Replies to post #447256 on Tornado Alley (PROG)

[B402]

Edit...Study compares Fox News and MSNBC using 52,000 transcripts, 283 million words

(MSNBC and FOX were made for each other, neither of which is doing the country any good..)

https://phys.org/news/2021-08-fox-news-msnbc-transcripts-million.html

"Even against the backdrop of multiple wars abroad, racial injustice, mass shootings and the COVID-19 pandemic, the year of the 2020 presidential election, together with the campaign and impeachment that preceded it and the lawsuits and insurrection that followed, stands out in the language of Fox News and MSNBC," said Kevin Lanning, Ph.D., corresponding author and a professor of psychology and data science, FAU Harriet L. Wilkes Honors College, John D. MacArthur Campus at Jupiter. "The language of these two networks was never more distinct, and never more volatile, than during coverage of political events associated with the last presidential election. Yet the differences in language of the two networks were primarily in measures of linguistic style, including noun and pronoun use. Sociopolitical dictionaries largely tailored to assess left-right differences in language use, including moral metaphors and foundations, grievances, values, and personality, showed relatively modest effects."


To examine how political discourse has changed over time, the researchers collected all transcripts from MSNBC and Fox News Network telecasts for the period Jan.1, 2011 through March 21, 2021, which were available from the Nexis Uni database. To make the Fox and MSNBC archives as comparable as possible, the researchers coded broadcast programs as "news" or "opinion," and examined these against daytime/evening and weekday/weekend dichotomies. Analyses included a machine learning approach to assess the extent to which the archives from the three presidential elections and two networks could be distinguished, as well as the features that are most important in driving these effects.

"Taken together, results from our study as well as other results provide a lens into the magnitude and nature of differences not just between the two networks, but also of a volatile and divided time in American social and political life," said Geoffrey Wetherell, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, FAU Charles E. Schmidt College of Science.