Conclusion

Conclusion

We hoped you learned something from this project! There are several main takeaways that we can draw from this project. First, both mainstream media and social media reflect widespread engagement with national events. Spikes in Tweets, Reddit posts, print news stories, and tv air time were identified following large news events including the Texas Abortion ban coming into effect and the Supreme Court engagement with the case Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Because of the limited features and date ranges of free API searches we were unable to fully perform a sentiment analysis between sources. However, we were able to compare the mean polarity and subjectivity of headlines between Reddit and mainstream print media. As expected, the subjectivity of the Reddit post headlines(0.176) was significantly higher than that of the mainstream print headlines (0.091). The Reddit headlines were also slightly more positive. A final finding of note is that Fox News gave significantly higher percentages of air time to abortion coverage than any other network. While we cannot conclude exactly why, we hypothesize it has to do with Fox News’s “right” bias rating. While we were limited by the constraints of the data available, our findings still show that abortion is very much in the national conversation. The recent headlines regarding abortion have even further pushed the topic to the forefront of debate.