Political orientation in media treatment of police violence: Evidence from modal adjectives

The goal of this paper is to unveil possible correlations between the political orientation of newspapers and their treatment of police violence. We consider three different news publications with diverging political orientations, namely Jacobin (Left), Breitbart (Right), and The New York Times (Center). We performed a corpus study that relies on two different categorizations: a new ontology for police violence situations, identifying a set of recurrent themes, and the use and distributions of modal adjectives across these themes as revealing stances toward them. Modal adjectives are highly polysemous, and our analysis distinguishes between the epistemic readings as relating to factual truth, and evaluative readings as relating to norms. Our study shows that left and right leaning journals share similar uses of themes, but differ in their use of modal adjectives. These results could suggest that political orientation is responsible for differences that lie in the stance that the newspapers adopt.