taxes on principal raw materials produced by this sector. The application of these methodological tools along with the descriptive corpus results in showing a predominately overall negative tone of assessment. However, a disaggregated analysis of the behavior of each of the index variables allows a glimpse toward how a different evaluation of the events, the actors and the public policies in each newspaper can demonstrate their editorial stances.