Sentiment on Dissemination about COVID-19 of Mainstream Media Around the World: What Information are They Delivering

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to research the sentiment and topic classification about COVID-19 of mainstream social media in the United States to interpret what information the American public receives toward the COVID-19, and what are the perspectives of News and articles on epidemics in different topic fields. The study will extract unigrams to trigrams of different articles to judge the sentiments of articles, and use region-related keywords, dates, and topics extracted by classification as independent variables to measure the differences between disparate features. The result shows that news related to the business and health fields are more frequent (48.2% and 20.8% respectively). It also reveals that news regarding entertainment and technologies has a lower rate to be negative during the pandemic (5.6% and 11.1% respectively). With time flows during the research period, the sports news has a trend to be more negative, and a trend to be more positive for entertainment news and technology news.