Panning for gold: Comparative analysis of cross-platform approaches for automated detection of political content in textual data.

To understand and measure political information consumption in the high-choice media environment, we need new methods to trace individual interactions with online content and novel techniques to analyse and detect politics-related information. In this paper, we report the results of a comparative analysis of the performance of automated content analysis techniques for detecting political content in the German language across different platforms. Using three validation datasets, we compare the performance of three groups of detection techniques relying on dictionaries, classic supervised machine learning, and deep learning.

Media Trust and the COVID-19 Pandemic: An Analysis of Short-Term Trust Changes, Their Ideological Drivers and Consequences in Switzerland.

We analyze short-term media trust changes during the COVID-19 pandemic, their ideological drivers and consequences based on panel data in German-speaking Switzerland. We thereby differentiate trust in political information from different types of traditional and non-traditional media. COVID-19 serves as a natural experiment, in which citizens' media trust at the outbreak of the crisis is compared with the same variables after the severe lockdown measures were lifted.

How climate change skeptics (try to) spread their ideas: Using computational methods to assess the resonance among skeptics' and legacy media.

We study the discursive resonance of online climate skepticism in traditional media in Germany, a country where climate skeptics lack public prestige and thus form a political counter-movement. We thereby differentiate two temporal dynamics: resonance can be continuous or selective, based on the exploitation of specific events. Beyond, we test whether such resonance is higher within the conservative media.

A changing climate of skepticism: The factors shaping climate change coverage in the US press.

Skepticism toward climate change has a long tradition in the United States. We focus on mass media as the conveyors of the image of climate change and ask: Is climate change skepticism still a characteristic of US print media coverage? If so, to what degree and in what form? And which factors might pave the way for skeptics entering mass media debates? We conducted a quantitative content analysis of US print media during one year (1 June 2012 to 31 May 2013). Our results show that the debate has changed: fundamental forms of climate change skepticism (such as denial of anthropogenic causes) have been abandoned in the coverage, being replaced by more subtle forms (such as the goal to avoid binding regulations).