Hydraulic fracturing and political conflict: News media coverage of topics and themes across nine states

This article compares the topics that underlie public debate around hydraulic fracturing covered in newspapers across nine U.S. states over an eleven-year period. In analyzing more than 7000 newspaper articles using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) modeling, thirteen main topics emerge. While these topics fluctuate over time, their relative frequency and, hence, importance in the discourse remains largely constant. The environmental risks associated with the practice is the topic that receives more attention when all data are aggregated. We find that the frequency of the topics varies by state, and the nature of this variation is associated with the political leanings of the state, with media sources in Republican governed states more likely to report on the economic benefits associated with hydraulic fracturing. Finally, we show how all topics are associated with words that indicate the presence of conflict among stakeholders involved in discussions about the costs and benefits of hydraulic fracturing. In doing so, we describe how the association between topics and conflict varies according to which party governs the state, which provides evidence about the fundamental differences on how parties consider the practice of hydraulic fracturing in the states we study. We conclude the article by discussing the advantages and disadvantages of our methodological approach, which can be leveraged to discern trends in discussions about environmental and energy-related problems that exceed the specific case of hydraulic fracturing.