Media Coverage Analysis

CAIR has hypothesized that there has been a decline and shift in local media coverage related to Muslim and Palestinian communities in Massachusetts since October 2023, particularly in The Boston Globe and MassLive. Prior to this date, these outlets often covered community reports and letters that elevated Muslim voices. After October 7, 2023, CAIR believes there has been reduced coverage, less representation of Muslim authorship, and framing that disproportionately favored Israel. This semester, the student team will explore and test whether these hypotheses hold true. The work will begin with an elementary keyword-based analysis of relevant news coverage, followed by the application of NLP techniques such as entity tracking to identify who the subject, names, organization, locations, and date. Students are also encouraged to experiment with methods to quantify whether recent articles demonstrate associations with Islamophobia-related topics, even if only at a prototype or exploratory level. Nationally, CAIR and ISPU have developed tools such as the Islamophobia Index and reports like Hijacked by Hate to capture themes of Islamophobia (e.g., portraying Muslims as violent, misogynistic, or anti-Western; exclusionary editorial decisions; or unequal treatment). However, these tools are theme-driven, not keyword-driven, which poses challenges for automation, they can serve as reference points to help guide idea generation and inform exploratory analysis in this project. For data collection and exploration, the team will use two approaches: • The Boston Globe (via ProQuest): Access will be through ProQuest, a subscription-based research database that provides archival and full-text access to newspapers, journals, and magazines. A key limitation is that ProQuest does not allow articles to be exported outside its environment. Instead, students must use ProQuest’s built-in Jupyter Notebook console to run text-mining and data analysis experiments. Only results, outputs, and summary findings can be exported—not the full text of the articles. • MassLive (via Web Scraping): Since MassLive is not indexed in ProQuest, its content will need to be collected through web scraping. Fortunately, MassLive maintains a sitemap that organizes articles by category and date, which should make scraping and filtering content relatively straightforward.