Negative Headlines Research Articles

Scrolling headlines and clicking stories: content differences and implications associated with increased scrollability of news

ABSTRACT Technological affordances have changed how people consume news; more people report scrolling headlines than actually reading stories. Despite the commonality of headline scrolling, we know relatively little about how headlines differ from full stories, and the consequences of these unique information environments for public opinion and political behavior. In this study, we use a replica newsfeed to track the stories participants scroll by and click on (N = 1,051), and complement this with a content analysis of the headlines and stories. Our findings show that headlines are more negative in tone when compared to stories and that people are more likely to click on negative headlines. Despite the contrast in information environments, with the exception of affective polarization, we find little difference between those who are more likely to scroll headlines and those who click on stories across a variety of political behaviors.

WP6.6 - Sentiment Analysis of Social Media Posts by Medical Professional in the UK

Abstract Aims Notoriously described as being controversial in nature, we aim to objectively assess the language used amongst medical professionals in social media (SM). Methods Data was extracted from the Reddit SM website under the sub-page "r/DoctorsUK" forum, through a data-extraction code written in the python language. This was then analysed through a Natural Language Toolkit algorithm to classify language used into positive, negative and neutral sentiments with an overall polarity score ranging from -1 noting most negative to 1 being most positive. Results A total of 992 articles were examined over a 24-day period, as limited by Reddit data application programme interface (API) protocols. A total of 210 positive, 218 negative and 564 neutral articles were noted with an average of 43 articles posted per day. Headlines sentiment on average was overall marginally positive at 0.0154. Comment tree within each headline was also examined, noting a more positive 0.173. Through regression analysis, it was noted that headline and comment sentiments was directly correlated, and this was statistically significant(P=1.24*10-10). It was also noted that more negative headlines had higher “likes” and were therefore featured more prominently within the forum. Conclusions Although SM posts are overall positive in sentiment, it is noted that more negative sentiments are often up-voted and therefore featured more prominently due to their more provocative nature and emotions incited amongst readers. As SM posts elicits strong psychological and psychosocial reactions from a community, there is an urgency to more accurate data driven models in developing future policies to maintain an effective professional morale within the NHS.

South African Government Functionality Assessment through the Eyes of Ordinary Citizens

While there are promises of improving in areas such as creation of jobs, law enforcement, education and other fields by government representatives, it seems as if the targeted beneficiaries or citizens no longer believe in government interventions. They see the government deteriorating in general service delivery and many believe the government functionality in providing safety and better life to all citizens is compromised and in downward trajectory as this is even widely reported by South African media.
 This qualitative study was intended to stipulate different works done by different government departments and agencies and use the beneficiaries accessible for participation to share their views in service delivery as received from specific agencies. In simple terms, this study focusses on understanding how ordinary citizens rate government delivery in general and how this is depicted by the media sources. In majority, the study is based on desk top data with limited observation and some face-to-face interviews. The study revealed that indeed there are levels of dissatisfaction from members of the community, and some believe the functionality of the government of South Africa is questionable. Some even compare the first ten years of the democratic South Africa ending up in 2004 to the rest and argue that things are going to worse situations in South Africa as they feel no longer protected and no longer gearing to the creation of better life. There are citizens who believe South Africa has become kakistocracy state as it seems unable to come with effective plans in many areas of service delivery. On the other hand, this provides media with multiple negative headlines.

Good News – Bad News. Proportion between Positive and Negative Headlines in the Global News Feed (Based on the Google News Aggregator)

This article tests the assertion about the dominance of the negative agenda in the media space. To this end, Google News, the world’s largest news aggregator, was taken into account, on the basis of which the ratio of positive and negative news headlines in the information flow was analyzed. Three stages of research were conducted, each one week long with 16 country versions of Google News. In total, it was considered a little less than half a million news headlines. According to the results, 70.54% of the headlines turned out to be positive. This outcome questions the stereotype of the dominance of negative agendas in the global news stream. As it turned out, the ratio of positive and negative news depends on the language (versions of Google News in one language showed very similar results) and the day of the week (the news is a little more positive on Sundays), but does not depend on the level of freedom of speech, cultural and geographical factors.

