TextMap News/Blog Analysis

Originally published at Textmap Blog. Please leave any comments there.

TextMap provide insights into geographic biases of news coverage and interest by analyzing the frequency and context of entity references and displaying the results on a map. Our battlemap images represent the relative frequency of reference among two different but related entities. For example, check out our battlemap between the Jews and the Christians.

Yellow regions represent places where “Jews” are mentioned more than “Christians” in news sources, while the reverse holds in blue regions. The map shows Jewish strongholds in the Northeast, California, and Florida, while Christians dominate the rest of country, particularly Utah and the South.

What does this mean? The yellow regions generally correspond to those places with the highest concentrations of Jews in the United States. Does this mean the news media is biased in favor of one religion? No!  The content of any publication reflects the interest of its readers, and the readership of a newspaper reflects the population it draws on. Relative frequency counts measure interest, not positive or negative sentiment, which is also monitored by our system.  I’ll discuss sentiment analysis in future posts.