U.S. Media Coverage of Border Wall

On Tuesday night, Jan. 8, President Trump gave his first formal Oval Office prime time address, focusing on the border wall issue. The address was followed directly by responses from Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer. According to New York Times, 40 million Americans tuned in to watched the address. The meeting next day between president Trump and congressional Democrats were cut short when both sides obviously were too far apart to reach an agreement.

The whole drama got me interested in the border wall issue. So I ran a search in GDELT’s Doc 2.0 API using “border wall” as the key word to see how this issue is portrayed in the U.S. media. The tone chart is shown below.

The most negative tone of coverage happened on Nov. 25, 2018. I did a search on the events during that time period. President Trump announced on the day before that migrants seeking asylum at the southern border will wait in Mexico while their claims are processed. The Mexican government, however, denied that any agreement had been reached regarding the matter. The coverage on the border wall issue was not the most negative on Jan 8, but as can be seen from the chart, it was one of the worst ones. The tone improved on the 9th, though. We’ll see how this goes. Judging by the moving average, it appears that the coverage may never be significantly better than -2.

News today suggests that the White House is preparing a declaration of national emergency to allow president Trump to build his wall. Be it a concrete wall or a steal barrier, election season is coming. It looks like there will be more grand standing on both sides.

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