News

Mainstream Media (Print)

In order to explore print mainstream news sources’ recent coverage of abortion, we used data from News API. We pulled headlines and article text containing the word “abortion” for a one month period of time from November 15th, 2021 to December 15, 2021.

Below is a chart showing the number of articles mentioning abortion by source and date. These articles were then ranked by their polarity and subjectivity. Polarity measures how positive an article is and ranges from 1 being positive to -1 being negative. Subjectivity measures how subjective an article is, ranging from 0 to 1. Subjective articles generally refer to personal opinion, emotion or judgment whereas objective articles stick to facts.

The New York Times had the most articles during our search period that mentioned abortion. Lifehacker, Gizmodo, and CNN all had one article each. The New York Times had a peak in mentions on Thursday, December 2nd, 2021. This was the day after the Supreme Court argued Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. This case questions the legality of Mississippi’s Gestational Age Act that bans abortions after 15 weeks. The uptick in mentions is likely due to the coverage of the case.

The sentiment analysis showed that the New York Times and Lifehacker had a more positive coverage while Gizmodo had more negative coverage. Lifehacker had the most subjective coverage of abortion with a polarity score just under 0.40.

The mean polarity for all of the news articles and headlines were then compiled and are shown in the below table.

	Subjectivity	Polarity
Article Text	0.280977	0.070536
Headline	0.091667	0.017500

For mainstream print news, the overall polarity of the text is 0.07, meaning that the article text is slightly more positive leaning than negative. The article headlines have a mean polarity of 0.02. The article text and headlines are also slightly more subjective leaning.

• See the Final Project Notebook for the code that produced these plots.