Misinformation about the COVID-19 Vaccine in Online Catholic Media.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, online media were the most widely used sources of scientific information. Often, they are also the only ones on science-related topics. Research has shown that much of the information available on the Internet about the health crisis lacked scientific rigor, and that misinformation about health issues can pose a threat to public health. In turn, millions of Catholics were found to be demonstrating against vaccination against COVID-19 based on "false" and misleading religious arguments. This research analyses publications about the vaccine in Catholic online media with the aim of understanding the presence of information (and misinformation) in this community. An algorithm designed for each media outlet collected COVID-19 vaccine-related publications from 109 Catholic media outlets in five languages. In total, 970 publications were analysed for journalistic genres, types of headlines and sources of information. The results show that most publications are informative and most of their headlines are neutral. However, opinion articles have mostly negative headlines. Furthermore, a higher percentage of the opinion authors come from the religious sphere and most of the sources cited are religious. Finally, 35% of the publications relate the vaccine to the framing issue of abortion.

The Zika virus crisis during the 2016 Rio Olympic Games: a media cover analysis

During times of crisis, media coverage increases significantly, shaping public opinion and creating images of the places where these events occur. In this context, this paper analyses the Zika virus epidemic in Brazil, a past crisis that gained increased media attention during the months leading up to the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio, to identify the cognitive and affective components of published information. To this end, we subjected 1034 headlines (from digital editions of leading Spanish daily newspapers) related to tourism security at the Olympic Games to content analysis and employed a series of attributes to approach the cognitive and affective components of the information analysed. The results reveal that alarmist and negative headlines are more frequent when security issues, particularly citizen security, are reported. News headlines about the Olympic Games are generally descriptive and more positive. In the field of health security, citation-type headlines—those citing information provided by experts or authorities—are used more frequently. By analysing a past crisis, this study has several implications for Destination Management Organisations (DMOs) dealing with such events. In this context, we highlight some good practices to maximise informative news and minimise alarmist ones.

Sentiments toward use of forest biomass for heat and power in canadian headlines

Replacement of fossil fuels with bioenergy, often in concert with carbon capture and storage, plays an important role in published low-emission pathways from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and other agencies. National and regional net-zero greenhouse gas emission commitments have caused a dramatic increase in forest biomass consumption globally, and the rise has been accompanied by debates in the scholarly literature and in society at large about the ecological and climate change impacts of forest biomass. This paper presents a quantitative analysis of media headlines about forest bioenergy published in 75 Canadian newspapers from 2010 to 2020. Using a lexicon and rules-based sentiment analysis tool, we explore negative and positive media headlines about forest biomass. Despite our finding that Canadian headlines about forest bioenergy were twice as likely to be positive as negative, media items document reversals away from forest biomass-generated domestic electricity. Our analysis found that increases in electricity costs following the introduction of forest biomass as a fuel type for Canadian electricity generation was a primary cause of these reversals. Headlines also critiqued the expanded production of wood pellets, citing forest ecological impacts and the debate about the net carbon impacts of forest biomass-generated energy. Safety issues, including stories about workplace injuries, and pellet plant fires, and economic issues, such as fiber supply and mill closures, were also featured. This research contributes a social science lens to understand perceptions over time about forest biomass for heat and power.

I Knew It, the World is Falling Apart! Combatting a Confirmatory Negativity Bias in Audiences’ News Selection Through News Media Literacy Interventions

Do people with a more pessimistic worldview also select more like-minded news that confirms their negative—sometimes irrational—outlook on reality? This study theorizes that, based on the negativity and confirmation biases in audience digital news selection, a pessimistic outlook increases the likelihood of self-selection of more negative and episodic headlines over positive and thematic news. In a next step, news media literacy (NML) literature is consulted to explore how to counter this tendency to, via news selection, confirm an overly negative and distorted worldview. A selective-exposure experiment (N = 612) monitored participants’ self-selection of crime news after exposure to NML interventions. Findings show that those participants who hold a more pessimistic outlook on crime in society tend to confirm this worldview by self-selecting into more negative crime news. Exposure to NML interventions concerning negativity bias or clickbait was found to mitigate this negativity bias in news selection, especially for those who already hold a pessimistic outlook. This study is the first to document that NML interventions can potentially have merits as a tool to combat negativity bias in online news selection.

Constructive Journalism in the Face of a Crisis: The Effects of Social Media News Updates About COVID-19

ABSTRACT The COVID-19 pandemic brought along with it concerns about anxiety, racial bias, and pushback against public health recommendations, all of which are intensified by the news and social media. This study investigated the effects of constructive journalism in the context of this crisis, by randomly assigning 492 subjects to view simulated social media news updates with different headlines and images. The results showed positive and constructive headlines led to less anger and anxiety than negative headlines. The sanitization of graphic images decreased anger, anxiety, COVID-19 risk perceptions, and anti-Chinese sentiment—a relationship that was mediated by anger and anxiety. These findings suggest constructive journalism can be useful in times of crisis, and that its visual aspect warrants more scholarly attention. Further, these results shed new light on the effects of news exposure via social media in times of crisis, and how this impact depends on specific attributes of the headlines and images of the content being shared. The findings are discussed in relation to the theory of affective intelligence and recent concerns about how news and social media influence the public in times of crisis.

Negative news dominates fast and slow brain responses and social judgments even after source credibility evaluation

Remedies to counter the impact of misinformation are in high demand, but little is known about the neuro-cognitive consequences of untrustworthy information and how they can be mitigated. In this preregistered study, we investigated the effects of social-emotional headline contents on social judgments and brain responses and whether they can be modulated by explicit evaluations of the trustworthiness of the media source. Participants (N = 30) evaluated –and clearly discerned– the trustworthiness of news sources before they were exposed to person-related news headlines. Despite this intervention, social judgments and brain responses were dominated largely by emotional headline contents. Results suggest differential effects of source credibility might depend on headline valence. Electrophysiological indexes of fast emotional and arousal-related brain responses, as well as correlates of slow evaluative processing were enhanced for persons associated with positive headline contents from trusted sources, but not when positive headlines stemmed from distrusted sources. In contrast, negative headlines dominated fast and slow brain responses unaffected by explicit source credibility evaluations. These results provide novel insights into the brain mechanisms underlying the “success” of emotional news from untrustworthy sources, suggesting a pronounced susceptibility to negative information even from distrusted sources that is reduced for positive contents. The differential pattern of responses to misinformation in mind and brain sheds light on the cognitive mechanisms underlying the processing of misinformation and possible strategies to avoid their potentially detrimental effects.

A Review on Reddit News Headlines with NLTK tool

Nowadays, Sentiment analysis is mostly utilized in the sector of Machine learning and Natural language processing (NLP). This idea is extremely common within the field of Data Science. Reddit is a news channel in which all users discuss their views on this social media platform. Many user comments on the contents posted. From this social news platform, its analysis, news reports, user feedback, social media updates, etc. Responses are analyzed and picked up by this social media platform. In this paper, Reddit API is such a social platform in which every day thousands of headlines or post received from many users some news is positively given some news are negatively given on all scenarios. from these posts or news headlines, we fun with different Sentiment Analysis using PRAW. PRAW is a Reddit API wrapper. Also in this paper NLTK tool is used which is the platform for Python Programming, also it works with human language data written by different creators. Also, NLTK's Vader analysis is used, which divides the text into different sentiments like neutral, positive, or negative. In this paper, we have first created the Reddit App to get the Client id and Secret identification of Creator. then we used python packages like praw and nltk, then we downloaded lexicon and then imported Sentiment Intensity Analyzer for identifying the sentiments and then assigned polarity_ scores to each headline as 0, 1, and -1 as a compound value. based on the compound value we normalized the headlines as positive and negative or neutral and finally plotted the bar chart of positive, negative, or neutral headlines.

Emotional news affects social judgments independent of perceived media credibility.

How does the credibility we attribute to media sources influence our opinions and judgments derived from news? Participants read headlines about the social behavior of depicted unfamiliar persons from websites of trusted or distrusted well-known German news media. As a consequence, persons paired with negative or positive headlines were judged more negative or positive than persons associated with neutral information independent of source credibility. Likewise, electrophysiological signatures of slow and controlled evaluative brain activity revealed a dominant influence of emotional headline contents regardless of credibility. Modulations of earlier brain responses associated with arousal and reflexive emotional processing show an effect of negative news and suggest that distrusted sources may even enhance the impact of negative headlines. These findings demonstrate that though we may have distinct perceptions about the credibility of media sources, information processing and social judgments rely on the emotional content of headlines, even when they stem from sources we distrust.

