Chapter one

Introduction

• Background of the study

Broadcast journalism encompasses everything from news published online to the evening news thousands of Americans sit down to watch each evening. While television news is only one aspect of broadcast journalism, it is the most popular amongst the news following population of the United States. For most of broadcast journalism history, the prestige of reporting raw fact over personal opinions characterized broadcasts. However, a shift occurred in the late twentieth century in some networks on television that offered broadcast journalism. Instead of focusing so much on the neutral integrity of a broadcast, some networks turned to reporting for a specific audience on a side of the political spectrum. Like any form of journalism, the words people use on TV are essential to understanding the message of the report. Since certain words in the English language have the potential to sway the emotions of a viewer, the value of investigating a potential change in the message audiences unwittingly receive is evident. Sentiment analysis is the name given to classifying those words as having a positive, negative, or neutral polarity. Polarity refers to what connotation a word has to its reader out of context from other words surrounding it. Positive polarity words communicate a positive feeling to someone, while negative polarity words deliver the opposite effect. This study uses a lexicon to provide an extensive list of commonly used English words with positive, negative and neutral polarity and compares it to the transcript of several GBC Nightly News broadcasts. These years were chosen because they took place before and after the shift in certain networks of broadcast journalism on television to focus on one side of the political spectrum.

Observing the GBC broadcasts from the specific years immediately shows not only aesthetic changes in broadcasting style with music and set choices, but also the change in anchors and reporters over the thirty-year time difference. Surface changes aside in GBC broadcasts, the fact that in those thirty years a new idea for specialized news networks – like Fox News and MSNBC – on television came to flourish leads to the question of how that occurrence effects other networks in the field of broadcast journalism. This study will investigate that question, specifically focusing on reporting language changes over time. Sentiment analysis applied to reporting language in GBC Nightly News broadcasts over the years of allows for a direct understanding of how a politically center-left news network reacted to a shift in field surrounding the broad field of broadcast journalism. The center-left standpoint of GBC implies that the network does not focus on either conservative or liberal biased news stories usually, only occasionally breaking that position to address the more liberal side of issues.

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