Do you have the sense that everything is becoming more negative? Does what you hear on the radio, and what you read in the news, seem altogether gloomier than it did ten years ago? That’s because it is – say two new studies.
The first, by David Rozado and colleagues, tracks ‘sentiment’ in U.S. news headlines since the year 2000. (We’ve covered Rozado’s work before on the Daily Sceptic.)
His team quantified ‘sentiment’ – i.e., how positive or negative the headlines were – using machine learning tools. In simple terms, they used an algorithm to identify strings conveying positive emotions (e.g., ‘good’, ‘benefit’, ‘praises’) or negative emotions (e.g., ‘bad, ‘cost’, ‘attacks’), and then assigned an overall score to each headline.
Results are given in the chart below. There are three lines: one for left-leaning outlets, one for centrist outlets, and one for right-leaning outlets. (The researchers used Allsides ratings to classify outlets.)
There is a clear shift from toward negative sentiment for both left-leaning outlets and right-leaning outlets. For centrist outlets, by contrast, the shift is much less clear.
To home-in on exactly how headlines have been changing, Rozado and colleagues looked at six different categories of emotions: anger; fear; sadness; disgust; joy; and neutral. They found that the first four have all been getting more common, while the last two have been getting less common – at least since 2010.
As to why headlines have been getting more negative, the researchers suggest it may have to do with what goes ‘viral’. Studies have found that statements with strong emotional valence – particularly those that convey animus towards an outgroup – spread fastest on social media. Outlets are presumably tweaking headlines with this in mind.
The second study, by Charlotte Brand and colleagues, tracked ‘sentiment’ in pop-song lyrics since the 1970s. One of their key findings is shown in the image below.
It indicates that “love” has decreased as a proportion of all song lyrics, while “hate” has correspondingly increased. These are just examples: the researchers found a “substantial decrease” in the use of many positive emotion-related words (and a corresponding increase in the use of negative words).
Interestingly, when they ran models predicting whether a particular song lyric was negative, they found that chart position mattered: negative lyrics were more common in songs that reached positions in the chart (i.e., closer to ‘Number 1’).
It’s unclear exactly why this would be the case. One possible explanation is the rise of rap and hip hop in the 1990s, which gave rise to more songs about themes like gang violence and breaking up. Though this is speculative.
What the two studies do suggest is that your average American is now exposed to more negative emotional content in his daily life – assuming he reads the news and listens to an occasional pop song. Faced with this finding, it’s worth reminding yourself: things could always be worse.
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For years now, I have completely ignored the Not-Journalism spewing from the “news media outlets” listed in the first graph.
Reuters, centrist? Pull the other one. As for the BBC, that stalwart of the Trusted News Initiative which gives us blanket censorship, psyops nudgery and outright cancellation of anything outside The Narrative ™, words fail.
https://childrenshealthdefense.org/defender/reuters-fact-check-covid-social-media-pfizer-world-economic-forum/
BBC centrist? I stopped reading there.
Negativity in headlines / news content increases in proportion to propaganda communication. When this kind of collective obsession with negativity and fear enters the collective consciousness we would expect to see, as we have, the onset of an acute mental health crisis. Newspapers are not there to represent a reliable gauge of the state of the world, but too many people believe they are.
It is a fact that a perusal of the local media in any region within a country would reveal that the kind of gloom pedalled by the national and international “legacy media” organisations is mostly a mirage, i.e. when you zoom in on local media you find that the situation is nothing like as bad. Of course I have the utmost sympathy and compassion for the residents of war-torn regions, etc, but it doesn’t translate to impending global meltdown.
A blind belief in the mass media as it stands is enough to cause a mental health crisis in anyone, let alone those susceptible!
Western civilisation is exhausted and will soon receive its coup de grace. So things will get worse. As adumbrated in When the Towers Fall, a coronal mass ejection is about to wreak havoc, probably this autumn. The coronavirus was a portent of what is to come.
If anyone can beat Joy Divison (1979-80) for slightly downbeat lyrics and music please let me know.
Morrissey.
I’d also add Leonard Cohen to the list.
The Verve had a cheery insight to share:
“It’s a bittersweet symphony, that’s life.
Try to make ends meet, you’re a slave to money then you die”
So it’s not all doom and gloom, then!
One of my all time favourite bands.
Whether “music” has negative lyrics or not is irrelevant: it’s nearly all bland crap and not worth listening to ….. which is why stations like Greatest Hits Radio (music from the ’70s, 80s and 90s) is going great guns.
I have been saying for some time that pop music and TV were generally much more upbeat in the 60s & 70s. Watching and listening it strikes me how everyone involved seemed to be enjoying themselves without trying to lecture or berate us and how they were able to entertain us without graphic sex and violence. I find the 21st century cynical and depressing but whenever I point this out to younger family members I am told that we were all stupid- literally stupid in some cases whatever that means- because we didn’t realise how awful things were. Whatever happened to innocent fun?