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Moral Foundations of U.S. Political News Organizations /
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Description: Partisan differences and diviseness have become an increasing hot topic in psychological research. Many theories have been proposed to explain these differences and divisions including Moral Foundations Theory. The current research seeks to use a linguistic measure of Moral Foundations, the Moral Foundations Dictionary (MFD), to test the theory in terms of predicted partisan differences. Through web scraping, the researchers extracted articles from popular partisan news sources' websites, calculated MFD word frequencies, and identified words' respective valences. This process attempts to uncover news outlets' positive or negative endorsements of certain moral dimensions concomitant with a particular ideology. In Experiment 1, the researchers gathered political articles from four sources. We were unable to reveal significant differences in moral endorsements, but we solidified the method to be employed in further research. In Experiment 2, the researchers expanded their number of sources to 10 and analyzed articles that pertain to two specific topics: the 2018 confirmation hearings of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh and the partial U.S. Government Shutdown of 2018-2019. Once again, no significant differences in moral endorsements were found. Together with past work, the results shed doubt on the validity of the MFD as a reliable measurement tool.