Harvard Gazette: Study quantifies U.S. news media’s disregard for archaeology from China, Taiwan
The Department of Anthropology at Harvard University is pleased to share recent news from The Harvard Gazette featuring Rowan Flad, John E. Hudson Professor of Archaeology, and Bridget Alex, Lecturer in HEB. The story, titled "Study quantifies U.S. news media’s disregard for archaeology from China, Taiwan," explores an anti-China bias in archaeological media reporting.
A new analysis, published this month in Science Advances, supports Flad’s claims of an anti-China bias. The study looked at 1,155 archaeology publications in seven peer-reviewed academic journals over six years, from the beginning of 2015 to the end of 2020. It also reviewed the resulting coverage in 15 major U.S. news outlets, including CNN, Scientific American, The New York Times, and The Washington Post.
Results show that research generated on Israel/Palestine, United Kingdom, and Australia was about three times more likely to receive coverage than similar work from China and Taiwan, even when controlling for other factors found to drive coverage.
Digging into archaeology stories produced by individual news outlets revealed additional disparities. “Some media outlets just really like covering Egypt,” observed Jenny Ji, who served as the study’s co-lead author with Alex. “Others really like Spain, or really like Turkey. Once you break down the data a little further, all these interesting little nuances start emerging.”
For the 16 countries with the highest counts of archaeology research papers, the team used statistical models to test whether each was more or less likely than the others to receive U.S. media attention. “Basically nothing stood out except for the results for China and Taiwan,” Alex explained. “These two countries had the highest absolute number of journal articles, but our models show they were statistically less likely to receive coverage.”
Read the full story here.
Special thanks to Christy DeSmith for her coverage of this story.