Chart of the week

If it bleeds it leads

What does this chart show?

An analysis of 23 million headlines from 47 U.S. news media outlets from 2000 - 2019 reveals a statistically significant pattern of headlines containing increasingly negative sentiment.

Why does it matter?

News media has a profound impact on informing the public, shaping opinions and influencing the public mood. Media outlets are financially incented to maximize viewership, and increasingly, the virality of their content. Because negative information gets our attention by activating our threat responses, negativity in online content has a strong, positive relationship to user engagement. To nobody’s surprise, consumption rates are highest for news stories with more negative words about the Government and Economy, as people may unintentionally be selectively exposing themselves to more polarizing media content.

The Bottom Line

In the zero-sum competition for reader attention and clicks, headlines that stoke our bias for negativity has been and will continue to be good for business and bad for people.

Chart & Data Sources - Longitudinal analysis of sentiment and emotion in news media headlines using automated labelling with Transformer language models and Negativity drives online news consumption