Victorian Newspapers During Second Wave of Covid-19—Sentiment Analysis
I set out on this project with the following hypothesis: the second-wave, stage 3 lockdown of Melbourne was initially met with disdain by Murdoch-owned papers, but welcomed by newspapers not owned by Murdoch. However, non-Murdoch papers shifted their tone towards antipathy as the restrictions wore on.
This dataset was unable to confirm or deny this hypothesis. However, it did suggest that the opinion sections of The Australian and The Herald Sun, two of Murdoch’s News Limited papers, did write more negatively about the lockdowns than The Age and The Australian Financial Review as the Victorian Government responded to the second wave outbreak of Covid-19.
It is somewhat well-established that Murdoch-owned papers, which generally hew conservative, were not supportive of stringent Covid-related restrictions. The Australian, the Murdoch-owned News Limited’s national broadsheet, featured columnists who lamented what they saw as the Victorian government’s heavy-handed response to the second wave of infections. Some in its pages started to refer to the Victorian Premier, Dan Andrews, with the tongue-in-cheek nickname ‘Dictator Dan’. This playful moniker has stuck around: imagery of Dan Andrews’ cherubic face topped with a communist-style hat is a common sight in The Australian’s cartoons.
Initially, most columnists in other media outlets did not share this view. Instead, many expressed support for more measures. This echoed the sentiments of some in Melbourne who had already entered something of a collective, voluntary lockdown before the Victorian government had announced it.
However, what is less established is the idea that writers who appeared to respond to the lockdown more favourably shifted their tone as the lockdown dragged out. I believe there was a growing view that the lockdown and various restrictions were kept in place for longer than necessary, as the daily infection numbers started to dwindle.
I turned to data to confirm or deny my hunch. I devised a simple methodology to test the hypothesis:
- Scrape news articles from major national and Melburnian mastheads
- Apply sentiment analysis
- Look for trends within the sentiment of articles from the different mastheads that would suggest that gradual shift in tone.
Ultimately, I found that this dataset did not provide evidence of this gradual shift. The idiosyncrasies of each masthead could not be overcome due to the small sample size of newspapers.
A note on sentiment analysis
Sentiment analysis is a type of natural language processing, a field of data science and statistics that involves analysing text. Specifically, sentiment analysis uses statistical methods to measure the perceived sentiment of written work. The type of sentiment analysis I used for this piece is quite well-established: it measures how positive or negative the tone of a body of text is. Because of the relative age of this kind of analysis and the technological strides that have occurred since, its results are widely accepted. Furthermore, I have used three different dictionaries (a list of words and the sentiments associated with them) to mitigate bias ingrained in these analytical tools. The final “Sentiment Score” of each article in the following visualisations is a moderated combination of scores yielded from those three dictionaries. Trendlines have been generated with a loess algorithm — locally estimated scatterplot smoothing — which takes local subdivisions of points to estimate a smooth trendline.
This piece analyses the weekday and weekend coverage of The Age, The Australian Financial Review, The Herald Sun, and The Australian. I had two main reasons that motivated this selection. Firstly, I selected two of Melbourne’s most popular newspapers, The Age and The Herald Sun, since I set out to analyse the second wave of Covid-19 infections in Victoria. Secondly, collecting every article published by a masthead throughout the year is not a simple task — while this analysis could be improved by including articles from the ABC, The Guardian, SBS, and others, it would have taken too long to scrape them as well. Therefore, I settled to analyse the two Melbourne dailies and their proprietors’ more nationally-oriented papers, The AFR and The Australian.
Media response to the stage 3 lockdown of Melbourne
On the 7th of July, the Victorian Government announced the stage 3 lockdown in response to the second wave of Covid infections concentrated in metropolitan Melbourne. This announcement seemed almost inevitable after the two-and-a-half weeks of increasing daily infections and accompanying restrictions. Victoria had notched 191 new cases that day.
The above visualisation is of news articles (not opinion or editorial) from the four mastheads that mention the terms ‘lockdown’, ‘shutdown’, or ‘restriction’. Furthermore, it only includes articles from The AFR and The Australian that mention ‘Victoria’ or ‘Melbourne’. The trendlines show that the four mastheads struck a relatively similar tone in their reporting during this time.
This visualisation shows opinion and editorial pieces with the same parameters. The trendlines representing The Herald Sun and The Australian quite clearly diverge from those of The Age and The AFR by mid-June, when it became clear that some kind of lockdown was in the offing. It lends credence to the common assumption that the two News Limited papers opined more negatively about the lockdowns and restrictions than others.
However, this does not support my hypothesis that the tone of opinion pieces and editorials in non-Murdoch publications largely turned more sour as time passed. While The AFR did adopt a tone as negative as The Herald Sun and The Australian, The Age’s tone remained bullish.
