Privacy and security in the media - quantitative analysis. Deliverable 6.1

This report provides insights into the ongoing research on the media's coverage of privacy and security issues within the first stage of the PRISMS project. The PRISMS project examines how technologies aimed at enhancing security are subjecting citizens to an increasing amount of surveillance and, in many cases, causing infringements of privacy and fundamental rights. In line with the overall project's research objectives - to explore the relationship between privacy and security and to learn if people actually evaluate the introduction of new security and security-oriented surveillance technologies in terms of a trade-off - the report starts by stating the work package's two main research objectives, namely identifying important discourse patterns (topics, actors, regions etc.) regarding privacy and security appearing in the media and analysing how the notions of ""privacy"" and ""security"" are reconstructed by the media in comparison to citizens' perceptions derived in the PRISMS survey. In this regard, the main theoretical concepts - agenda setting, priming, framing, risk communication, public opinion and news values - as well as prior research in similar areas are described briefly in the following chapter. Afterwards, details on the work package's methodology and research approach are provided: a systematic content analysis of media coverage of privacy and security issues that combines qualitative and quantitative aspects in a complex way will enable us to map the European discourse on privacy and security as the work package's final outcome. The process of content identification and sourcing is described in the following sections as well as an overview of the sample of the work package's primary countries (Germany, United Kingdom, The Netherlands). Also, it is analysed how coverage of privacy and security issues evolved during the years 2008 - 2011. This is followed by a description of the first step within our content analysis, that is analyzing the European media landscape by performing an automatic content analysis with the use of a data mining-based text analytical tool. Based on this analysis, the key features of the empirical material in terms of a selection of the main topics and issues discussed in the respective media and countries are identified. It is found that media coverage of privacy and security is dominated by issues that deal with data and personal information throughout the sample. Besides this set of shared topics, issues of national relevance are also identified. Using the results of the series of analyses conducted, the report concludes with the identification of next steps that will determine the next phase of research.