Stories were then screened for agreement with the project's inclusions rules. The resulting project sample consisted of 1,149 stories, all of which were fully coded and are included in the final data analysis. However, all stories under the editorial control of the newspaper are included. Coding Process Researchers worked with a detailed, standardized coding scheme. In all cases, coders worked with a defined set of rules per variable.
Additional weight is given to text within the headline of the story.
All other stories are coded as neutral. In this study, stories determined to be straight news accounts were not coded for Tone. Intercoder Reliability Intercoder reliability measures the extent to which individual coders, operating independently of one another, reach the same coding decision. As previously stated, the project director made all final decisions on both the content and intent variables.