Mining news media for understanding public health concerns.

ABSTRACT:

Introduction

News media play an important role in raising public awareness, framing public opinions, affecting policy formulation, and acknowledgment of public health issues. Traditional qualitative content analysis for news sentiments and focuses are time-consuming and may not efficiently convey sentiments nor the focuses of news media.

Methods

We used descriptive statistics and state-of-art text mining to conduct sentiment analysis and topic modeling, to efficiently analyze over 3 million Reuters news articles during 2007-2017 for identifying their coverage, sentiments, and focuses for public health issues. Based on the top keywords from public health scientific journals, we identified 10 major public health issues (i.e., "air pollution," "alcohol drinking," "asthma," "dep

SUBMITTER: Zolnoori M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8057471 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature