On 24 April, HCSS published a new report entitled ‘Eyes Wide Shut? The Impact of Embedded Journalism on Dutch Newspaper Coverage of Afghanistan’. For press release and report, click on “read more”.
The Dutch Ministry of Defence offers journalists the opportunity to stay embedded with the military in Afghanistan, and to report from ‘within’ military operations. This arrangement has led to many journalists enjoying unprecedented access to the Dutch soldiers and their work in Uruzgan. However, embeddedness raises questions about objectivity, censorship and journalistic independence. A current HCSS research project looks at embedded journalism, how it affects Dutch coverage of Afghanistan, and whether regulations for future reporting should be changed.
As part of this research HCSS conducted a software-based text mining analysis on Dutch press coverage of Afghanistan. This analysis consists of two parts 1) the comparison of a sample of embedded and unembedded articles, and 2) the analysis of a sample of the complete Dutch press coverage of Afghanistan.
Below you can find interactive visualisations of this part of the research.
Analysis of Dutch Press Coverage on Afghanistan
The graph below focuses on the overall press coverage on Afghanistan between January 2006 and December 2007. The figures are based on a monthly analysis of term ‘Afghanistan’ and how strongly it relates to other terms. For the purpose of this analysis, four categories have been used to cluster various terms: ‘Dutch politics’; ‘military’; ‘broader context’; and ‘other issues’. The category ‘Dutch politics’ refers to all words that have a clear connection to the Dutch political processes. The category ‘military’ includes all terms related to activities of the Dutch and allied militaries. The category ‘broader context’ contains terminology that describes the situation in Afghanistan in terms other than the Dutch political debate or military activities. ‘Other issues’ refers to any other wording that has no explanatory value for this analysis. Also, the latter category includes words that fall into more than one category.
For the full report, please click:
www.hcss.nl/reports/eyes-wide-shut-the-impact-of-embedded-journalism-on-dutch-newspaper-coverage-of-afghanistan/43/
For more details, including data on other months, please click here and you will be directed to the IBM website:
services.alphaworks.ibm.com/manyeyes/view/S72URNsOtha6UQ~