Economics Research Seminar

"The Rise of Affective Framing in TV News"

Using a novel, people-centric method to quantify media content, we study how cable news networks (CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC) have covered the news from 2012 to 2024. By separately measuring who is discussed and how they are discussed, we document three key findings. First, TV networks have increasingly focused airtime on the opposing political party while adopting an increasingly negative tone, a pattern consistent with affective framing. Second, we show that standard models of political polarization fail to capture this pattern because they neglect the identity of the people being discussed. Third, coverage has grown more hypocritical over time. A single network covers the same topic (e.g. improper handling of classified documents) with starkly different tone depending on the party affiliation of the subject. Our findings contribute to the literature on media polarization by providing direct empirical evidence of the shift toward affective, anger-based polarization in news content.