Emotional Editing and Public Understanding Bias in Short-Video News Communication

Abstract

Short-video news has become an important way for the public to encounter news in everyday media use. Compared with traditional news reports, it depends more on quick visual impact, strong titles, background music, subtitles, and selected emotional moments. These forms can make public events more visible, but they may also change how users understand the event. This paper discusses emotional editing in short-video news communication and its possible influence on public understanding. It argues that emotional editing is not only a technical matter of video production. It also shapes the order in which users receive information: feeling often comes before context, and judgment may appear before enough facts are known. When conflict scenes, dramatic captions, and highly liked comments become the main entry points, complex public events may be simplified into emotional opposition. Based on the Chinese platform context, the paper further considers how algorithmic visibility, repeated reposting, and comment sections may strengthen this tendency. The aim is not to deny the value of short-video news, but to show that stronger visibility should be matched with clearer context and more responsible news presentation.