Income, Nationality and Subjectivity in Media Text

Abstract

Abstract This article takes a bird’s eye view of how positive or negative sentiments in the news press about countries and nationality nouns seem to reflect the country’s general income groups. The study focuses on the four income groups classified by the World Bank and their co-occurrence with positively and negatively classified adjectives from the Subjectivity Lexicon for Czech. A search in the journalistic subcorpus of the SYN series, release 8 of the Czech National Corpus, results in a time line covering three decades. Previous research on subjectivity has either focused on other parts of the Subjectivity Lexicon or on fewer adjectives from other languages. In this article, it is argued that the income groups are treated in descending order, i.e., the higher the income, the more positive the sentiment. Even when the most influential groups in the top and bottom are removed, the result holds. Discourse concerning global war and peace, and the security of different nations, is also detected as a result.