Moral Framing and Ideological Bias of News

TL;DR

This paper introduces an unsupervised method to analyze moral framing and ideological bias in news stories based on Moral Foundation Theory, enabling the quantification of bias and partisanship without external annotations.

Contribution

It presents a novel unsupervised approach for characterizing moral frames in news using Moral Foundation Theory, validated on Twitter data.

Findings

Effective in quantifying framing bias and partisanship

Validated on annotated Twitter dataset

Reveals differences in moral framing across news outlets

Abstract

News outlets are a primary source for many people to learn what is going on in the world. However, outlets with different political slants, when talking about the same news story, usually emphasize various aspects and choose their language framing differently. This framing implicitly shows their biases and also affects the reader's opinion and understanding. Therefore, understanding the framing in the news stories is fundamental for realizing what kind of view the writer is conveying with each news story. In this paper, we describe methods for characterizing moral frames in the news. We capture the frames based on the Moral Foundation Theory. This theory is a psychological concept which explains how every kind of morality and opinion can be summarized and presented with five main dimensions. We propose an unsupervised method that extracts the framing Bias and the framing Intensity without any external framing annotations provided. We validate the performance on an annotated twitter dataset and then use it to quantify the framing bias and partisanship of news.