Sentiment Analysis of Local News Coverage of Immigration By Border and Non-Border Newspapers

Abstract

Many Americans inform their political opinions through media coverage, and local news outlets remain a significant source of such coverage. This paper seeks to investigate the way this coverage differs across local outlets, using immigration as a sample issue due to its varying levels of impact in different areas of the United States. The investigation involved gathering a sample of immigration-related newspaper articles from outlets in southern border states and non-southern border states, then evaluating the directional sentiment of each text through quantitative analysis of the lexicon, using positivity and negativity coding dictionaries. The investigation seeks to determine whether the proximity of a news outlet to the United States-Mexico border has a significant effect on the sentiment of the outlet’s immigration-related articles, and draws conclusions on the potential implications of such sentiment variation, including its potential impact on the political issue opinions of readers.