MEDIA CONTENT ANALYSIS AND REPORTING

4D-LEADERSHIP HOUSE

LOTFI SAIBI

Timeliness

• Intelligence reports should contain the latest information gathered; otherwise they would be of no use to the decision maker.

• Those who belong to the intelligence community know how intelligence information can change in a matter of minutes:

Accurate

• Develop a plan before you analyze

• Identify your most important findings

• Simplify

• Stay consistent

Verified

• Understand why you are writing the report

• Get peer review and ask for second opinion

• Use support

• Double and triple check resources

– Purpose

– Scope

– Recommendations

– audience

Media Content Analysis

• Media content analysis is the deconstruction of pieces of media with tendency towards either quantitative or qualitative research methods.

• Quantitative research methods within Media Content Analysis point to a far more structured and consequently restricted form of gathering information from clips of media.

• Qualitative methods involve a viewing of the clip and then unstructured open discussions and debate on the themes and effects of the clip

What are the advantages of media content analysis?

• Analyze the ideologies of those who produce them and how they try to spread this ideology. L

• Looks directly at communication via texts or transcripts, and hence gets at the central aspect of social interaction.

• Allows for both quantitative and qualitative operations.

• Provides valuable historical/cultural insights over time through analysis of texts.

• Media content analysis is an unobtrusive means of analyzing interactions and it provides an insight into complex models of human thought and language use.

What are the disadvantages of media content analysis?

• May produce a distorted image of society. • Can be extremely time consuming and is subject

to increased error. • Often devoid of a theoretical base, or attempts

too liberally to draw meaningful inferences about the relationships and impacts implied in a study.

• It is inherently reductive (particularly when dealing with complex texts) tends too often to simply consist of word counts.

• Often disregards the background in which something has been produced.

The process of a content analysis

• Six questions must be addressed in every content analysis:– 1. Which data are analyzed?

– 2. How are they defined?

– 3. What is the population from which they are drawn?

– 4. What is the context relative to which the data are analyzed?

– 5. What are the boundaries of the analysis?

– 6. What is the target of the inferences?