5-2. The media trend over the Syrian Refugee Crisis

 As a result, the Net-tone became worse dramatically after February 2016 (Fig 2-2, 2-3 and 2-4). The investigations on BBC media trend also exposed a different aspect of public emotions. The research question of this paper was “How have the public reactions changed as the trends of the media coverages have shifted?” The hypothesis for that was “The more there are negative headlines about refugees, the worse the public image towards them becomes”. However, the outcome of the survey was totally beyond expectations and it showed the inner complex matters that this subject potentially has. According to the three surveys conducted by YouGov in June, September and November 2015, the public sentiments towards refugees in the U.K. consistently were deteriorating during the period. In the inquiry of June 2015 (“Nearly Half of Britons”, 2015), 42% of the respondents said that those migrants escaping from conflict or persecution should not be welcomed to the U.K. From the result, it can be guessed that the Syrian refugee crisis split the U.K. public opinion into two at that time. One of the most surprising things that the analysis find is that the drowned boy incident affected the English people not so much at all. The survey of September 2015, which is soon after the tragic event, told that about 51 percent of the answerers showed their negative stance towards refugees. The pessimistic image towards the displaced people become much stronger after the incident. Even though the media trend calculated by Net-tone expressed sympathy about the situation of the Syrian refugees due to the incident, the public emotions seems to be never interfered with it. In addition, it seems that the Paris terrorist attack which never influenced the media trend played a crucial role to corrupt the refugees' public image. After the terror act, as reported by YouGov research, almost 72 percent of the people who participated in the survey replied that they had negative sentiments against those outsiders (Dahlgreen, 2015). The reaction of the respondents certainly indicate that the general people rarely distinguish the refugees from terrorists like the media usually tries to do. Not only that, it implies that even the sympathetic event like the drowned boy incident might give a boost of fear and hatred against those migrants. The public psychology could be seen in the transition of the approval rating for political parties. From the data which YouGov posts on its website, the comparison between conservative party and UKIP on their public support was made.

Though the conservative party, which is the ruling party led by David Cameron, gained the constant approval rating, the UKIP, which is famous for the anti-EU and anti-refugee policy, increased the support from citizens in the U.K every month (Fig 2-5). Every pivotal incidents related to the refugees seems to contribute to the support for UKIP. The above has led to the conclusion that the big incidents related to the refugee crisis have an effect on the media trend to some extent depending on whether they can be sympathetic or not. On the other hand, the public mind is not seemingly influenced by the media tone expressed in their news headlines. This would be because these days there are so many news sources such as Twitter and Facebook and those people tend to be skeptical about the major news coverages. 

5-1. The media trend over the Syrian Refugee Crisis

（*Some Figures and pics are omitted due to copyright issues）

　　The most significant thing this survey revealed is that the media coverages are likely to be affected by the crucial events. The Net-tone values in June and August 2015 are lower than -0.5, which means the BBC news coverages at that times were treating the Syrian refugee crisis as negative subjects. Those numbers fall below the every Net-tone indicators which Bleich's thesis shows. (Fig 2-1) Originally, it has been said that the U.K. media tends to be conservative (“British people,” 2016). As proof of the national nature, the Prime Minister David Cameron described the massive inflow of the displaced people from the Middle East as "swarm" (“David Cameron criticised,” 2015). 

The tide of the U.K. media attitudes vastly changed due to the tragic event in September 2015. The incident was brought by one photo which depicts the drowned refugee child named "Alan Kurdi". This news quickly spread across the world and forced many politicians to alter their cold stances towards Syrian refugees. Only few days after the sorrowful news, Cameron immediately reversed his previous remarks and announced the acceptance of those migrants. (“David Cameron: UK,” 2015)

