LMD crisis in NYT media

Pablo Bernabeu and Risto Hinno
15.07.2016

Background, problem, hypothesis

  • 07/05 Louisiana killing
  • 07/06 Minnesota killing
  • 07/07 Dallas shooting

Hypotheses:

  • Differences in topics across channels
  • Differences across time periods
  • Interaction between channels across time periods

Data

NY Times:

  • NYT API (+web scraping)
  • NYT @Twitter
  • NYT Facebook comments

Sentiment of datasets

NYT topics via LDAvis

NYT

Facebook topics via LDAvis

Facebook

Twitter topics via LDAvis

Twitter

Facebook topics

     Police People Black lives matter
1    police people              black
2       gun   will              lives
3      cops    can             matter
4    people   like              white
5  officers    get             people
6      dont    one             racist
7      just   just                blm
8       man   need             police
9       get   dont             blacks
10  officer police              obama

Twitter topics

   Racism Dallas shooting Philando shooting
1   black          police            police
2  police          dallas            blacks
3   white        officers               new
4   lives          killed          shooting
5  people         protest          philando
6  racism        shooting             force
7     amp       shootings           castile
8  matter           alton               use
9    stop        sterling              says
10   cops           baton          violence

NYT topics

   Foreign policy Shooting Elections
1            said   police       new
2         percent     said       one
3            vote officers    people
4            year    black       can
5          brexit   dallas      like
6            will  officer      york
7           since shooting     trump
8        european      two      july
9         british     shot      even
10        britain     says      just

Topic similarity based on cosine similarity

Topic similarity based on cosine similarity

Topic similarity based on cosine similarity

Topics in time

Topics are not totally comparable

Conclusions

  • Main effect of Media: NYT articles more neutral, though Facebook close behind
  • Interaction effect: Topics varied throughout crisis in different ways across media.
  • Caveats:
    • tight time frame
    • validate results with more methods

Code and visualisation