Replication Data for: "Locating the Asymmetry in Information Flow between Local and National Media on Transgender Discourses"

Full text and metadata for articles used in the analyses for "Locating the Asymmetry in Information Flow between Local and National Media on Transgender Discourses", currently under review for a special issue on transphobic disinformation from the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies. Columns: Unnamed:0 (dataset index), media_name (media outlet where the article was published), publish_date (date of publication in YYYY-mm-DD HH:MM:SS format), title (article title), url (article URL as obtained from MediaCloud), subtitle (article subtitle), text (article text), sent_count (number of sentences), domain (domain from which the article was obtained), gender_label (does this article contain the string "gender"?), media_group (state-level or national media collection as defined in the article -- one of {'texas', 'ohio', 'illinois', 'florida', 'california', 'newyork', 'nytimes.com', 'foxnews.com'}) Abstract: Mainstream news outlets set the agenda and terms of discussion for public discourse. As transgender people experience increasingly vitriolic attacks on their fundamental rights in the U.S., understanding the dynamics governing media discussions of transgender people becomes even more salient. The interplay between news outlets with different geographical scopes—national and local—is an important aspect of media discourse circulation. Guided by inter-media agenda-setting theory, we use transfer entropy, a measure of information flow, to quantify whether, and how, transgender discourses spread across local and national media. We find that transgender discourses on a particular topic propagate from national to state-level outlets; however, we find that this process often involves two steps: national outlets influence particular state(s), which, in turn, influence the other states. Therefore, local outlets play a more complex role in agenda-setting for transgender discourses than previously thought. We combine our quantitative study of information flow between two national outlets and six state-level news collections with two comprehensive qualitative case studies, including recommendations for interventions to improve the state of the news ecosystem, to shed light on the circulation and nature of various transgender discourses across different geographical scopes within the U.S. media landscape.