They responded not by innovation or transformation, but by becoming hysterical purveyors of fear, hatred and outrage, hoping to hijack our limbic sytems and save themselves by turning readers/watchers into crackheads addicted to stories of how evil and dangerous the Other is (the Other team/party members, that is). The MSM was faced with the threat of hemorrhaging money and influence due to the transition of our culture from print-based to internet-based. "Why has the proportion of pessimistic headlines in news media increased over the past decades?" But given the correlation given above, perhaps it is not too unreasonable to assume that New York Times attitudinal pessimism in headlines from the 1950s to the 1970s can act as an approximate gauge of US news media attitudinal pessimism at the time. Most proxy measurements are often imperfect to an extent. The correlation between headlines’ pessimism in the New York Times time series and the average pessimism of headlines in all the other outlets analyzed is 0.69. Is it reasonable to use attitudinal pessimism in New York Times headlines as a proxy for overall media attitudinal pessimism from the 1950s to the 1970s? That’s debatable. Headline data for the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and the Wall Street Journal begins in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s respectively. From the 1950s until the 1970s, the analyzed data set only contains headlines from the New York Times. That is, the sample of outlets becomes sparse the further we go back in time. The biggest methodological limitations of the analysis above is the unequal temporal coverage of outlets in the sample.
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