Gento Kato

Ph.D. Student, Department of Political Science, UC Davis

Abstract: This study gives the comprehensive understanding of when and how media influences foreign perceptions. Also, it makes three methodological contributions. First, it presents the integrative framework to study different types of media effects. The analysis shows that three media functions – agenda-setting, persuasion, and framing – can be captured by distinctive measurements, and have different implications. Second, the use of longitudinal data makes it possible to explore implications beyond cross-sectional studies. It enables us to study long-term, in addition to short-term, influence of media coverage. Third, it introduces partially automated ways to extract information from headline texts. Those methods may both reduce the time and increase reliability in data generation process compared to the method of fully-manual human-coding.