Affective and social markers of Romanian mainstream and nationalist-oriented news media’s discursive patterns

Abstract

The present paper is a quantitative investigation of the affective and social markers of mainstream and nationalist-oriented news media in Romania in a regular and a highly sensitive social context. To reach our aim, we analysed the linguistic markers of text corpus from two main news sites, representative for each type of media (Digi24 and Activenews). Our endeavor is structured in two empirical studies. In the first study, we analysed articles published in a regular, conflict-free context, while the second study helped us to differentiate between the two types of media’s coverage of the sensible Uz Valley interethnic incident in Romania. The text corpus was processed with the help of the recently developed Romanian version of the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count software. To check our hypotheses and analyze the difference in emotionality and social processes between the mainstream and non-mainstream, nationalist-oriented news media, we used the t test and the LDA modelling technique. Results pointed out the highly emotional and religious-focused language on Activenews as compared to Digi24, in both regular and ethnically sensitive contexts. However, the significant level of negativity on Digi24 as well, especially regarding the Uz Valley incident, challenges us to address the propagation of nationalist-type language elements through mainstream media as well.