Today online platforms are important broadcast tools for politicians. Multiple news outlets publish articles on a given issue or event at approximately the same time, and the different narratives and frames used by these sources can be observed. By examining whether and how media organizations with different political orientations portray the exact same piece of news, we can assess the differences – and, in turn, the social reality – perceived by their users.
Context
Given the gap among news narratives are particularly intense during polarized times, this research explores such a phenomenon during the heated extradition bill controversy in Hong Kong. After the government proposed a bill to enable authorities in mainland China to file extradition requests for suspects accused of criminal wrongdoing, large-scale demonstrations expressed concerns that Hong Kong’s citizens might be subjected to arbitrary detention and unfair trial under China’s judicial system. Related events slowly faded out when the coronavirus outbreak started in China.
Literature Review
Through an inductive approach, this research examines whether and how different news outlets present facts using emotional frames to promote their ideology. The emotional frames can include fear, threat, joy, and empathy. In fact, journalists do appeal to our emotions in their reporting, and news coverage are found to influence how audiences perceive controversial issues such as immigration (Haynes, 2013; Tsang, 2018). The findings contribute to not only the usage of emotions across news agencies, but also to digital journalism on Facebook. Also, the effects of emotional frames are assessed through the examination of Facebook likes and comments.
RQ1: What kinds of emotional frames do news outlets with different political orientations publish?
RQ 2: How does the way emotions are presented drives the (a) clicking of the like button and (b) commenting on news posts?
Method
This study employs Facebook data scraping of news posts and corresponding likes and comments of a total of 17 Facebook news accounts in Hong Kong from June to December 2019. The posts are sampled and human coded with respect to the emotional frame(s) used. Topic modeling is utilized to assist in automatically classifying the news archives and user comments. The relationships among frames, the number of likes, and the valence of comments are examined using crosstabs and correlational analyses. The changes in the digital journalistic environment are also inspected and presented in a descriptive manner.
Conclusion
This examination of engagement with news on Facebook can inform us how people receive news messages online and how they form their opinions toward politics. By identifying the underlying mechanisms of Facebook interactions, politicians and media practitioners can better understand how to engage with the public to better achieve their aims. The challenges for democratic engagement will also be explored.
References
Haynes, C. S. (2013). A study of the effect of empathy on public opinion on immigration (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from ProQuest Dissertations & Theses A&I. (UMI No. 3600567).
Tsang, S. J. (2018). Empathy and the hostile media phenomenon. Journal of Communication, 68(4), 809-829. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqy031