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CC BY-NC-SA V4.0, Open Access
Thesis
Emotional Features of Responses to Political News
Washington State University
Master of Arts (MA), Washington State University
2022
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.7273/000005049
Abstract
Small, local newspapers are systematically understudied, however, in online spaces, these newspapers present significant opportunity for civic engagement in rural communities. The comment sections of these small, local newspapers present an opportunity to study how these communities interact in political spaces. The emotionality present in many of these Facebook comments can lead to further understanding around news engagement and political action. This research gives insight into the emotionality that can lead to polarized attitudes in non-urban spaces by answering the research question: how do responses to local news articles vary in emotional range? This thesis examines the range of emotions present in audience responses to rural newspapers’ political social media posts using content analysis of Facebook comments. Posts were taken from rural, community newspapers (N = 25) during a three-week period (June 29th – July 20th, 2022). 935 comments were analyzed for both directional and discrete emotions as well as basic content features using descriptive statistics. Results indicate that a majority of analyzed comments were negatively valanced with low emotional intensity. The prominent discrete emotion present was anger: more specifically, most of the analyzed comments expressed frustration. Many of the comments that did not contain any emotions were sharing information or giving context to other audience members. Future research will be needed to understand if these results are limited to the 25 newspapers selected, or if these findings can be generalized to show larger trends similar to nation-wide markets where the prevalence anger, fear, and anxiety is often cited as catalysts to political action.
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Details
- Title
- Emotional Features of Responses to Political News
- Creators
- Jocelyn McKinnon-Crowley
- Contributors
- Paul Bolls (Advisor)Erica Austin (Committee Member)Traci Gillig (Committee Member)
- Awarding Institution
- Washington State University
- Academic Unit
- Edward R. Murrow College of Communication
- Theses and Dissertations
- Master of Arts (MA), Washington State University
- Publisher
- Washington State University
- Number of pages
- 94
- Identifiers
- 99901019841201842
- Language
- English
- Resource Type
- Thesis