What lies beyond the gates: media gatekeepers and the framing of welfare news in Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Over the past several decades, public opinion surveys have consistently shown that Canadians have a rather strong distaste for welfare. Conventional wisdom has typically held that one of the predominant reasons for this strong opposition to social assistance policies is the manner in which issues related to welfare and welfare recipients are depicted in the media, but very little is actually known about how, precisely, Canadian media gatekeepers frame welfare. Using an innovative form of content analysis which is capable of defining the predominant frames through which welfare is represented in an almost entirely automated process, this thesis considers all welfare news printed by a sample of Canadian newspapers and the Canadian Press for the period 2000-2006. The levels of coverage given to the eleven most common "frames of welfare" are examined, as are the stark differences between the realities of welfare in Canada and media depictions of those realities.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".