When Sentiment Is News: The Polarity Pattern Approach

We present a new approach and set of dictionaries for the analysis of sentiments in financial and business news headlines at the firm level. The proposed Polarity Pattern Approach (PPA) captures the deep structure of context and syntax and reduces measurement errors evident in previous approaches for classifying the tone of words and sentences in news headlines. We demonstrate the superior predictive validity of PPA using an out-of-sample dataset. As expected, negative news headlines are negatively related to stock returns and positively related to trading volumes, while positive news headlines are positively related to both, especially for finance news. Prior studies report a non-significant or, counter intuitively, negative relationship between positive news and stock returns, which we attribute to measurement error in previous approaches. Additionally, using market activities, we jointly estimate cross-sectional regression to compare the explanatory power of the PPA approach with commonly used methods. We show how PPA’s tone assignment significantly outperforms other dictionaries and approaches, including the commercial package (RavenPack) that uses both machine learning and deep learning. The PPA, including dictionaries, provides finance researchers with a new, more valid method of sentiment analysis for media news. Link to PPA tone assignment dataset: https://www.whensentimentisnews.com

World Economic Prospects Monthly

Overview: Global activity starts to bounce back ▀ After a dire start to Q2 in April, the global economy has since staged a robust rebound as lockdown restrictions in many regions have eased. But despite a strong initial bounce, high unemployment and surging corporate debt will limit the scale of the revival in H2 and beyond. And the renewed rise in Covid‐19 cases in parts of the world shows that considerable downside risks remain. ▀ After persistently surprising sharply to the downside, global economic data have exceeded expectations over the past month or so. Retail sales staged a particularly sharp rebound in Europe and North America in May.▀ The sharp post‐lockdown consumer spending bounce in response to the release of pent‐up demand, along with some evidence of a revival in industrial production and global trade, is clearly encouraging. In response we have raised our mid‐year GDP forecasts for a number of economies, including the US and China, pushing up our 2020 world GDP growth forecast by about 0.5pp to −4.5%.▀ Nonetheless, the risk of a second Covid‐19 wave, the swathe of negative headlines about job redundancies and the scaling‐back of some government support measures before long in some countries suggest that the sharp rebound in activity seen so far may not persist for too long.▀ As a result, the upward revision to our forecast for global activity in the shorter‐term is offset by a more cautious assessment of growth prospects next year. We now expect the level of global GDP at end‐2021 to be a touch lower than anticipated a month ago. Overall, we have cut our world GDP growth forecast for 2021 from 6.5% to 5.8%.▀ Our baseline forecast assumes that a global second wave of Covid‐19 is avoided. But in this respect, the recent resurgence in cases in some countries (and in some US states in particular) is a clear worry. Risks to our baseline forecast remain firmly tilted to the downside.

Cause for optimism on a learning disability nursing ‘reset’ in 2020

Learning disability nursing celebrated its centenary in 2019, but was rocked by scandals and negative headlines throughout. Can the profession expect better in 2020?

Cross-Border Portfolio Flows and News Media Coverage

This paper investigates the dynamic linkages between portfolio flows and various news indices (based on both positive and negative news headlines collected from Bloomberg), whilst also controlling for a comprehensive set of push and pull factors. The monthly panel examined comprises 49 developed and developing countries in addition to the US (the home economy) and covers the period from January 2007 to October 2017; the econometric model includes fixed effects. The empirical results document the important role played by the news variables. More specifically, news pessimism and intensity affect bond flows more than equity flows, and US news appears to play a leading role in these portfolio flow dynamics. By contrast, changes in news pessimism and intensity have a more significant impact on equity flows, and again US news tend to have more sizeable effects. News sentiment is generally found to be an important driver of portfolio flows, whilst only US news disagreement has a significant effect, and only on bond inflows into the US. Most results are robust to the exclusion of the six financial centres from the full sample. As for push and pull factors, most of them (equity return differentials, interest rate spreads, the VIX index, capital controls, exchange rate regimes, CDS spreads, QE episodes, financial development and commodity prices) are significant and with the expected signs.

