Journalists have long been regarded as the arbiter of truth. Their task is to give voice to the issues that should be important and are deemed to be “newsworthy”. Because of this, they hold a great responsibility of representing the issues that our culture cares about and bringing attention to issues that we should care about. In this sense, it makes us wonder how LGBTQIA+ people are portrayed in headlines. What does it take for LGBTQIA+ to make the news? Is there a change in public sentiment toward LGBTQIA+, as hinted by the news?
In a world full of noise, journalism is a key voice that many still default to. We seek to understand how they portray LGBTQIA+ people and present it to you to question whether we are content with this portrayal.
The Dataset
We analyzed 2 publications: The New York Times for American Media and The Guardian to represent British Media. We understand that more publications of multiple sizes and types are needed to glean a more accurate portrayal of how news media represent LGBTQIA+ people. This analysis serves as a first look into this investigation. We collected headlines that specifically included LGBTQIA+ keywords within this past year. The final dataset contains 5,034 related news headlines in Guardian and 3,419 related news headlines in the New York Times.
Here’s what we found…
Different cultures are interested in different topics related to LGBTQIA+
To break it down even further, the following are the exact top 20 words that appeared in each publication.
The guardian’s top words as you can see are more about lifestyle and relationships. On the other hand, The New York Times has more politics and pandemic-related news. The guardian’s top words are “UK”, and “England” which makes sense because it is a UK-based publication. And the other words are relationship-related such as “love”, “sex” and “relationship”. For the new york times the top words are “US”, “Biden”, “school”, and “Texas”, which are more about the recent government policies in the US.
The terms “gay” and “trans” are talked about disproportionately more than “LGBTQIA+”
When we further looked into the headlines related to the term “trans”, we found that many headlines found gender conversions newsworthy. There is also more news about athletes and actors that converted from male to female rather than the other way around.
Sports, Religion, Politics: How headlines change over time
We further looked into what the articles talked about when they contained the words trans, gay, and LGBTQ. The images below show the most common words used in the headlines that contained those keywords. The number of articles found is displayed under each month.
The term: Gay
For the word Gay in The New York Times, we commonly saw words related to laws/bills, rights, and men. Anti-gay was also mentioned more in recent months following the “don't say gay” bill.
When we look to the Guardian, we see a higher trend in sports and religion over bills.
The term: Trans
When looking at the keyword “trans” in The New York Times, we see many references to “Health”, along with “Sports”, “Texas”, “School”, and “Rights”.
The Guardian on the other hand has more references to “Anti-trans”, “Women” and “Olympics”.
The term: LGBTQ
When looking at the keyword “LGBTQ”, The Guardian has many references to “Anti-LGBTQ”, as well as many references to religion.
Negative > positive sentiment in headlines
We performed sentiment analysis using NLP models to categorize every headline into positive sentiment, negative sentiment, and neutral. We went on to further perform this analysis month over month. There are more negative sentiment articles as compared to positive ones, although a major chunk of them are still neutral.
The most number of articles related to LGBTQIA+ is published in June by The New York Times, which is expected, as it is pride month. However, pride month has the highest proportion of negative articles to positive articles.
The Guardian also followed a similar pattern of more negative sentiment articles in comparison to positive ones. The other interesting trend is the increasing proportion of negative sentiment articles. What kind of emotions will these increasing number of negative articles elicit from the audience?
We share these findings not because we want to criticize publications. Rather, we seek to understand what makes LGBTQIA+ newsworthy and question whether or not the public is happy with this representation.
This article is co-written by: Angelica Kosasih, Yimeng Sun, Ritika Poddar, Renzhi Hu, Rashmi Sinha
