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This research paper investigates Cohesion Policy in the mass media by applying computational text analysis to a novel media dataset. Specifically, structural topic modelling and sentiment analysis is applied to online news, user comments and social media at multiple territorial levels. The dataset includes 4,000 news stories, 33,000 user comments, 3,700 posts and 19,500 tweets from Facebook and Twitter respectively, as well as comments and reactions. We discover a two-level hierarchy of descending sentiment on Cohesion policy news stories, whereby international media use more negative sentiment than EU web-native media at one level, and the national media in turn use more negative sentiment than regional level sources at the domestic level. The sentiment of user comments on news articles varies across our country cases, being mainly neutral or positive in Spain and overwhelmingly negative in the United Kingdom even in pro-European news sources. Finally, social media content on Facebook and Twitter is largely neutral, and dominated by official policy channels and stakeholders. We conclude that a territorially-targeted media strategy is needed to improve public appreciation of Cohesion policy, along with more emotive and topical social media activity in order engage and connect with citizens. ; COHESIFY Research paper 12. COHESIFY WP4 -- Task 4.1 & 4.3

This article explores the territorial and temporal patterns of EU cohesion policy media coverage. The topic content and tone of news are analysed using topic modelling and sentiment analysis techniques, which are applied to a new corpus of over 4,000 English and Spanish news stories from the period 2010 to 2017 across three territorial levels. In line with our theoretical expectations, we found significant differences in the tone used across territorial levels, with national and transnational levels being more negative than the regional level. While national and transnational media place relatively more emphasis on politicized EU topics, subnational media focus more on substantive policy topics corresponding with EU policy objectives. Furthermore, media reporting on the cohesion policy evolved significantly over time and reacted to external events, such as the euro and migration crises, as well as internal, country-specific events, such as Brexit in the UK and corruption scandals in Spain. However, the tone of cohesion policy news is positive overall suggesting that the media can, in principle, contribute to public support for the policy and the EU more generally.

This article explores the territorial and temporal patterns of EU cohesion policy media coverage. The topic content and tone of news are analysed using topic modelling and sentiment analysis techniques, which are applied to a new corpus of over 4,000 English and Spanish news stories from the period 2010 to 2017 across three territorial levels. In line with our theoretical expectations, we found significant differences in the tone used across territorial levels, with national and transnational levels being more negative than the regional level. While national and transnational media place relatively more emphasis on politicized EU topics, subnational media focus more on substantive policy topics corresponding with EU policy objectives. Furthermore, media reporting on the cohesion policy evolved significantly over time and reacted to external events, such as the euro and migration crises, as well as internal, country-specific events, such as Brexit in the UK and corruption scandals in Spain. However, the tone of cohesion policy news is positive overall suggesting that the media can, in principle, contribute to public support for the policy and the EU more generally.

Data are publicly available at: Carrascosa, J and Cuevas, R and Gonzalez, R and Azcorra, A and Garcia, D. Dataset—Quantifying the Economic and Cultural Biases of Social Media through Trending Topics. http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1381869 ; Online social media has recently irrupted as the last major venue for the propagation of news and cultural content, competing with traditional mass media and allowing citizens to access new sources of information. In this paper, we study collectively filtered news and popular content in Twitter, known as Trending Topics (TTs), to quantify the extent to which they show similar biases known for mass media. We use two datasets collected in 2013 and 2014, including more than 300.000 TTs from 62 countries. The existing patterns of leader-follower relationships among countries reveal systemic biases known for mass media: Countries concentrate their attention to small groups of other countries, generating a pattern of centralization in which TTs follow the gradient of wealth across countries. At the same time, we find subjective biases within language communities linked to the cultural similarity of countries, in which countries with closer cultures and shared languages tend to follow each other's TTs. Moreover, using a novel methodology based on the Google News service, we study the influence of mass media in TTs for four countries. We find that roughly half of the TTs in Twitter overlap with news reported by mass media, and that the rest of TTs are more likely to spread internationally within Twitter. Our results confirm that online social media have the power to independently spread content beyond mass media, but at the same time social media content follows economic incentives and is subject to cultural factors and language barriers. ; DG acknowledges funding from the SNSF project CR21I1_146499. JMC and RC acknowledge funding from the European Union's FP7 program under the project eCOUSIN (318398) and the EUH2020 ReCRED project (653417). RG acknowledge funding from the European Union's FP7 program under the project METRICS (607728). AA and RC acknowledge funding from the Regional Government of Madrid under the MEDIANET Project (S2009/TIC-1468) and BRADE project (P2013/ICE-2958). ; Publicado