Sentiment analysis of the target in articles
I'm not sure I completely get the idea, but it looks to me like what you're actually interested in is the sentiment of a word in a particular context: a content word like &quot;car&quot; might not carry a stable sentiment by itself, but its usage in a specific context might.
So I'd suggest a method like this: for any target word you extract either the sentence or a context window, i.e. N words on the left and N words on the right of the target word. Then you could use predefined sentiment analysis tools to extract a sentiment value for this instance. From there you could:

measure the mean sentiment for a word by averaging over the instances
compare the distribution of sentiment or average sentiment for two different words