Linguistic Bias in News Media on Anti-Pipeline Protests in Canada
Date
2024-10-02
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
ORCID
0009-0003-5648-362X
Type
Thesis
Degree Level
Masters
Abstract
Protests give rise to social change, often advancing the rights of minority groups. However, their success hinges on public opinion, which can be influenced by news media (e.g., Detenber et al., 2007). Most research on this topic has demonstrated that protests that seek to disrupt the status quo are negatively framed in news media (e.g., Boyle et al., 2004), which inhibits their success. Others have found that the language used to describe minority groups in the news is often negatively biased (e.g., Dragojevic et al., 2017) and that this maintains harmful stereotypes (Beukeboom, 2014). However, no research has investigated the linguistic mechanisms used to describe protests in news media. Given this, the aim of this study was to determine whether news sources exhibit linguistic bias about protests that corresponds to regional differences, which are known to influence media bias. To do this, we examined articles published in news sources from different regions of Canada for linguistic bias in the description of Indigenous-led anti-pipeline protests. We found that the language used differed by region, such that news sources from the Prairies used more abstract language than news sources from the Central region. However, when considering both abstraction and valence, neither source exhibited a bias. This research is significant in that it demonstrates that regional differences in the way protests are framed extend to linguistic differences, but that negative framing may not.
Description
Keywords
Language, implicit bias, protests, news media bias, linguistic bias
Citation
Degree
Master of Arts (M.A.)
Department
Psychology
Program
Psychology