About the Project
For nearly a century, Americans have turned to television news as a primary source of information, especially during periods of uncertainty. In 2020, viewership of TV News spiked dramatically during the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet, despite the increase in information consumption, many Americans were confused and frustrated by official guidance about testing, masking, vaccinating and school openings. Journalists and scientists both choose their words carefully, so what exactly was happening to the messages? In this fellowship, students analyzed data from the Vanderbilt Television News Archive, guided by the hypothesis that news media filters scientific communications in a way that exploits their “newsworthiness” and results in miscommunication, misinformation, and panic. Using the Television News Archive’s collection of national evening news coverage during 2020-21, fellows contributed to faculty research exploring this central question. Students gained hands-on experience working with a digital collection, learned more about the challenges associated with media preservation and research. Throughout their research, fellows analyzed speaker labels to the transcripts of news segments about the pandemic, contributing to an invaluable dataset of labelled speech. The dataset will continue to be used by researchers to conduct sentiment analysis in order to compare how journalists and scientists present information to the public.
Mentor
Giselle Hengst; Jim Duran; Dana Currier; Shellie Richards
Fellows
Stuti Jain; Katherine Tam; Izzy Feng; Eden Kim; Yasin Davletyarov
Project
Fellows’ collaborative research project, data set, and final report can be found here.