Unreported Realities: The Political Economy of Media-Sourced Data

Abstract

What is the gap between scholars' expectations of media-sourced data and the realities those data actually represent? This letter elucidates the data generation process (DGP) that undergirds media-sourced data: journalistic reporting. It uses semi-structured interviews with 15 journalists to analyze how media actors decide what and how to report - in other words, the why of reporting specific events to the exclusion of others - as well as how the larger professional, economic, and political contexts in which journalists operate shape the material scholars treat as data. The letter thus centers unreported realities: the fact that media-derived data reflect reporters' locations, identities, capacities, and outlet priorities, rather than providing a representative sample of ongoing events. In doing so, it reveals variations in the consistency and constancy of reporting that produce unacknowledged, difficult-to-identify biases in media-sourced data that are not directionally predictable.