News of Noam: Unpacking Media Coverage of Chomsky

Abstract

Media inform and obfuscate. Corporate motives influence how news is neglected, reported, and contextualized. It is informative to examine the extent to which news content varies based on source and period. As a longstanding critic of news media, and a leading public intellectual, Noam Chomsky is a worthy case study. Three author-created, corpora of news articles referencing Noam Chomsky were created. The corpora contained articles from Agence France-Presse (AFP; n = 54), The Associated Press (AP; n = 48), and the Cable News Network Wire (CNNW; n = 6), from the years 2012 to 2022. Number and length analyses, along with hypothesis tests, established the degree of similarity existing among the articles of the three news wire services and periods. Analysis of variance showed that news source was significant in terms of both the number of articles (H2), F(2,6) = 5.916, p = 0.038., and article length (H4), F(2,105) = 23.936, p = 0.000 ( = 0.05). Little commonality in content or framing was established among the three news sources or periods in terms of top words or bigrams of merit. Whereas there were differences in the absolute values and degree of change, each of the three news sources contained a slightly negative average sentiment score when using the AFINN lexicon. The results of this study, while limited to a single case, are illustrative of broader concerns and are potentially useful for those engaged in media studies, politics, rhetoric, organizational management, and the social sciences.