The Contentious Somatic: Embodied Cognition, Journalistic Habitus, and Description Bias in Protest News Coverage

• In Event: 30663 - Computational Approaches to Culture and Cognition

Abstract

Description bias of protest events has long been a topic of both theoretical and methodological interest for political sociologists and social movement scholars relying on newspaper data. Institutional mediation theory suggests that protest news coverage varies along two core discursive dimensions---substance and sentiment---and variation along these dimensions is a function of how coverage is "mediated" through news-organizational, movement, and political contexts. This paper adds to the literature on description bias, and institutional mediation accounts in particular, by going beyond the typical bipolar treatment of sentiment. We argue that the body mediates our conceptualization of "good" and "bad," and this is reflected in how the concept is externalized in the written word. We explore how the embodiment of knowledge structures bias in news media coverage. By "grounding" sentiment in this way, we argue that negative descriptions will use language that is associated with the somatic and profane. While we expect this to be the case for situations in which it could be literal (e.g., acts of violence), we argue that it will also be the case when such negative descriptive language is metaphorical---e.g., when the attentional focus of the protest event itself is fundamentally embodied, such as protest focused on issues of race and ethnicity. Analytically, we rely on a popular protest event dataset and merge the entries with the original newspaper articles from which the data were derived. We use diachronic word embeddings and panel models to find that protest events with disruptive actions---such as violence, property damage, or deaths---prime somatic and profane descriptions. More importantly, though, we also find that somatic and profane descriptions are more common when the primary targets are racial-ethnic groups, and this remains the case regardless of whether disruptive actions are present. These findings further not only scholarly conversations on protest news coverage, but also on cultural evolution more broadly by underscoring the role of embodied cognitive processes for discursive change over time.

Authors

• Marshall A. Taylor, New Mexico State University

• Dustin S. Stoltz, Lehigh University

• David G. Ortiz, New Mexico State University