Measuring Media Criticism with ALC Word Embeddings

The ability of news media to report on events and opinions that are critical of the executive branch of government is central to media freedom and a marker of meaningful democratization. Existing indices use scoring criteria or expert surveys to develop country year measures of media criticism. In this article, we introduce a computationally inexpensive and fully open-source method for estimating media criticism from news articles using à la carte (ALC) word embeddings. We validate our approach using Arabic-language news media published during the Arab Spring. An applied example demonstrates how our technique generates credible estimates of changes in media criticism after a democratic transition is ended by a military coup. Experiments demonstrate the method works even with sparse data. Analyses of synthetic news media demonstrate that the method extends to multiple languages. Our approach points to new possibilities in the monitoring of media freedom within authoritarian and democratizing settings.