As a result of the movement, the media trend was also affected by the death of the Syrian boy. The Net-tone in October and December clearly improved and the total number of "Negative headlines" also decreased. The remarkable portion is that the November terrorist attack in Paris conducted by terrorist who disguised themselves as refugees from Syria seemed to be no effect on the media trend. On the contrary, the survey of the December showed the most sympathetic and lenient response in this research periods. This trait obviously suggests that BBC tried to avoid mixing up refugees who searched for the haven and terrorists who wanted to destroy European countries. Under such circumstances, it is highly likely that they began to depict the migrants more compassionately. The same phenomenon was reported by Bleich's paper saying that after the crucial events by terrorist the stance of media towards the related people like Muslims tends to be more positive-orient. However, the 2016 New Year's Eve sexual assaults in Germany decidedly influenced the media trend quite negatively. Unlike the previous two incidents, this disgusting event was carried out by the ordinary male migrants. Therefore, it damaged not only the Germans' feeling towards refugees but also their credibility. Then the Net-tone, which had formerly continued to improve, suddenly began to decrease terribly after the episode was reported by the major media. There was no similar sympathetic signs that the media trend showed after the past incidents possibly because the sexual assaults in Germany was treated as a social problem of refugees themselves. Another presumed reason for the abrupt change of the media attitude towards the migrants would be the heavy criticism against the news coverages from the local people. Some people in German seriously thought that the media tried to cover up the New Year’s crime in order not to increase the social tensions over the refugee crisis. Those harsh opinions might make the stance of the news companies more negative against the new comers. (“Cover-up' over,” 2016)

4. Methodology, Research Question and Hypothesis

The primal objective of this thesis is to find out how the media trend changed over the Syrian refugee crisis based on BBC website news headlines. For attain the goal, three incidents related Syrian refugees are taken up as pivotal events which altered the tide of public sentiments. Those targeted episodes are "September 2nd 2015 Death of Alan Kurdi", "November 2015 Paris attacks" and "2016 New Year's Eve sexual assaults in Germany". The investigation was made into the media trend over the period from June, 2015 to April, 2016 so that the survey term can cover all the tragedies.

In terms of the research techniques, there are already some methods to analyze the media trend from news coverages. For example, NET-Tone indicator which is introduced by Erik Bleich and his team is a quite efficient way to calculate the emotions of the news titles. Initially, this technics was considered as a main analysis method for this exploration. However, as the research progressed, some problems began to appear. The most serious issue was that getting the proper assessment for "positive" headlines was much harder than expected as proved in the previous section. Without the precise perception for "positive" elements, the credibility of "Net-tone" would be damaged tremendously.

As a result, this time, we decided to create the original simple procedure for this thesis to calculate the index which focus only on negative value. First of all, 50 titles of the suitable BBC articles from June, 2015 to April, 2016 were collected every two months. Secondly, every news headlines were split into three categories "positive", "negative" and "neutral" by the three programs. After that, from the result, only the extreme “negative” headlines which all three software indicate them as negative were counted for every selected month. In the end, those outcomes were compared with each other and other information so as to unravel the movement of the media trend. Some people might think that the number of the samples are too small in order to calculate the emotional value. However, given the fact that Nielsen Media Research has used only 5,000 households to calculate the nearly 100 million American’s TV viewing rate precisely for many years, the sample number of 50 headlines for each month would not be so small (Eric T. Olson & Tammy Perry Olson, 2000, p. 14).

The research questions for this thesis is “How have the public reactions changed as the trends of the media coverages have shifted?” The hypothesis for this query is that the increase of the news reports which contains negative elements towards the refugees will contributed the deterioration of their public image.   

3-2. Assessment of the Sentimental Analysis Tools

There are several possible causes for the accuracy differences between the tools. For instance, “domain-transfer problem” would be one of them. Sentimental classifiers like “Corenlp” have an ability that improve themselves. Supervises such as human programmers can teach them the ways to deal with specific domains. By doing so, those software is able to show high performance on the supervised field. On the other hand, if the supervised sentiment classifiers are used to analyze the different domains (unsupervised domains), their performance becomes very low. This phenomenon is called "domain-transfer problem" (Tan, Cheng, Wang, & Xu, 2009). Probably, this explains the cause of the lowest accuracy of “Corenlp” among the three applications. Unlike other two which were Web-based software, “Corenlp” was Java-based program and must had been trained for the domain of “News headline” in order to evaluate it properly. The other reason for the “Negative-oriented” analysis of Sentimental classifiers would be the latent nature of “News Headlines”. As some people suggested,“News Headlines” tend to be negative because readers are more attracted by negative headlines than positive ones (Headlines: When, 2013). What is more, unfortunately, there is a high possibility that the immatureness of the research in terms of the survey process caused the inaccurate outcome.

