TechEthos D3.3: Results of media analysis

This report presents the results of the media scan and analysis task (T3.6) of the TechEthos project. This study was carried out between November 2021 and May 2022. It sought to gain insights on the media discourse on TechEthos’ three families of technologies: geoengineering, neurotechnology and digital extended reality. The media both reflect and shape public perceptions on technologies and, as such, give important indications of these perceptions.

This study contributes to TechEthos’ analysis of public awareness and acceptance of the three families of technology (the focus of TechEthos WP3), through an exploration of media discourse. This task was led by Trilateral Research and carried out with the support of TechEthos’ partners and the science centers and museums associated with the project. The task explored the media discourse in 13 countries - it looked at online news outlets (excluding social media). This included ten EU countries: Austria, Czech Republic, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Romania, Spain, and Sweden and three non-EU countries: Serbia, UK, and USA. The study covered news stories published in 2020 and 2021.

To scan and analyse the massive amount of data of interest to this analysis, we used state-of-the art computational tools to collect, clean and analyse the data. This made it possible to collect and analyse a large set of news stories which would not have been possible with traditional and manual techniques. However, it also presented some challenges, especially in relation to data access. For various reasons, it appeared that some key media outlets were missing from the datasets and that we were sometimes missing data for a few months in 2020 and 2021. It is thus difficult to assess the representativeness of the results of this study. That said, we believe that this study provides interesting snapshots on the media discourse in these countries. In addition, it contributes to methods for the analysis of media discourses through computational methods. This report presents the method used in the study in detail.