Newspapers, Images and Income Support Policy

Abstract

[EN] To what extent do different newspapers have different kinds of images associated with articles on the same topic? We investigate this research question by considering one of the most important Income Support Policies implemented in Italy in recent times (‘Reddito di cittadinanza’ - RdC) which generated a strong debate in public opinion. Focussing on the national wide media, we downloaded images associated with articles about RdC and by means of Image Captioning algorithms, we generate the description of them. Results show that different newspapers have images containing different objects. Some topics emerging from images published by newspapers are very exclusive and the sentiment associated with the text extracted from the images has a wide heterogeneity. Furthermore, right-hand newspapers show a lower sentiment compared with left-hand newspapers. Overall, the results confirm that the ideological stance associated with different media outlets is reflected also in the images associated with articles and that the integration of Image Captioning algorithms and Natural Language Processes is very promising in this research area.