1. Introduction

In the U.S. election 2016, surprisingly Donald Trump was elected as a new president. This result astonished a lot of people because the previous poll surveys predicted Trump’s lose (Kirk & Scott, 2016). These days, predicting public emotions by ordinary ways such as telephone interviews or face-to-face survey seems to be much more difficult than before due to the growing complexity of the social elements like the widespread use of mobile phones, the hidden distrust of media coverages or concerns about privacy violation. One media report that the incredible victory hugely attributed to the hidden supporters who were not willing to express their tendency toward Trump (“Trump campaign,” 2016). On the contrary, analyzing social networking services might have a significant potential power to reveal the true sentimental values among people on particular topics, which might change the survey style in the near future.

Nowadays, not only the U.S., but also many countries are forced to deal with the unprecedented and sometimes unstable progress. For example, the America’s old friend, U.K., also experienced the painful detachment from EU called “Briexit”, which nobody had anticipated the realization until the results turned out. It is said that some of the avid supporters for it could not have imagined the results, which is called “Bregret” (Dearden, 2016).

It is not too much to say that the world is now facing with rapid upcoming of a new order. What is, if any, the main cause of those unpredictable events? Generally, big changes stem from big impulses. If so, there must be some kind of the emerging power which created the current unstable situation. In this thesis, the measurement for how Syrian refugee crisis from early 2015 has affected the U.K. society is offered in order to glimpse the entire influence of the calamity

When it comes to thinking about the displaced people, the important thing is that the media coverages have played an important role to pervade those events around the world. This means their influence has the crucial power not only to report the problem, but also to build up the public images or opinions which sometimes change the course of the political decision on particular matters.

The main objective of this paper is to find out how the media trends have changed by critical events and what kind of influence the shifting seems to have on the public reaction toward refugees or politics. For appraising the media trend, articles on BBC news website were analyzed by three sentimental tools. Additionally, with regard to verifying those effects, “Syrian refugee crisis” was chosen as a primal topic for evaluation because the tragic event has several notable features. One is that recently, especially in European countries, there have been serious concerns about immigrants from Muslim nations. What is more, some people there feel that those people might change their cultures entirely based on the sharia law. On the other hand, there are always heartfelt supports from the local citizens to those new comers. The coexistence of those two groups seems to create other problems in their countries that is worth to scrutinizing.

The motivation for choosing those subjects comes from the fact that many people these days begin to think the media reports are not reliable enough (“Further decline,” 2012). Therefore, “Syrian refugee crisis” could be a perfect example to exemplify how the public reactions are effected by the media coverages. Moreover, the historical tragedies include many aspects which the world today is facing with. For example, multiculturalism, Islamization, anti-immigrant sentiment, and social matters like that. The aim of this study is chiefly to show how the public emotions towards the refugee crisis have changed over a period of time and what influence the media coverages have attributed to them. Besides, the evaluations of the reliabilities of the sentimental analysis tools which have been developed to analyze the various social tendency including the media trend were conducted as well.