Moral Features of Online News Sphere

Abstract

This paper focuses on several major online news outlets that construct the online news sphere, and using quantitative text analysis methods to identify the relationship between the moral features based on Moral Foundations Theory that appear in them and their topics. The results showed that middle media, unlike other media outlets, were characterized more by certain morality such as "FairnessVirtue", "FairnessVice" and “IngroupVice” than by neutrality. The relationship between "FairnessVice" and topics confirmed the avoidance of describing or claiming certain events as discriminatory in bulletin boards/middle media.