Detecting Frames in News Headlines and Its Application to Analyzing News Framing Trends Surrounding U.S. Gun Violence

Proceedings of the 23rd Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning, pages 504–514 Hong Kong, China, November 3-4, 2019. c⃝2019 Association for Computational Linguistics 504 Detecting Frames in News Headlines and Its Application to Analyzing News Framing Trends Surrounding U.S. Gun Violence Siyi Liu Lei Guo Kate Mays Margrit Betke Derry Tanti Wijaya Boston University {liusiyi, guolei, kkmays, betke, wijaya}@bu.edu Abstract Different news articles about the same topic often offer a variety of perspectives: an arti- cle written about gun violence might empha- size gun control, while another might promote 2nd Amendment rights, and yet a third might focus on mental health issues. In communica- tion research, these different perspectives are known as “frames”, which, when used in news media will influence the opinion of their read- ers in multiple ways. In this paper, we present a method for effectively detecting frames in news headlines. Our training and performance evaluation is based on a new dataset of news headlines related to the issue of gun violence in the United States. This Gun Violence Frame Corpus (GVFC) was curated and annotated by journalism and communication experts. Our proposed approach sets a new state-of-the-art performance for multiclass news frame detec- tion, significantly outperforming a recent base- line by 35.9% absolute difference in accuracy. We apply our frame detection approach in a large scale study of 88k news headlines about the coverage of gun violence in the U.S. be- tween 2016 and 2018. 1 Introduction The political climate in the United States is increasingly polarized (Pew Research Center, 2018a). To many media scholars and pundits, the main reason that liberals and conservatives in- habit different worlds is that news media of var- ied political orientations have been depicting two distinct versions of social reality (Mitchell et al., 2014; Stroud, 2011). To address this problem, one needs to assess the ways in which news reporters frame important public affairs. In communication research, “to frame” means “to select some as- pects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text” (Entman, 1993). Like any type of communication, news involves framing. In a polarized media environment, par- tisan media outlets intentionally frame news sto- ries in a way to advance certain political agen- das (Jamieson et al., 2007; Levendusky, 2013). Even when journalists make their best efforts to pursue objectivity, media framing often favors one side over another in political disputes, thus always resulting in some degree of bias (Entman, 2010). Hence, a news framing analysis is helpful because it not only tells us whether a news article is left- or right-leaning (or positive or negative), but also reveals how the article is structured to promote a certain side of the political spectrum. In communication research, manual identifica- tion of media frames is a challenging task due to the large amount of media data in this news- saturated environment. More importantly, there is a high level of complexity in framing analysis that often requires a careful investigation of nuances in news coverage, which …

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