1. Objectivity of the Aleksandr Sinayev PhD Candidate, Quantitative Psychology Ohio State University

2. About Me Quantitative psychologist Personally interested in applying statistical models to gain insight in any area

3. What Is Objectivity? Traditional objectivity (report the truth) –Content Pragmatic objectivity – Ward, 1999 – (reports are empirically valid and coherent) –Content

4. What Is Objectivity? Objectivity as pretense (Tuchman, 1972) –Form (and relationships)

5. Empirical Investigation Can the form and content of objectivity be reliably measured and compared across content areas?

6. How Can We Say an Article is Subjective? Could identify subjective elements according to the definition and prior work

7. How Can We Say an Article is Subjective? Automatized approach A lot of data are available on movies

8. The Data 2,000 reviews –see Pang, Lee, & Vaithyanathan, 2002 –1,000 positive reviews and 1,000 negative 2,000 synopses –See Bamman, O’Connor, & Smith, 2013 All New York Times articles available online

9. Preprocessing Common non-diagnostic words deleted –E.g., ‘a’, ‘on’ Numbers were changed to generic features –‘1,023’ => ‘4digitnumber’ –‘4.8’ => ‘singledigitwdecimal’ –Effort made to identify years, dates etc. Features were words and word bigrams Articles were units of analysis

10. The Classifier Naïve Bayes Trained on 1,500 reviews and 1,500 synopses Tested on 500 reviews and 500 synopses

11. Examples “I thought”“you will”“is certainly”“were hurt” Synopses120203981,113 Reviews9851,7571,265400

12. Did it Work? Classified 80% of the reviews and synopses it was tested on correctly. Most (82%) of the NYT articles were classified as certainly subjective Opinion pieces and editorials were almost always classified as subjective (receiving an average probability of.01 on objectivity) Political news articles averaged.15

13. Articles Remained Subjective over Time Local, national and international news

14. What else? Business articles tended to be quite objective (.12) Science and technology articles were more subjective (.01,.02)

15. What About Front Page? Similar results if counting numbers

16. Positive or Negative? Trained another algorithm like the one above to distinguish between positive and negative reviews, again achieving over 80% accuracy.

17. Opinion articles became more positive over time

18. Other Articles Did Not

19. Conclusions Objectivity appears to be measurable through simple word pairs News articles appear to concentrate on positive subjective judgments, at least inasmuch as they resemble positive reviews Positivity of articles across time appears to have little to do with positivity of the world across time –Dipped in the 90’s (also small dip in subjectivity)

20. Limitations Emphasis on form, relationships completely ignored, content partly ignored Objectivity harder to pin down than subjectivity Absolute values of numbers to be taken with a grain of salt

21. Final Remarks If you are interested and know the literature, help me write this up!