Garnering coverage across the political spectrum is a major challenge for burgeoning social movements. The #MeToo movement stands out due to the volume of attention it generated. Yet, it is unclear how news media across the partisan spectrum covered the movement using different sexual violence language markers, latent topic, and word choices and which accusations and events drove media attention. To examine this, we used Media Cloud to extract 17,877 news articles from nine media outlets across the political spectrum, containing specific n-grams or co-occurrences of (1) “metoo,” (2) “sexual misconduct,” (3) “sexual harassment,” and (4) “sexual assault” from October 2017 through February 2018. The analyses first examined whether language and attention differed across the ideological news ecology and then turned to time-series modeling of these discourses to examine what drove press coverage and structural topic modeling (STM) and term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) analysis to understand latent topics and language usage. Findings reveal that (1) left-leaning media dedicated more relative attention across all topics—#MeToo, sexual misconduct, sexual harassment, and sexual assault—relative to centrist and right-leaning media. Moreover, across the right, left, and centrist media, the language markers “misconduct,” “harassment,” and “assault” decreased over the study period, while the mentions of #MeToo movement increased during the same period; (2) stories relating to entertainment and those accusing politicians, especially those belonging to the party in power at the Federal level, seemed to be by far the strongest driver of news media attention; and (3) we further observed partisan differences in topics of news coverage and language usage.

在整个政治领域获得报道是迅速发展的社会运动的主要挑战。#MeToo运动因其引起的关注而引人注目。然而，目前尚不清楚党派范围内的新闻媒体如何使用不同的性暴力语言标记，潜在话题和词语选择来报道这一运动，以及哪些指控和事件引起了媒体的关注。为了对此进行研究，我们使用Media Cloud从整个政治领域的9个媒体中提取了17,877条新闻报道，其中包含特定的n字或以下形式的同时出现：（1）“ metoo”，（2）“性行为不端”，（3）从2017年10月至2018年2月为“性骚扰”和（4）“性侵犯”。分析首先检查了意识形态新闻生态中的语言和注意力是否有所不同，然后转向对这些话语进行时间序列建模，以研究推动新闻报道和结构主题建模（STM）以及术语频率倒排文档频率（TF-IDF）的因素。分析以了解潜在主题和语言用法。研究结果表明（1）偏左媒体相对于中间派和偏右媒体在所有主题（#MeToo，性行为不端，性骚扰和性侵犯）上都给予了更多的相对关注。此外，在研究期间，在左右，中间派和中间派媒体上，语言标记“不当行为”，“骚扰”和“殴打”减少了，而#MeToo运动的提及在同一时期有所增加。（2）有关娱乐活动和指责政客的故事，尤其是在联邦一级当权的政党，似乎是迄今为止引起新闻媒体关注的最大动力；（3）我们进一步观察到党派在新闻报道和语言使用主题上的差异。