Sentiment Analysis

In this chapter, we analyze differences in emotional tone in the media portrayal of Jews and Judaism in the West and of Muslims and Islam in the West using sentiment analysis. We assume that reporting on Jews will contain more positive and less negative emotion than that on Muslims. Our results show a more differentiated picture that additionally changes throughout time. While the media portrayal of Jews compared to that of Muslims contained more globalized positive emotion, looking at individual kinds of positive emotion did not always support this appraisal. Similarly, the globalized negative emotion score confirmed our hypothesis of articles on Muslims employing more negative tone than those on Jews, but individual kinds of negative emotion were only partially in line with this supposition. In line with our assumptions, we found the conservative newspaper to contain more overall negative emotion than the progressive newspaper in the case of Muslims, but not in the case of Jews. We relate the different emotional tones to the concepts investigated in previous chapters and discuss our findings within the existent literature. We conclude with a note on the usability of sentiment analysis for media analysis on non-dominant groups.