The study “ Objectivity and Moral Judgment in U.S. News Narratives: A Natural Language Processing Analysis of ‘Culture War’ Coverage” by Mengyao Xu from University of Missouri and Zhujin Guo from Clarkson University used Natural Language Processing tools to evaluate objectivity practice in terms of attitude injection by examining 20,679 culture news articles published in five U.S. newspapers.
Objectivity is seen central in journalism but has been pronounced dead many times over when new norms arrive. Yet it lives on. Boudana argued that objectivity is an evolving notion and should be open to criticism and improvement. Quantitatively examining objectivity has been difficult. This gap is addressed by the study by using Moral Foundation Theory (MFT).
The theory of MFT claims that human beings draw from moral intuitions and judge right and wrong based on five innate moral foundations: 1) care/harm, 2) fairness/cheating, 3) loyalty/betrayal, 4) authority/subversion, and 5) sanctity/degradation. These automatically trigger snap judgements that cannot be turned off.
Moral rhetoric, according to Sagi and Dehghani (2014) refers to “the language used for advocating or taking a moral stance toward an issue by invoking or making salient various moral concerns”. It has been used to measure moral foundations in MFT framework. Moral loading is the degree to which moral values appeal and values are carried by language – meaning less neutral language.
Culture wars refers to issues in which there is a wide societal disagreement and polarization of viewpoints, such as abortion, gun control, and immigration. Stories pertaining to culture wars have a high risk of being subjective, e.g. morally loaded.
This study used Natural Language Processing (NLP) tools to automatically analyze the content of culture wars news from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, The Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times, from 1980s to 2021.The culture wars topics focused on were abortion, gun control, climate change, and immigration.
It was found out that there was a systematic conservative/liberal pattern of moral judgements in all five newspapers. Higher moral loadings were present in care/harm and fairness/cheating categories than loyalty/betrayal and sanctity/degradation. The higher moral loadings were present in individual-focused moral foundations rather than group-focused, suggesting a typical liberal pattern that is predicted by MFT.
Moreover, it was found out that the liberal pattern was increasing during the time period of analysis, and the group-focused were decreasing. The authors suggest that the reason for the liberal pattern is possibly shaped by the journalists’ social watchdog function, and objectivity – it asks to report reality as it is, and the topics have been discussed more from a liberal viewpoint.
In conclusion, the study connected moral psychology to media ethics in enactment of objectivity. The objectivity performance has reflected increasingly a liberal pattern, with authority/subversion as an outlier reflecting a partially conservative style. According to the authors, the findings suggest that journalists have been objectively reporting reality.
Future studies could focus on economic factors and their connection to the matters investigated, as moral loading slumped during the economic crisis of 2008. Other studies could focus on episodic framing.
The article “ Objectivity and Moral Judgment in U.S. News Narratives: A Natural Language Processing Analysis of ‘Culture War’ Coverage” by Mengyao Xu and Zhujin Guo is in Journal of Media Ethics. (free abstract).
Picture: Untitled by Charl Foscher.
License Unpslash.