Masters Theses

Date of Award

12-2002

Degree Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Science

Major

Communication

Major Professor

Bonnie Riechert

Committee Members

Paul Ashdown, Dorothy Bowles

Abstract

International news coverage by the U.S. media (and for the purpose of this study, newspaper coverage) is a heavily debated issue within the scholarly and professional worlds. Critics, both in the United States and abroad, charge that the U.S. media prescribe to an egocentric attitude about international news coverage, and that Americans do not receive the quality of news that could be expected in a nation with a free press, where citizens are, for the most part, highly educated and where access to news is not restricted.

Previous studies have focused on how much international news coverage Americans receive, and also on what type of coverage Americans receive. Some such studies investigated the size of international news hole, the geopolitical focus of news items and the quality of international news in the New York Times. This study explores these same factors.

A content analysis was used to examine articles in the international section of the New York Times. The articles were coded the income level of the country the news item pertained to (High, Upper-Middle, Lower-Middle or Low), the supplier of the story (news correspondent or wire service) and whether news borrowing occurred. The working definition of news borrowing for this study is any news reported where another form of media was the source (i.e. in an AP news wire story it was reported . . .). Departing from the earlier studies, this study also noted headlines and the source(s) from which news was borrowed, if there was a presence of borrowed news.

This study found that the size of international news hole in 1991, 1996 and 2001 was largely the same for the three years studied - about 45 percent international news hole and 55 percent national news hole. The amount of coverage about the countries in the four income levels varied. In some cases it was found that the amount of coverage could be correlated to the amount of space the countries occupied in the world, like in the Upper-Middle income group. The same cannot be said for the Lower-Middle income group. The amount of coverage for the Lower-Middle income group, though it actually decreased over the time period studied, was still the highest of all the income groups. This category includes countries like the Russian Federation and China, which could help to account for this.

As could be expected, Times correspondents made up the majority of the reporting source for the paper Times correspondents wrote approximately 70 percent of the content for the Times, and news wires supplied about 30 percent of the content. News borrowing decreased over the three-year period studied, drastically from 1991 and 1996 to 2001. The sources from which news borrowing occurred varied, but television and newspapers were the consistent top two.

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