A Triangulated Digital Approach to News Sentiment Analysis: Insights from Media Coverage of Saudi Women Enlistment in Military Forces

This study investigates the emotional tone in international news coverage of Saudi women’s empowerment, with a focus on their recruitment into the military as a milestone reform. The analysis is based on 22 news articles published between 2018 and 2023 across Western, regional Saudi and Arab, and non-Western international media outlets, including coverage from Asian media contexts such as China and India. Drawing on sentiment analysis; the study employed lexicon-based tools (LIWC; Bing; and AFINN) alongside thematic analysis using Speak AI to capture both polarity and narrative framing. This triangulated approach addressed the limitations of word-level sentiment tools by integrating contextual and thematic interpretation. The findings reveal clear regional contrasts: Western media predominantly employed negative framings, emphasizing human rights concerns and ongoing gender inequality. In contrast, regional Saudi and Arab outlets highlighted empowerment, modernization, and Vision 2030 alignment, while non-Western international outlets tended to mirror these positive narratives with limited rights-based critique. Asian media presented mixed framings. These results complicate assumptions of a simple East–West divide by showing convergence between regional and non-Western portrayals. The study contributes methodologically by demonstrating how combining polarity-based sentiment tools with thematic analysis provides a more nuanced account of media sentiment, and substantively by revealing how empowerment narratives are unevenly distributed across global media systems.