Measuring Media Criticism with ALC Word Embeddings

• DOI: 10.31219/osf.io/68zn4
• Publication Date: 2023-05-14T05:00:58Z
• Authors: Christopher Barrie; Neil Ketchley; Alexandra Arons S...; Mossaab Bagdouri

The ability of news media to criticize government is a core pillar freedom and often taken as evidence meaningful democratization. Existing indices typically use scoring criteria or expert surveys develop over-time measures freedom. In this article, we the largest existing dataset Arabic-language evaluate how political reporting about changes over course successful failed democratic transitions in Egypt Tunisia. Using entirely unsupervised ALC word-embedding techniques, demonstrate generate temporally granular measurements criticism that closely correlate with derived from for both countries. Crucially, technique propose computationally inexpensive, open-source, cost-free––making it eminently scalable. Our work therefore points new possibilities monitoring measurement capture within authoritarian transitional settings.