What is the underlying sentiment of headlines about pro-Palestinian student protests?

I used a textual analysis sentiment tool to analyze 499 headlines from 5 major news outlets.

I was visiting Columbia University’s campus when the first day of the “Gaza Solidarity Encampment” began, a protest where students demanded the university divest its finances from Israel amidst the war in Gaza.

While I was a student at Columbia two years earlier, graduate students conducted a months-long strike to protest for better working conditions. Protests are a routine part of campus life in the U.S. So the next day I was surprised to hear that Columbia’s president had authorized the New York Police Department to arrest over 100 students.

In the days and weeks that followed, pro-Palestinian protests at college campuses repeatedly made national headlines. I wanted to take a closer look at media coverage of those protests to see if I could detect any patterns.

So I web scraped 100 headlines from five of the most widely read media outlets: The New York Times, Fox News, CNN, The New York Post and The Washington Post. I ran a sentiment analysis on these headlines to see what emotions those headlines were expressing.

The sentiment analysis returned results from a range of -1 to 1, with 1 being a positive sentiment, 0 being neutral and -1 being negative.

These are headlines that have a negative sentiment score.

And these are headlines that have a positive sentiment score.

All five outlets had a negative median sentiment score for the headlines I examined, meaning the underlying sentiment of the headlines from all five outlets is negative.

The wordcloud above shows the most frequenctly used words in the headlines analyzed.

The word "Palestine" was only used in 0.6% of the headlines, while the word "Israel" was used in 30% of headlines. Associated Press style, used by most U.S. media outlets, says not to use the word "Palestine" because it is not a fully independent state. The word "Palestinian" was used in 10% of the headlines

The majority of the headlines focused on sensational aspects of the protests, rather than why the protests were being held. The word "Gaza" was only used in 4% of the headlines analyzed.

Image Credit: Gabriella Gregor Splaver, Columbia Spectator

All five of the outlets we analyzed, regardless of their political leaning, had a negative sentiment when covering pro-Palestinian campus protests from the time period between April 17 to May 4. This project is only a prototype and would need a larger sample size for more accurate results.