Browsing by Author "Kim, Minchul"

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Citation Count: 0
Seeing the Black Lives Matter Movement Through Computer Vision? an Automated Visual Analysis of News Media Images on Facebook
(Sage Publications Ltd, 2023) Kim, Minchul; Bas, Ozen
In this study, automated visual analysis was used to explore how the political leanings of news media are associated with their visual representation of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. We analyzed more than 9,000 images posted on Facebook pages run by U.S. news media between August 2014 and October 2020 using commercially developed computer vision tools and a topic modeling algorithm. The results show that images used in BLM-related news coverage can be categorized into 10 distinctively themed groups that overlap with the main types of protest images uncovered by manual content analysis. Furthermore, news sources engaged in different visual representation practices depending on their partisan leanings. The patterns uncovered in this study imply that (de)legitimization of protests may take either active or passive forms. These findings contribute to theorization of the way news media might use social media platforms to (de)legitimize social protests, which may influence public opinion on social issues.
Citation Count: 2
Who Is Responsible? the Impact of Emotional Personalization on Explaining the Origins of Social Problems
(Routledge, 2020) Kim, Minchul; Hale, Brent J.; Grabe, Maria Elizabeth; Baş, Özen
Personalization refers to the journalistic practice of including emotional case studies of ordinary people in news stories, increasing vividness and emotional charge of news and eliciting identification and empathy in news consumers. Previous research suggests that personalization of news stories increases collectivistic (compared with individualistic) causal attributions by the news audience. In response, an experiment was conducted with a week time delay between stimuli presentation and open-ended participant responses to examine the influence of news personalization on how news consumers attribute causes for social issues. Participant (N = 80) trait empathy was included as an additional factor. Findings show that participants with high trait empathy expressed a greater shift to collectivistic attribution after watching personalized news stories than participants with low trait empathy, suggesting that individual differences in trait empathy may be an important factor in how individuals construct their own understanding of social problems.