Problems and Solutions for American Political Coverage: Journalistic self-critique in the wake of the 2016 presidential election

Drawing on Shoemaker and her colleagues’ five levels of analysis, i.e. the individual, routine, organization, institutional, and social system levels, this study examines news media’s post-election self-examination. This study uses natural language processing-related techniques to analyze a corpus of news articles published 10 days after the election day to understand the nature and distribution of identified problems and proposed solutions at the five levels. This study finds that news media's inward reflections focused more on the routine level while problems at individual and organizational levels were not prominently examined. Outwardly, more discussions were pointed to institutions that share the media ecosystem with the news industry. This study serves as an empirical contribution to metajournalistic discourse analysis. Findings reveal the discursive struggle to construct and reconstruct the journalistic field.

Duke Scholars

Author Philip Michael Napoli Sanford School of Public Policy