Maintaining Journalistic Integrity in the Digital Age: A COmprehensive NLP Framework for Evaluating Online News

Abstract

The rapid growth of online news platforms has led to an increased need for reliable methods to evaluate the quality and credibility of news articles. This paper proposes a comprehensive framework to analyze online news texts using natural language processing (NLP) techniques, particularly a language model specifically trained for this purpose, alongside other well-established NLP methods. The framework incorporates ten journalism standards—objectivity, balance and fairness, readability and clarity, sensationalism and clickbait, ethical considerations, public interest and value, source credibility, relevance and timeliness, factual accuracy, and attribution and transparency—to assess the quality of news articles. By establishing these standards, researchers, media organizations, and readers can better evaluate and understand the content they consume and produce. The proposed method has some limitations, such as potential difficulty in detecting subtle biases and the need for continuous updating of the language model to keep pace with evolving language patterns.