Thematic Indicators Derived from World News Report

Abstract

A method for deriving statistical indicators from the Europe Media Monitor (EMM) is described. EMM monitors world news in real time from the Internet and various News Agencies. The new method measures the intensity of news reporting for any country concerning a particular theme. Two normalised indi-cators are defined for each theme (j) and for each country (c). The first (Icj ) is a measure of the relative importance for a given theme to that country. The sec-ond (Ijc )is a measure of the relative importance placed on that country with re-spect to the given theme by the world’s media. The method has then been ap-plied to news articles processed by EMM for each day during August 2003. This month was characterized by a number of serious terrorist bomb attacks visible both in the EMM data and in the derived indicators. The calculated indi-cators for a selection of 14 countries are presented. Their interpretation and pos-sible biases in the data are discussed. The data are then applied to identify can-didate countries for “forgotten conflicts”. These are countries with high levels of conflict but poorly reported in the world’s media.JRC.G.2-Support to external securit