NewsOptimism

Comparative Analysis of various news media and quantify its postiveness based on the Linguistic choice of words in their articles.

Problem

All around the world both good and bad happens, and we get to know only those that are exposed to us. And, that’s the primary responsibility of the media. But the bigger responsibility of these media houses is the way in which they express the content to the people.

A responsible media house’s content should be original, unbiased, free of exaggeration and should be very sensitive in handling the emotions of it’s readers and viewers. A same story could be told in different ways and these different ways could definitely trigger different emotions among it’s readers.

It is known that we become who we are by what we say and what we read. Reading a story that’s filled with positive words would make us feel more positive and vice versa. So the wordings of a content definitely plays an equal role as that of the content itself.

This project aims to answer how some of the major media houses in USA are giving importance to the wordings of their content. The answer would allow the readers to wisely choose their daily source of news that truly cares about its readers.

There is a famous concept called Law of attraction written by Rhonda Byrne in her book Secret.It says that we become who we are by what we say!

Key concepts:

Text-analysis, Lexicon based sentiment analysis, Natural Language Processing(NLP),Data extraction, Newspaper API, AFINN

Hypothesis:

The English(language) words are considered to find out how much of positivity or negativity an article contains. We then quantify the news website by comparing the frequency of occurrence of the words across all articles published in that website.

Target Audience:

The headline scrollers - people who scroll the news headlines and text directly from the media’s homepage.

Datasource:

1. "http://www.nytimes.com/"
2. "http://www.foxnews.com/"
3. "http://www.reuters.com/"
4. "http://www.cnn.com/"
5. "http://www.huffingtonpost.com/"

These are the famous news websites considered based on the unique visitor count obtained from the research

Language:

1. Python
2. Sql

Considerations to keep in mind:

  1. Data has been scrapped from the resources at the same time(since it gets updated regularly).
  2. Only the USA News web market is considered for this research.
  3. CNN, Foxnews, nytimes, huffingtonpost, reuters are the top news websites considered based on the unique visitor count obtained from the research[www.journalism.org/files/legacy/NIELSEN%20STUDY%20-%20Copy.pdf].
  4. Our target audience are prone to ALL the articles published in home page.
  5. Our Sample considers only the articles published in 10am(CST).

Approach:

  1. Scrapped news articles and their content from the news media websites as text document.
  2. Converted those text document into csv formatted file.
  3. Preprocessed the data using NLP techniques.
  4. Tf-idf method is applied to find the importance of word.
  5. Sentiment analysis to show how much positive or negative the news websites for each day.

Progress:

1) Data Extraction Phase:

Data is collected as Text Document from the datasources as mentioned above. Have a look at the sample text file of the articles taken from the reuters.com front page on 10/17/2017. Reuters_10/17/2017

The data as CSV file has the following columns:

Have Peek at the file structure Download original csv file

2) Analysis Phase:

Let’s check the distribution of negative words(words that have a negative connotation), as shown below. The media house with least projection of these negative words is Foxnews followed by New York times. They deliver the content in more optimistic way than their counterparts.

Net Negative Score=Negative termsper media * Sentiment score

cnn_12032017

However to build healthy society we also need to check all vocabulary content of the article, that includes both the usage of positive and negative words. Thus a Normalized score is introduced!

A Normalized score is the net sentiment score of all articles to that of the total number of term usage across all the articles in a day(which is specific to each media houses).

Net Normalized Score=(termsper day * Sentiment score)/Total Number of terms

score range

Note: The terms positivines is calculated using a lexicon based approach, AFINN(It is a list of English words rated for valence with an integer between minus five (negative) and plus five (positive)).

3) Conclusion:

Thus from the plot we can see that New York times plays an important role in not only conveying the News but also in a healthy way(comparatively more optimistic). Thus I recommend New york times, for those Web users who just want to have good taste of daily news.

Detailed Work

  1. Full Project OpenSource code

Detailed Research resources:

  1. How the words we use affect the way we think
  2. According to new research by Stanford psychologists. Your thinking can even be swayed with just one word, they say
  3. There is a famous concept called Law of attraction written by Rhonda Byrne in her book Secret.It says that we become who we are by what we say!
  4. Lera Boroditsky: How language shapes the way we think