Mastodawn

Taylor Lorenz Dec 23, 2023

Massive study analyzes 23 million headlines from 47 news media outlets in the US from 2000-2019. They find that over this time period, headlines became more likely to denote anger, fear, disgust and sadness and less likely to be emotionally neutral. Headlines from right-leaning news media were consistently more negative than headlines from left-leaning outlets as well.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0276367

Longitudinal analysis of sentiment and emotion in news media headlines using automated labelling with Transformer language models

This work describes a chronological (2000–2019) analysis of sentiment and emotion in 23 million headlines from 47 news media outlets popular in the United States. We use Transformer language models fine-tuned for detection of sentiment (positive, negative) and Ekman’s six basic emotions (anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, surprise) plus neutral to automatically label the headlines. Results show an increase of sentiment negativity in headlines across written news media since the year 2000. Headlines from right-leaning news media have been, on average, consistently more negative than headlines from left-leaning outlets over the entire studied time period. The chronological analysis of headlines emotionality shows a growing proportion of headlines denoting anger, fear, disgust and sadness and a decrease in the prevalence of emotionally neutral headlines across the studied outlets over the 2000–2019 interval. The prevalence of headlines denoting anger appears to be higher, on average, in right-leaning news outlets than in left-leaning news media.

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David Dec 23, 2023

The losing side resorts to fear mongering

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Jim Vernon Dec 23, 2023

@drdrowland Both sides must be losing because the trend wasn't limited to left or right wing news sources.

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David Dec 23, 2023

yes. and relative quantities matter, too.

in conflict no one wins.

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Jim Vernon Dec 23, 2023

@drdrowland There's a difference between left and right sources in this study, but it's not a big difference. I'm personally disappointed by that, but I'm not entirely surprised.

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Raccoon🇺🇸🏳️‍🌈Dec 26, 2023

@jimvernon @drdrowland
In the left's defense, the right spent 8 years acting like Obama was not a citizen and literally Hitler, then elected Donald Trump and spent 5 years insisting he was not a criminal, then have spent the past 3 years insisting that when Trump is clearly lying about things like winning the election, because he's a pathological liar, that this somehow constitutes evidence.

It's a dark time in American politics, and while I do blame the left wing media on some level, they aren't the ones who decided to take us down this path, unless you count the crime of having the audacity to think a black man should be president.

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ForeverExpat Jan 5, 2024

@Raccoon @jimvernon @drdrowland
Agreed. Bizarrely, the AP just ”neutrally” titled an article “One attack, two interpretations: Biden and Trump both make the Jan. 6 riot a political rallying cry” !?

Take any major theme: Climate Change, Russia’s ongoing aggression, Gun Violence, vaccinations, etc. The GOP shamelessly ignores science and statistics and other bald-faced evidence. Does any sane person think a neutral heading is warranted? I would *expect* media to get off the fence in such cases.

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Raccoon🇺🇸🏳️‍🌈

@ForeverExpat @jimvernon @drdrowland
Oh, don't get me wrong, the mainstream media's inability to give actual fair and realistic reporting on the situation, as opposed to sugarcoating one side and being overly skeptical about the other is a major part of what's gotten into this situation, and it's absurd because you realize that, if what they are pushing along actually happened, they would be up against the firing squad in pretty short order, because Nazis hate any journalist that doesn't immediately repeat whatever insane propaganda they put out as if it is both obvious and brilliant.

It's a problem, because rather than reporting the facts, they are trying to spin things in such a way that makes them look balanced, and that skews the discourse away from reality and reason.