Media Coverage of Litigation, Legislation & Corporate Campaign Contributions in Corporate N.C. (2009)

Undergraduates: Annie Ellis, Aislinn Hickle-Edwards none none

Faculty Advisor: Craig Carroll
Department: Journalism & Mass Communication

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This poster explores how the news media covers legislation, litigation and corporate campaign contributions in the context of North Carolina companies between October 1, 2008 and March 31, 2009. We rely on a secondary analysis of a media-monitoring pilot study analyzing the day-to-day prominent news coverage of 30 North Carolina companies having a significant economic impact on the state, using a database of the Carolina Observatory on Corporate Reputation. The OCR used keywords-in-context to capture the URLs where these firms were mentioned in national newspapers, North Carolina daily and weekly newspapers, business magazines, and business journals filed via their online news Web sites. The URL links were downloaded daily. Using a formula to calculate how prominent these organizations were to the news reports, an automated script identified the news articles that featured these companies prominently. A team of undergraduate students returned to these websites to pull the news stories into the database and then content-analyzed the articles where our sample firms prominently appeared for the degree of prominence, tone, and the co-occurrence of public issues. This presentation focuses largely on the most frequent publications that cover legislation, litigation and corporate campaign contribution issues, their prominence, dominance and tone and how they influence corporate reputation.