(All the results for this investigation are appended to the end of this thesis as appendix.)

Contents for my thesis

              This report shows the topics which I would handle with in my graduation thesis. Currently, there are a lot of subjects which I hope to look into, but it would be necessary to narrow down the options in order to make my thesis more plain and understandable for readers as well as for myself. As previously conducted for evaluating methods, this time, I also assessed some of the topics and tried to find out what I should treat for my final report.

              First of all, my most focused theme for my final report must be “Sentimental Analysis”. This is because the method seems relatively new compared to other linguistic analysis approaches and, in Japan, many people still do not know even what it is. As a result, there is no Japanese page on Wikipedia for this jargon yet. If I analyze various phenomenon using this technique, my thesis can be unique one which other Japanese scholars have never written. In addition, thanks to the recent the rapid development of computer technology, there are a lot of software which conduct diverse linguistic analysis including “Sentimental Analysis”. The assessment for those would be also interesting and make my thesis instructive.

              In order to make the most use of the latest mean, I would need to find the proper subjects to analyze with it. Currently, there are some categories for that. First one is the media trend about “Syrian refugee crisis”. This topic seems to have notable changes over the periods, so we would be able to find interesting results from them. Second is the news reports for 2016’s US election. As you already know, the political race this year have been one of the most unique ones. Therefore, we could expect a lot of various sentimental elements in the news for it. Thirdly, Japanese sensational movement “Kanryu (Korean wave)” might be one of the candidates for my research. This is because the Korean movement in Japan had had strange trend changes and it had seemed that media coverages had had great influence for it. 

             In addition to “Sentimental Analysis”, I also want to look into its analysis tool itself. As I stated above, so many new evaluation tools for “Sentimental Analysis” are there these days. So scrutinizing those would lead to very interesting outcomes for my thesis.

              Finally, by writing this report, I could find that deciding the topics for my thesis is much more difficult and critical thing than looking for some methods or data. It would be necessary for me to trim away the needless parts and focus on the most important ones so as to make my thesis simple and understandable.   

“Introduction (Temporary)”

“Introduction (Temporary)”

In the modern times, the media coverages have played an important role to pervade various events around the world. In addition, they have a crucial power to influence on the public images or opinions on certain topics. These days, the media trends created by news agencies have been analyzed in many ways. One of the unique methods is to analyzing the news headlines instead of the news contents.

In 1973, Charles Grivel, professor of Modern French literature at the University of Mannheim, focus on the title’s potential abilities and defined its functions as “Identify the work”, “Designate the work's subject matter” and “Play up the work”. (*1) Those title evaluation is now applied for the analysis of news headlines as well. Also, a number of sentence analysis methods have been proposed. “Sentimental Analysis” is an text analysis which categorize sentences into specified emotional groups like “sad”, “fun”, “negative” and so on. This shows what kind of sentimental elements those sentences have and we can assume what influence they have. Recently, thanks to the rapid technological development, a lot of computer software which analyze text implications have been created by major companies or researchers.

Likewise, the research on the influence of the media have been a popular subject.

For example, “Bandwagon effect” and “Underdog effect” would be well known theories which illustrate the media coverages’ leverage with people’s decisions on the diverse issues.

“Bandwagon effect” is an assumed movement that people tend to support for a person or a thing which seems to gain majority backing so that their actions can be effective. On the contrary, “Underdog effect” is a phenomenon that leads people to support the “Underdog” no matter their aids may be useless. At the same time, is also means that the backers of the popular ones occasionally think that their help might not be necessary and they quit assisting them. (*2)

In this report, we analyze the media trend over the Syrian refugee crisis using various methods. The main reason for choosing this subject is that many people these days begin to think the media reports are not reliable enough. (*3) Similarly, Syrian refugee crisis is a perfect example to exemplify the transitory traits of the public reactions. Moreover, the historical tragedy includes many aspects which the world today is facing with. For example, multiculturalism, Muslimazation, anti-immigrant sentiment, and things like that. The aim of this study is mainly to show how the public reactions towards the event have changed over a period and what influence the media coverages have attributed to them. Besides, we also try to evaluate the reliabilities of the new tools which are being developed to analyze the various social tendency including the media trend.

