Exploring “ideological correction” in digital news updates of Portland protests & police violence

Abstract

This paper critically examines 48 digital news updates to six New York Times online articles collected through 181 captures via the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine (WBM), a web scraping tool, pertaining to federal military and local police responses to Portland protests published in headlines, sources, quotes, hyperlinks, the order of information presented, and articles’ main thrusts of meaning. Through this analysis, we call for the notion of “ideological correction” to represent an additional element of the liquidity of journalism in this case — shifts in news explanations of single articles that altered the articles’ focus on and characterizations of law enforcement and protesters — sometimes even under the same, original headline and article URL.