LAUSR

Past research has called for balance in the media when reporting on chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) in order to avoid harmful bias on the readers. The call to do no harm in reporting is based on concerns that the media’s representation of CTE has moved far beyond what researchers studying the disease are able to prove. This study aimed to use positive and negative word sentiments to directly compare journal articles with corresponding news articles in order to evaluate these concerns. Research articles (n=7) directly associated with CTE that were heavily covered in the media, as well as associated media articles (n=7) from reputable news sites that covered only the associated article, were selected for the sample. The “AFINN” sentiment analysis dictionary rates the emotional valence of each word with an integer between minus three (negative) and plus three (positive). Words not recognized by the dictionary or with a zero weight were omitted from the analyses. The entire word list from journal articles weighted equally produced a mean sentiment of -1.001, while news articles using the same scale produce a mean of -0.746. However, when the means were weighted against word count, the mean sentiment score for journal articles was -0.135 and for news article -0.137. A paired t-test analysis of the weighted group of articles yielded no significant difference between the two groups before (p= 0.72) and after (p=0.69) the word count weighted analysis. Despite recent calls for a less biased reporting of CTE in the mainstream media, this analysis indicates equal sentimental weighting between peer-reviewed journal articles and news reports on CTE, which each approached a value of zero (true neutrality).