The rise of social media allowed for rich analyses of their content and their network structure. As traditional media (i.e. newspapers and magazines) are being digitized, similar analyses can be undertaken. This provides a glimpse of the elite, as the news mostly revolves around the more influential members of society. We here focus on a network structure derived from co-occurrences of people in the media. This network has a strong core with peripheral clusters being connected to the core. Nonetheless, these characteristics seem to be mainly a result from the bipartite structure of the data. We employ a simple growing bipartite model that can qualitatively reproduce such a core-periphery structure. Two self-reinforcing processes are vital: (1) more frequently occurring persons are more likely to occur again; and (2) if two people co-occur frequently, they are more likely to co-occur again. This suggests that the core-periphery structure is not necessarily reflective of the elite network in society, but might be an artefact of how they are portrayed in the media.
['Vincent A. Traag', 'Ridho Reinanda', 'G.A. van Klinken']
Structure of an elite co-occurrence network