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Comparative Framing and Sentiment Analysis of Trump’s 2nd of April Tariff Announcement
Treep, Tom (2025) Comparative Framing and Sentiment Analysis of Trump’s 2nd of April Tariff Announcement.
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| Abstract: | This research investigates how U.S. media outlets with different ideologies framed President Donald J. Trump’s tariffs on April 2, 2025, and how the public responded to this policy. This media analysis contains a qualitative framing analysis of 30 news articles, ten per media outlet, varying from left-leaning (The New York Times), center-leaning (The Hill), and right-leaning outlets (Deseret News). These articles were coded by Entman's framing functions and Semetko & Valkenburg's generic frames. The findings indicate that media outlets framed the event in distinct ways aligned with their beliefs. Left outlets framed tariffs as an economic risk and moral criticism, centrist outlets focused on facts and uncertainty, while right-leaning outlets framed tariffs as a justified response against fair trade. All outlets did acknowledge the uncertainty and fast decisions of Trump. After the framing analysis, a lexicon-based quantitative sentiment analysis was executed, focusing on 7,000 comments on YouTube covering the announcement live. This showed a near-perfect polarity (473 positive vs. 450 negative). The sentiment analysis of YouTube videos indicated a polarized picture of positive and negative public reactions, with emotions such as trust, anticipation, anger, and fear being most present. Together, results highlight that partisan media frames quickly influence the feelings people express online, and those reactions in turn reinforce the news narratives. Future research is needed to track how this feedback loop evolves over a longer period. |
| Item Type: | Essay (Bachelor) |
| Clients: | Apple |
| Faculty: | BMS: Behavioural, Management and Social Sciences |
| Subject: | 05 communication studies |
| Programme: | Communication Science BSc (56615) |
| Link to this item: | https://purl.utwente.nl/essays/107062 |
| Export this item as: | BibTeX EndNote HTML Citation Reference Manager |
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