Impact of Negative News on the U.S. Soft Drinks Industry

The fact that negative news affects the stock returns of a mentioned brand is well known and proven extensively in literature. Nevertheless, little is known about the effect this might have on other brands within the industry in which the focal brand operates. This phenomenon was investigated by looking at the effect of negative news articles on similar and dissimilar competitors in the soft drink industry. Extent literature has theoretically posited that competitors may either benefit or share the harm depending on the presence of competitive or contagion effects. However, such effects have rarely been investigated empirically. Results generated through data from the soft drinks industry indicated that negative news in general lowered the stock returns of the focal brand active in the industry. Second, the effect of negative headlines had a significant effect on competitors but was competitor specific. Negative Coca-Cola headlines resulted in a contagion effect over the entire industry; negative Pepsi headlines resulted in competitive effects for both Coke and Dr Pepper; negative Dr Pepper headlines also resulted in contagion effects over the entire industry. These results hold important consequences for firm managers and stockholders.

Parents’ and Teachers’ Views on Digital Communication in Finland

Parents’ and teachers’ well-functioning communication supports their partnership and also benefits pupils’ well-being. Today, communication largely takes place using electronic tools. In the current study, Finnish parents’ (N = 1123) and teachers’ (N = 118) opinions on digital communication in urban and rural areas were studied by applying a new 14-item Digital Communication Scale (DCS) created for the purpose. The three-factor structured DCS was used to elucidate parents’ and teachers’ views on their partnership, feedback, and clarity of messaging. In contrast to some negative headlines and myths, the main finding of our study was overall satisfaction with digital communication, which was seen as supporting the parent-teacher partnership and providing valuable information on pupils’ development and their everyday issues. In particular, rural parents seemed satisfied with digital communication as a partnership-building tool. However, the view of parents was that they received less encouraging feedback about their children than teachers believed they had given. On the other hand, teachers experienced more ambiguity in digital communication than parents. This was more salient among urban teachers than among rural teachers. To summarize, rural parents and rural teachers saw digital communication as serving their collaboration better than did their urban peers. The results of the current study can be used for further development of parent-teacher communication in digital environments.

All Animals Learn, but Only Humans Teach: The Professional Place of Teacher Educators

The profession that creates all other professions has been subject to much debate in recent years. Largely invisible at times, teacher educators have recently been visible mainly in the negative headlines which have surrounded attempts to disrupt this important, but often unsung, profession in order to introduce neoliberal reforms. This paper uses both Eliot Freidson’s three logics (adding artificial intelligence as a fourth logic) and Clarke’s Place Model to deconstruct and map the contested place of the teacher educator in respect of status and career-long learning journey. The question, ‘who is my teacher education professional’? is addressed, highlighting the complexity surrounding teacher educators’ roles and realms. In a world where many animals learn but only humans teach, teaching teachers is poorly recognised for the singularly inclusive profession it might be.

Religion as sensation. The analysis of religious mass media headlines in the daily newspaper “Lietuvos rytas”

Mass media discourse has a strong impact on the public opinion about various religious communities. Needless to say, mass media’s content is created with news framing rules in a space, where all mass media channels are competing for audience attention. Headlines often become one of the most important part of the article, which not only attract readers’ attention and present the content of the article, but also, with the help of various rhetorical strategies and emotional words, strengthen certain representations of various religious communities. The analysis of 1990 – 2015 Lithuanian daily newspaper “Lietuvos rytas” headlines demonstrates that the headlines are more expressive than neutral. The percentage of negative rhetoric headlines has increased proportionally since 1990. Various rhetorical strategies were found in the analysed headlines: metaphors, irony, critique, assumptions, hyperbolization, subjectivity, and modality. There were also inaccurate and misleading headlines. The results enable to disclose the rule of news selectivity – most of the foreign news had negative rhetoric headlines. Roman Catholic community has double-sided portrait: it is shown as a part of Lithuania’s society, which creates a sense of belonging and contributes to a various social issues; and as a community with clergy who justify human sins. The headlines portraying other traditional or non-traditional religions communities highlight strategies that symbolize fear, threat and otherness of these communities.