11/14: Terman

[smiklin]

Comment below with questions or thoughts about the reading for this week's workshop.

Please make your comments by Wednesday 11:59 PM, and upvote at least five of your peers' comments on Thursday prior to the workshop. You need to use 'thumbs-up' for your reactions to count towards 'top comments,' but you can use other emojis on top of the thumbs up.

[SixueLiu96]

This is a great topic! As female student, sometimes I do feel like we are in a minority group. It's great to see the scholars are focus on gender related issues. The first hypothesis you mention in your article, media coverage are more likely to report on women living in Muslim areas if their rights are violated, instead of reporting that women in other societies when their rights are respected. I wonder if this is related to the intrinsic attributes of news and media. Is this because that people are more likely to open and read more dramatic news, leading to this specially focus on gender inequivalence of women in Muslim areas?

[HaowenShang]

Really interesting topic! Thanks for your presentation! For the part '9/11 and Change over Time ', you mentioned that 'It may, however, give plausibility to that claim, undermining the conventional wisdom that gendered orientalism has worsened after the events of 9/11. ' I want to know the events of 9/11 just worsened people’s understanding of the gender discrimination for Muslim women, or they worsened people’s impression of Muslim and thus worsened people’s understanding of the gender discrimination for Muslim women. Thanks!

[bjcliang-uchi]

Thank you for sharing this inspiring article! As we know, the New York Times and Washington Post both have a lean left bias. Do you think right-leaning media such as Fox News also exhibit the same pattern in depicting the image of Muslim women? Or, since they are more hostile to the Muslim community in general, do they tend to emphasize even more or simply ignore the situation of women in Muslim countries? Also, if, instead of differentiating reports by countries (Iran or Malaysia, for example), we differentiate reports by racial groups (i.e whether the article mentions Muslim or Asian), would the result change significantly?

[huanye]

I think this is a super cool research with clearly defined hypotheses and solid computational testing. My concern is the data sources, and I admit the New York Times and Washington Post are the two most influential "papers of records" as mentioned in the paper, and I think both of them have similar political leanings of being relatively liberal. However, first, I wonder if there could be some different results produced by testing hypotheses using data from the two sources respectively. Second, it could be more interesting if some other more conservative media sources had been added for comparisons although which we expect could be more anti-Muslim, but in what way? Since there could still be some more detailed distinctions from those more liberal ones in testing each raised hypothesis, or maybe even some counterintuitive results could also appear.

[ruixili]

Thanks for your presentation! I found this is a very interesting social topic that integrates the natural language processing technique. However, I wonder what's the implication for this study? What can we do to change the attitude of US NEWS? How should we measure that?

[jsgenan]

When it comes to partial, biased US media, I believe a lot of people have much to say. Thanks for bringing this topic to us, especially with such a wonderful paper. I'd like to see a time transition in the coefficients, as many analyses about partial media point to the shift in journalism as a cause. Is it true that our reporters have deteriorated? Or is this pattern consistent in history? Also, I might be a bit pessimistic here, but given how domestic news coverage is, there is little chance the fragmentation in NYT or WSP could revert.

[Anqi-Zhou]

Thanks for the presentation in advance! I'm really interested in what drives you to do research on such an interesting topic? What effects do you think will this article have on the feminist, or even the society?

[YanjieZhou]

Thanks very much for your presentation! Bias is everywhere in our societies, not only within the area of gender, but also regarding many other areas like politics and environmentalism. It is such a universal problem that I cannot help to think what hides behind those biases, or in other words, what mechanism drives people to believe and spread those biases. Does this just match our human instincts or is it actually avoidable by more justified media coverage?

[Leahjl]

Thank you in advance for your presentation. It is a kind of labeling due to prejudice for the media to focus on Muslim women’s rights violations and gender inequality. What’s your suggestion to address this problem? Do you think there is a solution has something to do with the Metoo movement?

