Skip to the main content
Media Cloud
Tool

Media Cloud

Media Cloud is a consortium research project across multiple institutions, including the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Northeastern University. It is an open source, open data platform that allows researchers to answer complex quantitative and qualitative questions about the content of online media. Using MediaCloud, academic researchers, journalism critics, and interested citizens can examine what mediasources cover which stories, what language different media outlets use in conjunction with different stories, and how stories spread from one media outlet to another.

For more information and to get started, visit the Media Cloud site at mediacloud.org.


Our Work 22

Publication
Oct 29, 2020

Polarization and the Pandemic: American Political Discourse

Public Discourse in the U.S. 2020 Election: March - May

Tracking political discourse in the U.S. for March, April, and May of 2020

Oct 22, 2020

Partisanship, Impeachment, and the Democratic Primaries: American Political Discourse

Public Discourse in the U.S. 2020 Election: January and February

Tracking political discourse in the U.S. for January and February of 2020

News
Oct 2, 2020

Tracing the disinformation campaign on mail-in voter fraud

Research shows elites, mass media play an important role in spreading voting misinformation

Publication
Oct 1, 2020

Mail-In Voter Fraud: Anatomy of a Disinformation Campaign

Working paper shows Disinformation Campaign Surrounding the Risk of Voter Fraud Associated with Mail-in Ballots Follows an Elite-Driven, Mass Media Model; Social Media Plays a Secondary Role in 2020

Working paper explores disinformation campaign about mail-in voter fraud

News
Dec 9, 2018

Network Propaganda named one of the best books of 2018

The Guardian celebrates some of our research as the most important of the year.

Jul 12, 2018

Understanding Media and Information Quality in an Age of Artificial Intelligence, Automation, Algorithms and Machine Learning

Technology can be a threat to the integrity and quality of media, but also a source of potential solutions.

Event
Jan 23, 2018 @ 12:00 PM

The Dark Side of the Networked Public Sphere

featuring Jonas Kaiser, Berkman Klein Affiliate

In this talk, Berkman Klein affiliate Jonas Kaiser will share some of his research on the networked public sphere. "The right-wing is rising. Not only in the United States but…

News
Aug 16, 2017

Partisan Right-Wing Websites Shaped Mainstream Press Coverage Before 2016 Election, Berkman Klein Study Finds

The Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University today released a comprehensive analysis of online media and social media coverage of the 2016 presidential…

Publication
Aug 16, 2017

Partisanship, Propaganda, and Disinformation: Online Media and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election

In this study, we analyze both mainstream and social media coverage of the 2016 United States presidential election.

Event
Mar 14, 2017 @ 12:00 PM

An Introduction to Media Cloud

Mapping the attention and influence of news

The recent US election, and related conversations about misinformation, have brought questions about media influence to the forefront of internet research and communications…

Event
Feb 23, 2017 @ 12:00 PM

Public Health Echo Chambers in a Time of Mistrust & Misinformation - Digital Health @ Harvard, February 2017

with Berkman Klein fellows Natalie Gyenes and Brittany Seymour

Research shows that public health information networks online have been largely unsuccessful in driving an evidence-based information network narrative around key health topics…

Publication
Feb 10, 2015

Score Another One for the Internet? The Role of the Networked Public Sphere in the U.S. Net Neutrality Policy Debate

A new paper from the Media Cloud team concludes that a diverse set of actors working in conjunction through the networked public sphere played a central, arguably decisive, role…

Jul 25, 2013

New Publication: "Social Mobilization and the Networked Public Sphere: Mapping the SOPA-PIPA Debate"

The Berkman Center for Internet & Society is pleased to announce the publication of “Social mobilization and the networked public sphere: Mapping the SOPA-PIPA debate,” authored…

Jul 25, 2013

Social Mobilization and the Networked Public Sphere: Mapping the SOPA-PIPA Debate

This paper uses a new set of online research tools to develop a detailed study of the public debate over proposed legislation in the United States designed to give prosecutors and…

News
Jun 22, 2011

MIT bound!

Ethan Zuckerman is becoming director of the Center for Civic Media

Huge congratulations to our friend and colleague Ethan Zuckerman on his new gig at the MIT Media Lab! Ethan writes, "So, I got a new job. A really cool new job."

