Subjectivity Analysis: Negative Sentiment and Linguistic Features in Page Six News Headlines

Abstract

The subjectivity in news headlines frequently occurs in today's world of journalism, leading to scandals and misleading information for readers. This present study aims to investigate and analyze the headlines of the well-known web page for scandal, Page Six, which will undergo analysis of the 1) Linguistic features Page Six employs in headlines, and 2) Linguistic features reflecting the attitude and subjectivity of Page Six. The data was collected by gathering 501 news headlines from Page Six and analyzed using the subjectivity indicators, developed by Prasithrathsint (2014) and sentiment hybrid analysis from the MonkeyLearn platform, and two raters. The result showed that all headlines contain intense content words that show subjectivity, consisting of the content words that depict traits with 46.6%, action with 40.5%, and emotion with 12.9%. For sentiment analysis of the attitude, it was found that 80.6% of the headlines were negative while positive headlines were only 19.4%.