Pride, Politics, and Pageantry: Uncovering the on-Line News Coverage of LGBT Issues in the Philippines through Lda Topic Modelling

Recent trends in news consumption foreground the growing importance of on-line news as a primary source of information for many people. In the Philippines, while television and radio remain the primary sources of news, around half of Filipinos now turn to the Internet for their news. Given the media’s gatekeeping function in shaping public discourse, it is crucial to uncover how media cover LGBT issues by examining which topics are being focused on and which are left out, and to surface opportunities for LGBTQI movements to engage with media outlets in bringing attention to issues that affect LGBTQI people. In this work, I utilized latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) to model central topics across headlines of LGBT-related on-line news in the Philippines from 2017 to 2022 (n = 1,314). News articles were obtained using Google Alerts, a tool that monitors web content. Using various optimisation metrics, 15 topics were obtained. These include topics across three general themes: pride (news about pride celebration and Pride Month), politics (news about LGBT-related pronouncements of key government officials such as the Philippine president and proposed laws on anti-discrimination law and marriage equality), and pageantry (news about cultural events such as drag competitions and beauty contests). News coverage of LGBT-related issues was also observed to peak during events surrounding these themes: pride marches, official government discussions on LGBTQI matters, and cultural events involving LGBTQI folks and allies. The findings reveal opportunities for LGBTQI movements to leverage these social, political, and cultural contexts to engage with news media outlets and address significant gaps in coverage of other issues affecting LGBTQI people, such as health, education, and employment.