On Reckoning and Renewal: A Discourse Analysis of Migrant Farm Worker Coverage in Alternative News Media
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This Major Research Paper seeks to assess alternative media coverage of migrant farm workers in Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic. Extending upon what Callison and Young (2020) call a “digital reckoning” taking place in Canadian journalism, I employ the theoretical framework of political economy of communication (PEC) to interpret the organizational practices and funding models of the shifting mediascape. Following in the tradition of PEC, I ask how alternative media in Canada are covering migrant farm workers and worker programs during a pandemic, and to what extent these publications are addressing larger systemic issues in their coverage. A critical discourse analysis of two print magazines and four digital media outlets finds common themes surrounding precarious work, exploitation and the need for migrant workers to access a pathway to citizenship, but relatively less context into systemic issues. A broader assessment of the journalism industry encourages future scholarship of alternative media in Canada.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.010 | 0.020 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".