Objectivity and Moral Judgment in U.S. News Narratives: A Natural Language Processing Analysis of ‘Culture War’ Coverage

ABSTRACT

Using Natural Language Processing tools, the current study explores the evolution of objectivity practice in terms of attitude injection. Adopting the indicator of moral loading under the Moral Foundation Theory framework, it examined the moral judgments embedded in 20,679 culture war news articles published in five major U.S. newspapers from 1980 to 2021. Our findings revealed a distinct mixed journalistic liberal pattern and an apparent paradox in objectivity practice: the less moral judgments, the more liberal tendencies, which could be caused by journalists’ watchdog role and the increase of liberal components in U.S. democracy. We then argue that the performance of traditional objectivity has remained robust, especially when accounting for the degree to which moral judgments can be attributed to source quotations. The study contributes to the literature by bridging moral psychology and the enactment of journalistic norms, applying MFT to evaluate degrees of objectivity in news.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

¹ Liberal refers to “progressive or left-wing politics” in MFT (Haidt, 2012, p. 14) and that is how it is used in this study.