Applying Natural Language Processing to Evaluate News Media Coverage of Bullying and Cyberbullying

Abstract

Bullying events have frequently been the focus of coverage by news media, including news stories about teens whose death from suicide was attributed to cyberbullying. Previous work has shown that news media coverage is influential to readers in areas such as suicide, infectious disease outbreaks, and tobacco use. News media may be an untapped resource to promote bullying prevention messages, though current news media approaches to describing bullying and cyberbullying remain unexplored. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the current state of news media coverage of bullying and cyberbullying. A sample of newspaper articles covering bullying or cyberbullying across regional and national U.S. newspapers from 6 recent years was identified. A content analysis using natural language processing was conducted with the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) software program for key variables including affective, social, and cognitive processes. Evaluation included the percentage of words that represented Fear-based reporting such as alarmist words (e.g., epidemic, tragic), as well as words that represent Public Health-oriented messages such as prevention. A total of 463 newspaper articles met inclusion criteria, including 140 cyberbullying articles and 323 bullying articles. Findings indicated that cyberbullying articles scored higher on affective processes such as measures of anxiety (Mdn=0.34) compared to bullying articles (Mdn=0.22). A greater number of cyberbullying articles were Fear-based (41.4%) than were bullying articles (19.5%). An equivalent number of cyberbullying articles (50.0%) and bullying articles (49.8%) were Public Health-oriented. Findings may be used to collaborate with journalists toward optimizing prevention-oriented reporting.

Adolescent and Parent Emotions and Perceptions Regarding News Media Stories About Bullying: a Qualitative Study

“…This study finding is supported by previous work that compared fear-based to public health-oriented news articles using linguistic analysis (Moreno et al 2019). That study found that fear-based articles were more likely to include negative emotion words related to anxiety, anger, and death.…”

“…Alongside the reader's own experience of bullying, the news media's choice of words might also be perpetuating these feelings of sadness and hopelessness. In fear-based news articles, the use of negative emotion words related to anxiety, anger, and death could contribute to the participant's emotional responses to the excerpt (Moreno et al 2019). The use of emotional words has been shown to play a significant role in the perception of news media (Hoffner et al 2017).…”

“…A previous study developed and tested two frameworks for evaluating bullying news media coverage: fear-based and public health-oriented (Moreno et al 2019). This study used a modified Delphi technique, which involves engaging experts as stakeholders in a structured process to create consensus around a particular definition or criteria (Dalkey 1969).…”

“…We focused on older adolescents ages 15-18 years in this study, and it is possible that younger adolescents may have different emotions or perceptions from reading news media about bullying. We selected two excerpts from news articles that were identified as fear-based or public health-oriented from a previous study that validated these constructs in news media (Moreno et al 2019), but only two article excerpts were used as examples in this study. Incorporating both excerpts into interviews allowed participants to read and react to both styles of reporting, similar to what they may experience in reading through an actual news publication that has varied writing and story styles.…”

“…One example is news articles linking cyberbullying experiences to adolescent suicide (www.nobullying.com 2016). A previous study used linguistic analysis to examine bullying and cyberbullying-related newspaper articles and found that articles focused on cyberbullying were more likely to use fear-based terms related to anger and anxiety, as well as death, compared with bullying articles (Moreno et al 2019). This type of fear-based news media coverage may influence adolescents and parents to feel hopeless or disempowered when experiencing bullying.…”