Category: Student Projects
Student Projects
Duke students find skimpy, superficial coverage of Congress
Gerrymandering not only creates safe partisan districts, it leads to less scrutiny by the news media.
By Bill Adair - February 28, 2015
There’s been lots of harrumphing about the decline in local coverage of Congress. Many Washington bureaus have been closed and there are fewer reporters covering congressional delegations.
But is the coverage as weak as the critics suspect?
To find out, students in my Washington in a New Media Age class examined how the local media covered their representatives in Congress last year. Using the Nexis and America’s News databases, the students tallied stories about their lawmakers and analyzed the content.
The results justify the harrumphing. With few exceptions, local coverage of lawmakers is skimpy and superficial. The students found that coverage is particularly anemic for incumbents who are heavily favored — a group that has grown as more districts have been gerrymandered.
The student findings reveal an unexpected side effect of gerrymandering. It hasn’t just skewed the composition of congressional districts, it has become a justification for less news coverage. When a race is likely to be lopsided, editors often conclude they don’t need to cover the race or provide even the most basic coverage of an incumbent. So once a House member has a safe seat, they are likely to receive less scrutiny by the news media.
The average House member was mentioned in 160 news stories in print, online and television outlets, according to the data the students collected. That number sounds pretty respectable at first. But the number varied widely depending whether the seat was considered up for grabs. It was high for a closely contested seat such as Colorado’s 6th District (310 mentions) and low for the least competitive seats, such as the heavily Democratic 11th District in Virginia (51).
The students found little coverage by television stations, although it’s difficult to draw conclusions for all markets because of wide variations in how coverage is archived.
Even when the overall number is high, it doesn’t tell the full story. When the students examined the articles, they found a large portion had little or no discussion of policy or issues. And even when the coverage dealt with issues, it often provided little substance, the students found.
Student Thamina Stoll spent several hours reviewing the coverage of Rep. Loretta Sanchez, D-Calif, but came away with only a vague idea about what kind of lawmaker she is. “I still have no clue other than that she enjoys taking pictures for Christmas Cards, isn’t as involved in the immigration debate as she should be and that she appears to stress the importance of education,” Stoll wrote. “How should a voter feel comfortable voting for her again?”
Jordan DeLoatch, a student from the Raleigh-Durham area, found 171 mentions of his representative, Republican George Holding. But much of the coverage was shallow. “There was no fact-checking, no following up and no real attempt to dig deeper into the race,” DeLoatch wrote.
There were a few notable exceptions. The Denver Post and other news organizations in Colorado provided some good enterprise coverage of GOP Rep. Mike Coffman. And despite its national and international focus, the Washington Post did some good coverage of lawmakers in the Washington area.
But more often, the students found shallow reporting and a lack of questioning. News organizations, shrunken by the disruption of the digital age, have scaled back their accountability journalism. Many are more willing to publish a lawmaker’s op-ed than to assign a reporter who will ask critical questions.
Student Allie Eisen, writing about the 11th District in North Carolina around Asheville, found the coverage to be fawning and uncritical. She summed it up by saying that incumbent Republican Mark Meadows “is in the business of writing his own local headlines, and is wildly successful at doing so.”
Scraping the web for Durham’s ‘cold cases’
By Daniel Carp - January 26, 2015
At the end of each year, we struggle to give a 12-month period of our lives an identity. Time Magazine picks a Person of the Year, Barbara Walters whittles everything down into an hour’s worth of interviews—always, a winner must be named.
Last year, several stories in different states formed a common thread about the relationship between race and crime. The summer’s heat boiled over with weeks of protest in Ferguson, Mo., following the shooting death of 18-year-old African American Michael Brown by a police officer. And then the unrest spread after grand juries failed to indict officers involved in the deaths of Brown and Eric Garner, whose fatal strangulation by a New York City police officer was captured in a viral YouTube video.
Just as we got set to turn the calendar toward a new year, New York was again struck by tragedy, this time in its police department when police officers Rafael Ramos and Wenjian Liu were ambushed and executed in what is being considered an act of retribution for Garner’s death.
These developments, both tragic and captivating, were my primary motivation for digging into the Durham Police Department in an exercise of web scraping, an automated process that copies content from websites, allowing you to analyze or republish it.
Every web page you visit on the Internet is nothing more than a series of tables and lists. And although some pages are more complicated than others and contain many moving parts, there are always you can pull data directly out of pages with short lines of code and easy-to-use widgets. The best part: as long as your code remains active, your data will continue to update in real-time.
Some background on my project: During the fall semester of my senior year, I encountered a late-college crisis of sorts as a humanities major with an extensive journalism background but few quantitative skills. Tasked with a research project to help complete my Public Policy degree, I decided to use the opportunity as an excuse to learn new computer skills, which is how I settled on web scraping.
My journey began at square one — the absolute basics of coding. After a few weeks spent learning the ins and outs of HTML, CSS and Python, I was ready to learn how basic scrapers worked. The next couple weeks were spent learning about scrapers and doing scraping exercises from a textbook before compiling a list of dozens of Durham city and county organizations I could potentially scrape. This ultimately landed me on the Durham Police Department, which publishes an intriguing list of unsolved homicides on its website for all to see.
After painstaking trial and error (and mostly error), I developed a scraper using a Google Doc that pulled all of Durham County’s unsolved homicide victims, dates and locations into a spreadsheet—25 years worth of cold cases. Using Python and the web app ScraperWiki, I wrote a loop that pulled every sub-URL present on the page into a long list, extracted the victims’ individual pages and inserted them into the sheet. This allowed me to write a second scraper that pulled full descriptions of the homicide out of each victim’s page. I then plotted my data on an interactive map.
Some context and reactions to my analysis of Durham’s unsolved homicides:
- Currently, there are just 28 unsolved homicides in the last 25 years. To put that in perspective, Durham had 30 homicides in 2013 and has since solved all but one of them.
- Of the 24 unsolved homicides that took place within Durham city limits, 20 of them took place on the city’s East side. East Durham is less developed and more poverty-stricken than the West side, home to Duke University, the city’s downtown area and most of its urban gentrification.
- Of the 28 unsolved homicides, five of the victims were white (17.9 percent)—17 were African American (60.7 percent) and six were Hispanic (21.4 percent). There had also been only one unsolved homicide with a white victim in the past 18 years. For reference, Durham County’s 2013 Census statistics indicate that 42.1 percent of residents were white, 13.5 percent Hispanic and 38.7 percent African American.