Library & Cultural Services: Politics: News. Media

News & media databases

Interest in news & media is relevant to political scientists working in many areas, including policy studies, political campaigns & marketing, party platforms, propaganda, social movement studies, events analysis, and so forth. Nor is it restricted to current affairs, since an increasing range of historical sources are also being made available. Methods such as content analysis, discourse analysis, and, increasingly, use of big data can be employed in news analysis.

See also the extensive links to websites concerned with Media, Journalism & Fake News on the Politics subject guide

BBC World News
Reasonable starting point for current events

Box of Broadcasts (BoB)
Box of Broadcasts (BoB) is an off-air recording and media archive service. It allows you to record TV and radio programmes scheduled to be broadcast over the next seven days as well as retrieving programmes from the last seven days, and from the archive (back to around 2007 for 9 key channels).
Institutional login

British Library News Data Guide
A great page to start exploring the BLs large and diverse newspaper collections from around the world

Economist.com
The Economist online offers authoritative insight and opinion on international news, politics, business, finance, science and technology. It publishes all articles from The Economist print edition and maintains a searchable online archive that dates back June 1997.
Institutional login
Factiva
Factiva is the Library's replacement for Nexis, and similarly offers full text access to thousands of newspapers from around the world, in a variety of languages. It includes many key national newspapers of record, as well as more local or regional newspapers. Additional content comes from Web newspapers, news wires, and business information sources.
Pressreader
PressReader is a "virtual news stand" and contains a selection of newspapers and magazines from over 120 countries in over 60 languages. You can personalise to show your favourite publications.
OFF-CAMPUS ACCESS: Select "sign in" via "Library or Group". Search for University of Essex. Sign in using "OpenID Connect" and select University of Essex.
Select "sign in" via "Library or Group". Search for University of Essex. Sign in using "OpenID Connect" and select University of Essex.

Nor is research restricted to current affairs, since an increasing range of historical sources are also being made available, such as:

Economist Historical Archive 1843-2015
The Economist Historical Archive 1843-2015 is the fully searchable complete facsimile edition of The Economist, the weekly paper which is essential reading for anyone engaged in politics, current affairs and all aspects of business and trade worldwide.
Shibboleth users

Europeana Newspapers
EU project to digitise historic European newspapers from the 17th century onwards. Huge resource, search facility can be slow

Gale Primary Sources
Gale Primary Sources provides access to a range of collections and newspaper archives. These databases include the Archives of Sexuality and Gender; British Library Newspapers; Crime, Punishment, and Popular Culture, 1790-1920; 17th and 18th Century Burney Newspapers Collection; and more.
Shibboleth users

Pressemappe 20. Jahrhundert (20th century Press Archives)
Huge archive of around 16 million press clippings initially compiled by the Hamburg Kolonialinstitut, later the Hamburgisches Welt-Wirtschafts-Archiv, and now part of the Leibniz Association. Cuttings cover about 100 years up to 2005, are are divided into 4 sections: topics, products, companies, persons. Digitisation is making good progress, see Wikipedia for further details

Proquest Historical Newspapers
This historical newspaper archive provides genealogists, researchers and scholars with online, easily-searchable first-hand accounts and unparalleled coverage of the politics, society and events of the time.
Institutional login

For further information on newspaper sources see the British Library list of online newspaper resources (some free)

Wikipedia has some useful links to online newspaper archives (some free).

Specialist guides to sources in the library catalogue can be found using the keywords "Newspapers" and "Bibliography"

News websites

Here is a small selection of generally credible news sites with global or mostly global coverage:

ABC News
Al Jazeera
AP News
BBC News
CNN
Eurasia Review
Foreign Policy news
PBS Newshour
Reuters
Spiegel International

Additional news sources for the US may be found here and on the Area Studies subject guide.

You can assess these and other news sources for left/right bias and factual credibility of reporting by doing some fact checking yourself, and/or using these tools to do so