From Regional to National Clouds: TV Coverage in the Czech Republic

PLoS One. 2016 Nov 8;11(11):e0165527. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0165527. eCollection 2016.

Abstract

Media, and particularly TV media, have a great impact on the general public. In recent years, spatial patterns of information and the relevance of intangible geographies have become increasingly important. Gatekeeping plays a critical role in the selection of information that is transformed into media. Therefore, gatekeeping, through national media, also co-forms the generation of mental maps. In this paper, correspondence analysis (a statistical method) combined with cloud lines (a new visual analytics technique) is used to analyze how individual major regional events in one of the post-communist countries, the Czech Republic, penetrate into the media on a national scale. Although national news should minimize distortions about regions, this assumption has not been verified by our research. Impressions presented by the media of selected regions that were markedly influenced by one or several events in those regions demonstrate that gatekeepers, especially news reporters, functioned as a filter by selecting only a few specific, and in many cases, unusual events for dissemination.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by http://www.nserc-crsng.gc.ca/index_eng.asp, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, [386586-2011], MW; https://www.rvvi.cz/cep?s=jednoduche-vyhledavani&ss=detail&n=0&h=EE2.3.20.0296, VŠB-TU Ostrava, Operational Programme Education for Competitiveness, [CZ.1.07/2.3.00/20.0296], JS PS. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.