# A Systematic Media Frame Analysis of 1.5 Million New York Times Articles from 2000 to 2017

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2005.01803 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.01803/

## Key facts

- Cited by 23 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 4 May 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 23 of 23)

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- [Connecting the Dots in News Analysis: Bridging the Cross-Disciplinary Disparities in Media Bias and Framing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.08069/) (2023)
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- [QCRI at SemEval-2023 Task 3: News Genre, Framing and Persuasion Techniques Detection using Multilingual Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.03336/) (2023)
- [Media Framing through the Lens of Event-Centric Narratives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03151/) (2024)
- [Generalizability of Media Frames: Corpus creation and analysis across countries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.16337/) (2025)
- [Framing in the Presence of Supporting Data: A Case Study in U.S. Economic News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.14224/) (2024)
- [mCPT at SemEval-2023 Task 3: Multilingual Label-Aware Contrastive Pre-Training of Transformers for Few- and Zero-shot Framing Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.09901/) (2023)
- [A Quantitative Discourse Analysis of Asian Workers in the US Historical Newspapers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.02572/) (2024)
- [A Dataset for Analysing News Framing in Chinese Media](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04439/) (2025)
- [Journalism-Guided Agentic In-Context Learning for News Stance Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11049/) (2025)
- [Structuring the Space of Perspectives](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.12113/) (2026)
- [A Study on Scaling Up Multilingual News Framing Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.01481/) (2024)
- [Dynamic Analysis and Adaptive Discriminator for Fake News Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10883/) (2024)
- [A Data-driven Investigation of Euphemistic Language: Comparing the usage of "slave" and "servant" in 19th century US newspapers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.15057/) (2025)
- [Triangulating Temporal Dynamics in Multilingual Swiss Online News](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21519/) (2026)
- [Politics of Questions in News: A Mixed-Methods Study of Interrogative Stances as Markers of Voice and Power](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21823/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Framing is an indispensable narrative device for news media because even the same facts may lead to conflicting understandings if deliberate framing is employed. Therefore, identifying media framing is a crucial step to understanding how news media influence the public. Framing is, however, difficult to operationalize and detect, and thus traditional media framing studies had to rely on manual annotation, which is challenging to scale up to massive news datasets. Here, by developing a media frame classifier that achieves state-of-the-art performance, we systematically analyze the media frames of 1.5 million New York Times articles published from 2000 to 2017. By examining the ebb and flow of media frames over almost two decades, we show that short-term frame abundance fluctuation closely corresponds to major events, while there also exist several long-term trends, such as the gradually increasing prevalence of the ``Cultural identity'' frame. By examining specific topics and sentiments, we identify characteristics and dynamics of each frame. Finally, as a case study, we delve into the framing of mass shootings, revealing three major framing patterns. Our scalable, computational approach to massive news datasets opens up new pathways for systematic media framing studies.