Thirty Years of Media Coverage on High Drug Prices in the United States--A Never-Ending Story or a Time for Change?

In recent years drug prices have increasingly become a topic of debate for patients, providers, payers and policy makers. To place the current drug price debate into historical context, we searched the New York Times and Wall Street Journal from 1985 - 2015 and found that concerns about drug prices have commonly featured in the press over the study period with recently stronger calls for change. Price levels, types of innovations, stakeholder responses, and strategies to address high prices discussed in the media suggest that concerted efforts are required to enable affordable and high-value innovations.

A linguistic analysis of dehumanization toward substance use across three decades of news articles.

Introduction: Substances and the people who use them have been dehumanized for decades. As a result, lawmakers and healthcare providers have implemented policies that subjected millions to criminalization, incarceration, and inadequate resources to support health and wellbeing. While there have been recent shifts in public opinion on issues such as legalization, in the case of marijuana in the U.S., or addiction as a disease, dehumanization and stigma are still leading barriers for individuals seeking treatment. Integral to the narrative of "substance users" as thoughtless zombies or violent criminals is their portrayal in popular media, such as films and news. Methods: This study attempts to quantify the dehumanization of people who use substances (PWUS) across time using a large corpus of over 3 million news articles. We apply a computational linguistic framework for measuring dehumanization across three decades of New York Times articles. Results: We show that (1) levels of dehumanization remain high and (2) while marijuana has become less dehumanized over time, attitudes toward other substances such as heroin and cocaine remain stable. Discussion: This work highlights the importance of a holistic view of substance use that places all substances within the context of addiction as a disease, prioritizes the humanization of PWUS, and centers around harm reduction.

Shark Bite Reporting and The New York Times.

The social and political dynamics around human-shark interactions are a growing area of interest in marine social science. The question motivating this article asks to what extent media reporting by The New York Times has engaged beyond the lexicon of "shark attack" discourse to describe human-shark interactions. It is important because different styles of reporting on human-shark interactions can influence the public's perceptions about sharks and support for shark conservation. This media outlet is also a paper of record whose editorial style choices may influence the broader media landscape. I review reporting language from The New York Times for 10 years between 2012 and 2021 (n = 36). I present three findings: first, I argue that The New York Times has had an increased frequency in use of the term "shark bite" to describe human-shark interactions. Secondly, I find that shark "attack" is still used consistently with other narratives. Third, there appears to be an increased use of "sightings; encounter; and incident" descriptors since 2020. The implication of this is a layered approach to reporting on human-shark interactions that diversifies away from a one-dimensional shark "attack" discourse.

A Framework for the Computational Linguistic Analysis of Dehumanization.

Dehumanization is a pernicious psychological process that often leads to extreme intergroup bias, hate speech, and violence aimed at targeted social groups. Despite these serious consequences and the wealth of available data, dehumanization has not yet been computationally studied on a large scale. Drawing upon social psychology research, we create a computational linguistic framework for analyzing dehumanizing language by identifying linguistic correlates of salient components of dehumanization. We then apply this framework to analyze discussions of LGBTQ people in the New York Times from 1986 to 2015. Overall, we find increasingly humanizing descriptions of LGBTQ people over time. However, we find that the label homosexual has emerged to be much more strongly associated with dehumanizing attitudes than other labels, such as gay. Our proposed techniques highlight processes of linguistic variation and change in discourses surrounding marginalized groups. Furthermore, the ability to analyze dehumanizing language at a large scale has implications for automatically detecting and understanding media bias as well as abusive language online.

PTSD and the War of Words.

Trauma-related symptoms among veterans of military engagement have been documented at least since the time of the ancient Greeks.1 Since the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual in 1980, this condition has been known as posttraumatic stress disorder, but the name has changed repeatedly over the past century, including shell shock, war neurosis, and soldier's heart. Using over 14 million articles in the digital archives of the New York Times, Associated Press, and Reuters, we quantify historical changes in trauma-related terminology over the past century. These data suggest that posttraumatic stress disorder has historically peaked in public awareness after the end of US military engagements, but denoted by a different name each time-a phenomenon that could impede clinical and scientific progress.