Selling anger

Abstract

We develop a new method to quantify media content based on people and their associated Wikipedia topics (e.g. political affiliation, gender, race, etc). We apply our method to the closed caption transcriptions of cable news to uncover a new pattern in media content and polarization: TV networks have been increasingly focusing their limited airtime on the opposing party, while simultaneously exacerbating rhetorical slant. These negative affective behaviors go beyond politicians and include topics such as African Americans and LGBTQ people, where Fox News has accelerated negative coverage relative to CNN and MSNBC. Our findings extend to Fox Business relative to CNBC and Bloomberg TV, the leading business news channels.

Keywords: media, cable news, named entities

JEL Classification: D82, G14