International press coverage of East German protest events, 1989

Despite increasing international interest in the quantitative study of protest events, there has been no systematic attempt to test Snyder and Kelly's (1977) validity model for evaluating the newspaper data on which such analyses are based. Their model emphasizes the independent roles of media sensitivity (proximity to protest events and ideological bias) and event intensity (protest size, duration, and violence) in the enumeration of protest events. I expand their model to encompass issues raised in the context of international press reporting and test the expanded model using data from six international newspapers that covered the protest events in the former German Democratic Republic in 1989.