[weijiexu-charlie]

Thanks for your presentation. In the paper, you mentioned that based on the data of this research "some trends (of gendered orientalism) appear roughly stable across time, specifically before and after 9/11". This result is quite against our intuition about the impact of 9/11. Although you have left this topic as an open question, I was still wondering about do you have any interpretation of this counterintuitive result?

[MegicLF]

Thank you so much for bring this interesting topic up! I realize that in the paper you only used articles posted on NYT and WP from 1980 to 2014, and you believed that such a long time period could include enough variations to validly test the hypothesis. However, you also mentioned the possibility at the conclusion of the paper about relevant posts about Muslim Women on other media. Given that a news media may hold its own value and political standing, is it possible for media with different political values (e.g. the Republican and the Democratic) that may portray the minorities including Muslim Women differently? For example, do CNN and Fox have different patterns in describing and commenting the Muslim Women in the United States and in the Middle East?

[Yiqing-Zh]

Thank you for the presentation. It is really an interesting topic. I think it would be interesting to some further work on people's reactions to media propaganda. Maybe we can do something like linking media data with data on Twitter to find whether bias in news reports will actually distort people's attitudes towards Muslin countries.

[sunying2018]

Thanks for your presentation! I am interested in the concept you mentioned in the paper--confirmation bias. I have a question about the evolution path of confirmation bias driven by some certain significant events. Is there any potential method to explore this problem?

[di-Tong]

Thank you for sharing this fascinating research! I wonder if you have conduct cross-regional comparison among the MENA to see if there's variation conditioned by the international relations and more specific stereotypes. Examining whether women from UAE and Iran are perceived as the same could also make clear the scope of stereotypes.

[luyingjiang]

Thank you for your presentation. The topic about the US media’s stereotype about Muslim women is really inspiring. In my undergrad campus, I often saw many Muslim student groups using flyers and posters to change the stereotype. Do you have any suggestion on Muslim people (i.e. Muslim community in U.S.) should do? For people that do not have much background information about Muslim women, how could they more efficiently justify the bias that the news contains?

[tonofshell]

We typically think of bias in media along a political spectrum from left to right, but your research makes it clear that this bias is multi-dimensional. Have you looked into some other dimensions of bias in media? How might different media organizations or the media in different countries compare?

[ziwnchen]

Thanks for sharing this interesting research! One of my concerns is also about data sources. As you mentioned in the paper, the number of news documents labeled with the subject term"women" for 35 years is around 6000. This means only ~200 news articles are released for ~200 countries in the world per year, combining NY Times and Washington Post. Personally, I feel like the small number indicates that US media is not so interested in reporting the topic of women. Do you think the amount of data will influence your conclusion?

[TianxinZheng]

Thanks for your presentation. This is a thought-provoking topic. Apart from news, people also get a large body of information from social medias such as twitter and facebook. Do you think the topic modelling used in this study could also by applied to other souce of text data? What do you think would be the difference when applying it to different format of text data?

[fulinguo]

Thanks for your interesting paper! I am curious about the mechanism of the phenomenon in your research. I hope to know why the media report news with bias and the mechanism behind the laws of people's reaction toward biased news. Both media and readers hope to make decisions based on their preferences, which might include money or other non-monetary happiness. I am curious about whether there are any explanations for the phenomenon from the perspective of the preferences of agents? Thanks!

[caibengbu]

Thank you for presenting this interesting paper! I am interested in the FREX method that you applied to identify topics. My question is: Does this FREX method also detects the attitude of the news report, even though intuitively I don't think attitudes of news reports would change much about the result? But can the story also extend to the point where the media is not only distinctly sexist against Muslin women but also acting very opinionated and negative on Muslin female issues?

[lyl010]

Thanks for your presentation. You mention in your hypothesis 1 that women's rights' newsworthy are dependent on whether they are in Muslim countries or not, suggesting that people would live with stereotypes if they construct their understanding of the world through several media reports. Of course, we can blame the media for masking people's minds, however, people seem to be contented with their local understanding of the world, although they may know it maybe not the truth. Especially In today's self-media era, tons of news together with huge details, images, videos, recordings, spread across the Internet rapidly, but the polarization and hatred are not alleviated but aggravated. Do you think people will be more global and empathized when meeting with different values, people or the opposite? Thank you!

