Statement networks: a power structure narrative as depicted by newspapers
This work addresses media representation and power dynamics in Bangladesh, but it is incremental as it applies existing data mining techniques to a new dataset.
The study analyzed power structures in Bangladeshi newspapers by mining statements between actors, revealing cliquishness among political leaders and changes in cohesive groups over a decade.
We report a data mining pipeline and subsequent analysis to understand the core periphery power structure created in three national newspapers in Bangladesh, as depicted by statements made by people appearing in news. Statements made by one actor about another actor can be considered a form of public conversation. Named entity recognition techniques can be used to create a temporal actor network from such conversations, which shows some unique structure, and reveals much room for improvement in news reporting and also the top actors' conversation preferences. Our results indicate there is a presence of cliquishness between powerful political leaders when it comes to their appearance in news. We also show how these cohesive cores form through the news articles, and how, over a decade, news cycles change the actors belonging in these groups.