One of the research questions for this thesis is “How have the public reactions changed as the trends of the media coverages have shifted?” The hypothesis for this query is that the increase of the news reports which contains sympathetic elements towards the refugees will contributed the improvement of their public image and vice versa.   

This paper consists of several experiments regarding to the various reactions over the Syrian refugee crisis. First, we seek for the media trend about the event and its influence on the public opinions by evaluating headlines and news articles. Secondly, the results of analysis tools are shown and careful reviews for them are also conducted. Finally, the summary of the media influence based on those results of the experiments is illustrated.

Brief Reference

*1

https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=AmWhQzemk2EC&pg=PA76&lpg=PA76&dq=Charles+Grivel+title&source=bl&ots=4augxFfLRO&sig=6vKFlcGcwYYny1HUqUvwJxuwOk0&hl=ja&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjY4cm85MLPAhWBv5QKHdzXDIQQ6AEIPzAE#v=onepage&q=Charles%20Grivel%20title&f=false

*2

https://books.google.co.jp/books?id=Q6u5ADXTpR4C&pg=PA95&lpg=PA95&dq=media+trend+poll+results&source=bl&ots=WkC1zcI5WU&sig=p2zNW7y_nRWK5x0SFLzTg8cBXZs&hl=ja&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwim1tyJw83PAhVCtJQKHRSoDQwQ6AEIPjAE#v=onepage&q=media%20trend%20poll%20results&f=false

*3

http://www.journalism.org/2016/07/07/trust-and-accuracy/

News Headlines

Abstract

              For this week’s assignment, I conducted research on sentimental analysis for news headlines. Especially, this time I collected and analyzed several news articles from three periods (2000, 2007 and 2015).

Result review

              Thanks to this experiment, I could find a points that is needed to be dealt with. The point is that all of the result for news headlines focused on the keyword “immigrants” tend to “Negative” or “Neutral”. “Positive” articles were quite rare and hardly found them.

Maybe I need to find another analysis method for it to improve my analysis reliabili

*Result (P: Positive / N: Negative / L: Neutral)

2000（BBC）

News headlines	My Reaction	Corenlp	Text Analysis	Result
Immigrant suspects found in lorries.	N	L	L	-
Immigration or extinction.	N	L	L	-
NY police 'deliberately' killed immigrant.	N	N	L	N
'Immigrant' deaths shock papers.	N	N	L	N
Should immigration policy be relaxed?	L	P	L	-
Spain struggles with race riots.	N	L	L	-
German CDU says immigrants must 'conform'.	L	N	L	L
US immigration policy branded 'racist'.	N	N	N	N
Mutual fears behind Spain's race riots.	N	L	L	-

2007（BBC）

News headlines	My Reaction	Corenlp	Text Analysis	Result
Joining the immigrant underclass.	N	L	L	-
The BIG Immigration Debate.	L	L	L	L
Health | Immigrant pregnancies stretch NHS.	L	N	L	L
England | London | Violent immigrants fuelling crime.	N	N	L	N
Hispanic immigrants in the USA.	L	L	L	L
Migrants 'deceived and exploited'.	N	N	L	N
Immigrants re-energise Irish Church.	P	L	L	-
Panorama | Immigration: How we lost count.	N	N	N	N
Immigration to the USA.	L	L	L

 

News headlines	My Reaction	Corenlp	Text Analysis	Result
Immigrant spouses must speak English, court rules.	N	N	L	N
'Blatant' illegal immigrant job offers in Sussex and Kent.	N	N	N	N
Immigration Bill: Landlords 'must evict' illegal immigrants.	N	N	N	N
UK net migration hits record high.	N	P	L	X
The battle over the words used to describe migrants.	N	N	N	N
Illegal immigrants smuggled out of UK and back again.	N	N	L	N
We are beautiful too, say women from immigrant backgrounds.	P	P	L	P
Under the radar with the UK's illegal migrants.	N	L	L	X
EU immigration rules - in 90 seconds.	L	L	L	L