This article was originally published on November 21, 2025 on the McGee Applied Research Center for Narrative Studies website. The McGee Center aims to equip individuals with the essential skills and knowledge required to adeptly navigate and critically assess narratives in the dynamic media landscape of the 21st century. Through innovative research endeavors, collaborative educational initiatives, and active engagement with the community, the McGee Center is helping build a future where media literacy becomes a cornerstone for informed and empowered citizenship.
Trying to make sense of the information environment can feel like a Sisyphean task — just when you think you’ve got a handle on things, forces within the complex system evolve and it’s time to rethink or re-examine. This is at once exciting, inspiring, confusing and overwhelming. Deciding which aspects of the system to focus on, whether to take a macro- or micro-view, and how to move the needle on the existing gaps in research are all part of the challenge. I’m regularly reminded of a line from the classic Crowded House song “Don’t Dream It’s Over”:
Try to catch the deluge in a paper cup
It’s within this context that the McGee Center is building a research agenda centered on two main areas: how media narratives (and the individuals, companies and tech platforms behind the narratives) shape our understanding of the world, and people’s changing relationship with media and information. Below I've summarized our first-year efforts in both areas.
Vanderbilt Television News Archive
To tackle the first focus area, we are so fortunate to have the Vanderbilt Television News Archive (TVNA), an unparalleled collection of U.S. national television news dating back to 1968. Though television has dominated as the preferred way to consume news until very recently, studying TV news has been an arduous, time-consuming task. The TVNA team has worked diligently to digitize, transcribe and describe the collection, and a recently launched beta website will enhance the archive’s usability for university sponsors and public patrons.
Through this process, we have unlocked the potential for computational analysis of more than 1.4 million segments of news and commercials using Databricks data analytics tools. We are now able to quickly track narrative trends over time, examine media framing and agenda-setting across networks and decades, and conduct longitudinal sentiment analysis, to name only a few of the possibilities for researchers across disciplines. To test these systems, we’ve embarked on research in a few areas, led by our Hearst Fellow for Media Analysis Namrah Khan.
Immigration Policy: Television Media Trends Over Time
To demonstrate longitudinal analysis of media coverage in TVNA, we selected four key moments in modern immigration policy history to evaluate. In addition to an in-depth qualitative study of relevant news segments (forthcoming), we looked at the words used by national evening news programs to describe immigrants in the U.S. The dashboards below provide a snapshot of the type of information we can glean using computational analysis of more than 1 million records. Click each graph for a bigger view.
The images above are static versions of what can be complex and interrelated dynamic dashboards that allow researchers to see the big picture but also zoom in for greater detail. This information can be directly connected to source material (transcripts and segment videos) for deeper investigation.
In addition to our immigration research, we’re working with Vanderbilt undergraduate students through the Buchanan Library Fellowship to examine U.S. national media coverage of higher education since the TVNA started in 1968. And we’ve consulted with undergrads researching presidential debates, climate change and COVID-19.
The advancements we’ve made greatly accelerate the research possibilities of the TVNA. Researchers are no longer limited to the slow process of viewing news segments as the unit of analysis (though they are still very welcome to do so!). By reducing that time barrier, TVNA becomes a much more accessible dataset for researchers across a broad range of disciplines, using many different methodologies. To help facilitate this process and learn more about what’s possible, we invite you to become a sponsor or contact us to learn more about our research services.
Media Habits: Focus Groups and In-Depth Interviews
People’s relationship with the news today is fraught. Confidence in democratic institutions is at historic lows, a consistent trend for the media for decades. A newer twist to how we think about these relationships, though, is that we no longer have a solid understanding of, nor a clear agreement on, what news is as defined by the people who consume it (or don’t). Through research and my experience leading dozens of workshops with students, professionals in a variety of fields, and retirees, I have commonly heard that people are:
- confused about what news sources they can trust;
- skeptical of information they see on social media;
- likely to believe the news media are biased (especially cable television news).
However, I’ve also learned that these ideas do not always inform people’s actual media consumption. For example, though people often aren’t convinced there is a credible source of news to be found, they also describe relying on news for things like weather and traffic updates, as well as in breaking news situations, including emergencies. And though social media skepticism is high, it is now the primary place for people to find out about current events.
Though we have pretty clear referents when people say they get news from television or news websites, it’s much less clear what the social media equivalent is. And after more than 15 years of generally attributing the rise in misinformation, growing partisan divide and decline in institutional trust to social media, we still don’t have a good handle on people’s actual media habits and influences. We’ll be digging deeper into these questions through focus groups and in-depth interviews in the coming year, so we hope you’ll stay tuned.