@article{THESIS,
      recid = {6033},
      author = {Nicholson, Gabriel },
      title = {Is the News Always Negative? Using Deep Learning to Track  News Sentiment During the Covid-19 Pandemic},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {M.A.},
      address = {2023-06-03},
      number = {THESIS},
      abstract = {The news is notorious for its tendency to focus on  negative events, giving rise to the adage, “If it bleeds,  it leads.” In this study, I examine whether news coverage  during the Covid-19 pandemic mainly focused on negative  events while downplaying positive developments such as  decreasing Covid-19 cases. Utilizing a state-of-the-art  fine-tuned language model, I analyzed the sentiment of over  900,000 Covid-19 related news articles from March 2020 to  April 2022 across the United States, Canada, and the United  Kingdom. The results indicate that the news is far more  negative than positive—even when Covid-19 cases and  hospitalizations are decreasing. This negativity is most  pronounced in Op-Ed articles, front-page news articles, and  articles published by large news organizations (e.g., New  York Times, BBC, Fox News). However, non-Op-Ed news  articles do become more positive as Covid-19 cases  decrease, contradicting previous research findings. These  discrepancies can be attributed, in part, to differences in  model accuracy, as the model I trained is approximately 20%  more accurate than other models used in the literature.  Further, when dividing U.S. news by the publisher’s  political ideology, clear differences emerge: both  left-wing and right-wing sources are much more negative  than centrist news sources. Surprisingly, these differences  in sentiment are about as large as the difference between  regular news and Covid-19 news sentiment, indicating  substantial differences in news reporting across political  lines. These findings provide new insights into news  reporting patterns during the pandemic and carry important  implications for public health messaging and news reporting  practices.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/6033},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.6033},
}