  In October 2017, numerous women accused producer Harvey Weinstein of sexual
harassment. Their stories encouraged other women to voice allegations of sexual
harassment against many high profile men, including politicians, actors, and
producers. These events are broadly referred to as the #MeToo movement, named
for the use of the hashtag "#metoo" on social media platforms like Twitter and
Facebook. The movement has widely been referred to as "empowering" because it
has amplified the voices of previously unheard women over those of
traditionally powerful men. In this work, we investigate dynamics of sentiment,
power and agency in online media coverage of these events. Using a corpus of
online media articles about the #MeToo movement, we present a contextual
affective analysis---an entity-centric approach that uses contextualized
lexicons to examine how people are portrayed in media articles. We show that
while these articles are sympathetic towards women who have experienced sexual
harassment, they consistently present men as most powerful, even after sexual
assault allegations. While we focus on media coverage of the #MeToo movement,
our method for contextual affective analysis readily generalizes to other
domains.