[liu431]

Thank you for the presentation. It looks that you treated all identified articles equally together. However, it could be that these articles are from different sections in the printed newspaper, such as the front page or corner area in the subsection. Some articles might come with images, which add more influence to the readers. So my question is should we take into consideration and put some weights of the documents in the STM accordingly?

[yalingtsui]

Thank you for your presentation! Very interesting topic and pretty new method. I am curious that there may exist bias during your research method. Pure computational method may ignore some hidden phenomena behind the articles. How do you avoid it or interpret the potential bias?

[mingtao-gao]

Thank you for your presentation in advance! The topic is very compelling and challenges the existing biases in the news and media today in the United States. However, such biases may not be something new and may not merely target at the issue with Muslim women. Media serves as a fundamental way to form western ideologies and it perceives to be common on the over-emphasis or biases on certain topics regarding a specific group. For example, when talking about Tibet, most news would focus on the liberation of Tibetans rather than the amazing natural views in Tibet. My question is what are in-depth implications or consequences on this over-emphasis on the rights of Muslim women in US media, since the consequences may not always be negative, even if it is negative, what potential effects it will bring?

[Panyw97]

Thank you for sharing us this novel research! Just as you mentioned in the paper, Muslim women have become a special and prominent group in the debate. Their figures have become a sign of gender inequality and a representative characteristic of Muslim society. How do those negative views of Muslim women and Muslim society form over time? Do the media bias accelerate or even create this phenomenon? Through your work, we can find some answers.

[wu-yt]

Thanks for your presentation! Indeed there are biases when it comes to the way the media is reporting the news, but news and media in the United States are biased on so many other issues as well, and my question is what are some suggestions you have that might help change the situation? Thank you.

[jtschoi]

Thank you in advance for your presentation. In your article, you elaborate on the "short attention span" on the issue of global women's rights. I think that this inherently has to do with the changing incentives that media outlets face; they are moving closer towards making profit by attracting more views and therefore more opportunities for advertisements, and so forth. In this environment where news outlets are still influential yet not necessarily incentivized to truth-tell, would you be able to recommend to us readers how to process such information?

[Yawei-Li]

Thank you in advance for coming and presentation. Both feminism and Muslim are my topics of interest. I can see you proposed two interesting hypotheses and tested them with solid data across a very long period of time. My question then is, what are the rationales for this research design (modeling, large scale, text analysis, etc) over others? What are the "behind scenes" decision-making process when deciding each part?

[sanittawan]

Thank you for sharing your research with us and for presenting at the workshop. Biases in media portrayal of certain population groups is a topic that we all kind of know it exists, but never really thought about testing and measuring it. I learned a lot from your research design and I think it did a very good job in "conversing" with the extant theories. My question is rather simple. You alluded to the expected effect of looking into a more conservative outlet, but what about more liberal ones? What do you think the result of your research would have been if you had looked at reports by (very) liberal media?

[ellenhsieh]

Thank you for presenting such interesting topic! From your paper, we can know that media does play an important role in people's perception for certain topic. As we can see that American journals and newspaper tend to portray Muslim women as victims of gender inequality, so people tend to perceive that Muslim society is more sexist. However, I am wondering how the media in Muslim countries portray the women within the society. Also, it seems that in general changing people's perception towards Muslim women might be hard. Do you have any ideas or thoughts that how can we address this misperception?

[SiyuanPengMike]

Thanks so much, for this interesting and informative paper. Confirmation bias has been a popular topic in the social media domain and it indeed deserves our attention. From my perspective, it is a journalist's responsibility to present the truth as it is, without personal preference or bias. Therefore, I'm wondering that if your model could be a preliminary test for those news reports before they have been published. Using the model and setting up a reasonable bias threshold, if we could find that the report has a confirmation bias, we might could ask that journalist to further modify the article.