Mapping Opposition: Moral Prioritization Structures in Canadian News Coverage of Policy Disputes

• In Event: Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): 15. Media Sociology

Abstract

How do media outlets engage with moral language when covering contested policy disputes, and does that engagement reflect genuine moral opposition or mere difference? This paper introduces the concept of moral prioritization structures to examine whether Canadian news outlets engage with the five moral foundations identified by Moral Foundations Theory horizontally — with roughly equal attention across foundations — or hierarchically, prioritizing certain foundations over others. Drawing on the culture war hypothesis and Jacoby's (2014) geometric model of value structures, the paper argues that moral polarization constitutes genuine conflict only when outlets across the ideological spectrum develop opposing hierarchical structures, not merely divergent ones.
Using a corpus of 1,964 articles from Canadian news outlets covering three policy disputes — SOGI curriculum, affordable housing, and immigration — between 2022 and 2024, I apply sentence embeddings to measure semantic engagement with each moral foundation at the paragraph level. I then use the coefficient of variation to identify articles with hierarchical moral prioritization structures, retaining approximately half the corpus. A geometric model transforms rank-ordered foundation scores into directional vectors in a latent space, enabling visual and angular comparison across ideological groups and policy domains. Circular regression provides statistical support for the geometric evidence.
Results reveal that policy domain explains more variation in moral prioritization than media ideology, with immigration representing the primary site of moral conflict and housing showing unexpected consensus. Liberal outlets show the greatest moral language disparity, while centrist outlets show the least. Centrist outlets frequently occupy isolated positions in moral space rather than serving as ideological bridges. These findings suggest that Canadian media exhibits issue-specific moral polarization rather than a uniform culture war, with the structure of moral opposition varying fundamentally across policy domains — contributing to both the culture war literature and the measurement of media polarization.

Author

• Yi-Cheng Hsieh, McGill University