An exploratory study of net zero discourse based on South Korean newspapers: a topic modeling and sentiment analysis approach

Public support for net zero is an important determinant of the solution for climate change. Newspapers can be used as a data source for observing public discourse on a variety of subjects including net zero. Public discourse produced through newspapers is not value-neutral; in particular, media inevitably has political orientation. This study examines the major topics of net zero articles, and if and how articles from different political orientations differ in the tone of news report of the topic of net zero. Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA)-based topic modeling was applied to infer the major topics, and sentiment analysis was applied to understand the sentiments and tones of the articles. We found that 16 major topics were composed of 5 groups to discuss various aspects such as environment, socio-politics, and the economy. We also found that although the majority of articles are neutral, differences in the tone of South Korean media was particularly noticeable in negatively classified articles. These findings suggest that newspapers, particularly politically oriented newspapers, can influence public acceptance, support for net zero, and therefore the implementation of government policies in certain ways.