An attempt at using mass media data to analyze the political economy around some key ICTD policies in India

Policy making is influenced by a number of factors, including electoral politics, ideological biases of actors involved in the policy making process, and the interlocks between corporate and government entities. This influence is also exercised by shaping public opinion through mass media. In this paper, we study four ICTD policies in India, and explore the political economy around them by using data about how these policies are covered in the mass media. We study which actors are covered more in media, how they speak on the policy issues, and which aspects are given more coverage for these policies. We find that politicians get the highest coverage in mass media regarding discussions on policies, and that the politicians and business-persons often express similar ideologies related to these policies. We also observe that mass media is often biased towards issues related to its middle class reader base with a strong sense of technology driven high-modernism, and negative aspects of these policies and issues faced by the poor due to improper policy implementation are often not given significant coverage. Our key contribution is a methodology of using automated analysis of mass media data to reveal the factors that might be shaping the political economy behind policy making.