Andrej Školkay
with contributions (in alphabetical order) by Ľubica Adamcová, Ruqia Anwar, Juraj Filin and Veronika Vigh-Vass
This exploratory research presents key findings regarding media coverage and media monitoring of foreign policy, foreign affairs and international relations. It should be noted that we found that monitoring of media content in general, including related past and recent research projects in the areas of foreign affairs and international relations, has been widespread, but the successful monitoring of media content for the purpose of revealing emerging foreign policy in particular was not found in the research. Therefore, the research could not directly answer the question of what are the methodological challenges associated with using media monitoring tools to identify emerging foreign policy. Nonetheless, our research reveals inconsistencies in algorithmic dependability, coding biases, and data collection and interpretation issues in current media monitoring tools.
Despite the challenges identified, the key lesson from this pilot study is that the only reliable way to assess the effectiveness of media monitoring tools in any field is to assign identical specific tasks to their creators or managers and then compare the results. To come to such simple finding, however, first requires producing an overview such as this one. Notably, the most we managed to get from contacted private projects and tools through experiments and communication, were outputs based on sentiment analysis or frequency of mentions. This is obviously an insufficient information result for a comprehensive media monitoring of emerging foreign policies. Often, there was silence or contradictory information provided by researchers from publicly funded projects. Therefore, this report underscores the need for advancements in foreign policy monitoring and analysis while remaining sceptical about the effectiveness of automated monitoring, analytical and detection tools (with an exception of some partial tasks such as automated abstracts productions) without substantial human oversight.