May 6, 2011

Relaunch: Media Cloud

The Berkman Center is pleased to announce that the Media Cloud Dashboard is open for public use. We invite you to experiment with the tool, which generates weekly word clouds of…

News
Mar 30, 2011

Using Media Cloud to measure the change in media cycles

From Ethan Zuckerman's blog: "...Hal Roberts, David Larochelle, Zoe Fraade-Blanar...have been revamping the Media Cloud tool this past year, trying to make it more powerful for…

Event
Feb 16, 2010 @ 12:30 PM

Meme-tracking and the dynamics of the news cycle

Jure Leskovec, assistant professor of Computer Science at Stanford University

Jure will discuss his analysis of approximately 1.6 million mainstream media sites and blogs for a period of three months, covering about 1 million articles per day.

Event
Nov 23, 2009 @ 11:45 AM

CRCS Lunch Seminar: Media Cloud and Quantitative News Media Analysis

Hal Roberts and Ethan Zuckerman, Berkman Center

Ethan and Hal will present their prototype system to retrieve, tag, cluster and analyze blog and newspaper data, and discuss how the Media Cloud platform will be used in our…

News
Mar 23, 2009

Berkman selected as Google Summer of Code mentoring organization

From March 23 - April 3, students can apply to work with Berkman as Summer of Code participants.

News
Mar 19, 2009

Introducing Media Cloud

(updated March 19)

The Berkman Center is pleased to announce the launch of Media Cloud, a new project that seeks to track news content comprehensively -- providing free, open, and flexible research…

News
Mar 11, 2009

Berkman Center’s ‘Media Cloud’ To Offer Insights on Media Trends, the Blogosphere and News Industry Dynamics

Thomson Reuters Contributes Calais Web Service to New Research Tool from the Berkman Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University

Thomson Reuters has teamed with Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society to support the new ‘Media Cloud’ open research tool. Debuting in Q2, 2009, Media Cloud…


Community 11

Columbia Journalism Review

How a racialized disinformation campaign ties itself to The 1619 Project

Research from Joan Donovan and colleague shows how right-wing media enabled a disinformation campaign around The 1619 Project

Mar 11, 2021
NiemanReports

How Not to Cover Voter Fraud Disinformation

Journalists should treat systematic disinformation campaigns from President Trump and his party no differently than those from Russian propagandists and Facebook clickbait artists

Oct 7, 2020
MIT ILP

Exploring the good – and very bad – political impacts of social media

Ethan Zuckerman discusses the opportunities and consequences of participatory media.

Aug 7, 2019
MIT Industrial Liaison Program

Exploring the good – and very bad – political impacts of social media

Ethan Zuckerman discusses the opportunities and consequences of participatory media.

Apr 3, 2019
Colombia Journalism Review

What we learned from analyzing thousands of stories on the Christchurch shooting

An analysis of over 6,000 articles about the recent tragedy reveals useful guidelines for journalists on reporting extreme content

Mar 26, 2019
The New Yorker

The Making of the Fox News White House

What does the data show? Looking at the relationship between Fox News and the Trump Administration.

Mar 11, 2019
The Atlantic

How the “attention backbone" works to spread misinformation

Berkman Klein research cited in a writeup of how political figures are contributing to the spread of misinformation through fringe news sites and into the mainstream media

Feb 10, 2019
LA Times

How the 'propaganda feedback loop' of right-wing media keeps more than a quarter of Americans siloed

Why is there so often no overlap, no resemblance whatsoever between the news events reported in mainstream print and broadcast coverage?

Nov 7, 2018
Washington Post

Blame Fox, not Facebook, for fake news

"The highly asymmetric pattern of media ecosystems we observe on the right and the left, despite the fact that Facebook and Twitter usage is roughly similar on both sides,…

Nov 6, 2018
Cato Institute

Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics

Yochai Benkler at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC.

Sep 28, 2018
The Tow Center for Digital Journalism

Network Propaganda

A discussion on how to think about technology, politics, and media in the post-truth moment

Sep 26, 2018

People 09

Point of Contact

Team

Robert Faris

Affiliate

Jonas Kaiser

Faculty Associate

Ethan Zuckerman

Faculty Associate