Political Polarization: Why are you fighting in the comment section?

Kathryn Cunningham, Anna Tobey, Leia Broughton, Maya Athwal, Nicole Pacheco

Note: This article was written in Spring 2024, prior to Biden stepping down from the presidential race and Trump winning the 2024 presidential election.

Are all news headlines made equal? For our project, we analyzed the potential effects of framing in online news headlines on readership responses in the comments. Digital tools for political discourse are becoming increasingly popular, and we want to investigate how framing in the media can influence political cognition and amplify the political polarization we see in comment sections today. We hypothesized that different framings in headlines would provoke politically biased emotional responses against the opposing political party. We conducted critical discourse analysis of six different headlines pertaining to a singular political event — Michael Cohen’s testimony against Donald Trump — on two news sites from each of the following categories: left-leaning, right-leaning, and neutral. We then compared these analyses of the lexical and syntactic choices used to frame Cohen and Trump with the corresponding comments on each article. We observed high-frequency keywords and identified eight categories for different comment types, considering how each headline could have prompted the intense responses we saw. The results of this project are important in understanding the power of party framing and how it can divide us simply through subtle choices in language.

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