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"Xi tgħidli dwar Joey?"- ("What can you tell me about Joey"): A study into the sentiment expressed towardspoliticians in Maltese newspapers
Linköping University, Department of Management and Engineering, The Institute for Analytical Sociology, IAS. Linköping University, Faculty of Arts and Sciences.
2022 (English)Independent thesis Advanced level (degree of Master (Two Years)), 20 credits / 30 HE creditsStudent thesis
Abstract [en]

The murder of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia shook the Maltese nation and madeinternational headlines in October of 2017. As the investigation of the case unfolded, the involvement of politicians in power and those close to them became apparent through confessions and evidence from those who had set up the bomb. These revelations, as well as the presidential pardon of one of the murderers by then prime minister, Joseph Muscat, led to weekly, at times daily, protests and civil unrest, which culminated in the ex-prime minister's resignation by December of 2019 (Briguglio, 2021).With this event in mind, this study uses a novel approach to investigate the sentiment expressed towards politicians in local news media before and after a political scandal. Using a combination of named entity recognition (NER) and sentiment analysis (SA) techniques, we measured the sentiments expressed towards politicians in the Times of Malta. Our collected dataset includes all online articles written between 2017 and February 2022, about 84 individuals who were in parliament within that time frame (~20,000 articles). The study uses two measures of entity sentiment analysis: a lexicon and rule-based approach (VADER) and an API approach (Google entity sentiment analysis). Then, using these collected measures of sentiment we conduct an interrupted time series analysis to understand how the event impacted how the politicians and their parties were spoken about in the newspaper. Our findings indicate that the murder of journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia caused an increase in negative sentiment towards the Labour party, especially following the presidential pardon of Melvin Theuma. We also find that sentiment towards the nationalist party was not impacted by the event. When looking at how individual involvement impacted sentiments, our study had mixed results. The lexicon-based and API-based sentiment analysis (SA) algorithms differed in output. For the lexicon-based SA, those involved experienced an increased negative sentiment however this was not always the case for the API-based method. On the other hand, those who were not involved also experienced a significantly more negative sentiment towards them according to the lexicon-based method, but did not reach significance in the API-based method.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
2022. , p. 43
National Category
Sociology (excluding Social Work, Social Psychology and Social Anthropology)
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:liu:diva-186627ISRN: LIU-IEI-FIL-A--2203960--SEOAI: oai:DiVA.org:liu-186627DiVA, id: diva2:1678432
Subject / course
Master’s Thesis in Computational Social Science
Supervisors
Examiners
Available from: 2022-08-11 Created: 2022-06-29 Last updated: 2024-08-30Bibliographically approved

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Galea, Abigail
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The Institute for Analytical Sociology, IASFaculty of Arts and Sciences
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CiteExportLink to record
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Citation style
  • apa
  • ieee
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More styles
Language
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  • Other locale
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Output format
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