To what extent does the news media address school funding? A case study in Texas/USA

ABSTRACT This paper investigates how television news media deals with the financing of basic education, with the aim of tracing theoretical and methodological elements for analyzing how the media can influence public opinion about schools and, consequently, underpin legislative debates and the implementation of educational policies. With an approach based on critical discourse analysis methodology, this paper originated in a quantitative and qualitative study of news media data in five cities in the state of Texas (United States of America). The data comes from these cities’ primary TV channels and local newspapers, which was used to create a historical database capable of revealing the topics of greatest journalistic coverage regarding school funding. This article presents aspects of the materials and methods used in this larger research project, focusing on the study’s quantitative results about television news coverage. The paper aims to contribute to the debate about the ideological matrices that permeate the socially constructed symbolic representation of public education and its financing through the journalistic media.