Abstract
A key question of collective social behavior is related to the influence of mass media on public opinion. Different approaches have been developed to address quantitatively this issue, ranging from field experiments to mathematical models. In this work we propose a combination of tools involving natural language processing and time series analysis. We compare selected features of mass media news articles with measurable manifestation of public opinion. We apply our analysis to news articles belonging to the 2016 US presidential campaign. We compare variations in polls (as a proxy of public opinion) with changes in the connotation of the news (sentiment) or in the agenda (topics) of a selected group of media outlets. Our results suggest that the sentiment content by itself is not enough to understand the differences in polls, but the combination of topics coverage and sentiment content provides an useful insight of the context in which public opinion varies. The methodology employed in this work is far general and can be easily extended to other topics of interest.
Highlights
Mass media play one of the important roles in the process of public opinion formation
Our results suggest that the sentiment content by itself is not enough to understand the differences in polls, but the combination of topics coverage and sentiment content provides an useful insight of the context in which public opinion varies
We study the relationship between mass media and public opinion using a combination of sentiment analysis and topic detection of news articles
Summary
Mass media play one of the important roles in the process of public opinion formation. Beyond informing about facts and events, mass media give an interpretation about such events, providing individuals a way to understand their relevance. Through its capacity to reflect reality from its own perspective, media determine the relative importance given to different topics, a process known as agenda-setting. The agenda-setting theory is usually summarized in the quote ‘maybe media does not tell you what to think, but what to think about’ [1, 2]. Media can tell you what is and what is not important, and to what extent. The agenda-setting power of mass media produce an important effect, that acquires relevance, for instance, in the political opinion formation during electoral contexts [3]
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