Negativity bias helps explain war terms, dismissing
peace in study of Ukraine-Russia war news
In the previous two blogs, I’ve laid out a recent study I conducted that examined war vs. peace journalism terms in Ukraine war coverage. See the two blogs below for details. Today, I wrap up this presentation with a discussion of my findings, of possible solutions, and suggestions for further research. --Ed

Discussion
The findings showing a 5-1 dominance of traditional war terms vs. peace journalism terms (R1, Chart 1) are consistent with studies cited earlier (Afghanistan, Iraq, Myanmar, Kashmir) that indicate a long-standing media bias towards traditional/war framing.

These findings are also consistent with research indicating a news media bias toward the negative—in this instance, battles and tanks and killing rather than peace and compromise. Certainly, this can be found in content analysis data about COVID that showed a strong negativity bias.[i] This negativity bias can also be found more broadly across media. The results of one recent study showed an increase of “sentiment negativity” in headlines across written news media since the year 2000. The researchers noted, “The chronological analysis of headlines emotionality shows a growing proportion of headlines denoting anger, fear, and sadness and a decrease in the prevalence of emotionally neutral headlines across the studied outlets over the 2000–2019 interval.”[ii] This may be partially due to the fact that most news consumers pay more attention to negative news than to positive news, according to a study from the National Academy of Sciences in 2019 that quizzed 1,000 respondents in 17 countries. [iii]

Negativity bias can also be used to at least partially explain the second set (R2, Chart 2) of findings that show a substantial presence (41.8%) of words used to dismiss peace settlement proposals and activities.

The most prevalent dismissive language was used in a way denigrated peace settlements because they were perceived to be pro-Russian. In fact, “favors Russia” and “benefits Russia” received the highest number of hits under each of the settlement terms searched. “Benefits Russia,” for example, appeared in 25.8% of all Russia Ukraine war stories that contained the word “negotiation.” One might easily theorize that the prevalence of these terms indicates not just a bias towards traditional/war journalism, but also a pro-Western, anti-Russian bias (some might say xenophobia) generally observed in coverage of the war.

Solutions
One solution to the biased, negative, emotive, inflammatory word usage and warmongering story framing would be to more widely practice peace journalism. PJ’s principles could be applied to war coverage that:

a. Gives voice to the voiceless. In this context, this would mean focusing more on everyday people rather than leaders, and giving voice to those who have been victimized;
b. Rejects propaganda, which in wartime, is often bellicose and chocked full of inflammatory and emotive language;
c. Rejects ‘us vs. them’ storytelling. During wartime, this would acknowledge suffering and innocent victimhood (see a. above) on all sides.
d. Rejects overly simple, stereotyped portrayals of all groups, as in “all Ukrainians are fascists” or “all Russian are bloodthirsty monsters.” Reporting must be more nuanced.
e. More carefully chooses words, rejecting overuse of bellicose war terminology and emphasizing instead the language of reconciliation;
f. Gives peacemakers and peace proposals a voice proportionate to war proponents.
g. Rejects reflexive dismissiveness and marginalization of peace proposals, and considers peace proposals and settlement ideas equally regardless of the source.

Additional Research
Further studies could build and expand on these findings. Researchers could explore:

a. Peace/war language across many months, or between longer periods in 2022 and 2023.
b. Peace/war language by region, comparing Ukrainian, Russian, and Western media, for example, in their use of peace/war terminology.
c. Themes present in Russia Ukraine war reporting (anger, bellicosity, conciliation, sadness, etc.). This comparison could also look at the differences among Ukrainian, Russian, and Western media.
d. Anti-Russia word use and framing by Western media in reporting about the war. Also, does this framing vary by country/region (the U.S. as compared to EU countries, for example).
e. Images of war (still pictures and video). What themes and biases do they reflect? Are they consistent with the principles of peace journalism?

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[i] Leonhardt, D. (2021, 24 March). Bad News Bias. New York Times.  https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/24/briefing/boulder-shooting-george-segal-astrazeneca.html

[ii] Rozado, D., Hughes, R., & Halberstadt, J. (2022, 18 October). Longitudinal analysis of sentiment and emotion in news media headlines using automated labelling with Transformer language models. Plos One. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0276367 .

[iii] Khan, A. (2019, 5 September). Why People Respond to Negative News. Los Angeles Times.

https://www.latimes.com/science/story/2019-09-05/why-people-respond-to-negative-news