News You Can Use 

I

t would be no great news to report that news has become more subjective. Everyone has noticed it. CNN and MSNBC are today more like opinion channels than news channels. Even once-great newspapers like the New York Times are daily dabbling in outrageous speculation.

But it’s one thing to sense it and another to prove it, which is why a recent study on media bias from the RAND Corporation is so significant. Titled “News in the Digital Age: Comparing the Presentation of News Information over Time and across Media Platforms,” RAND researchers used computer software tools that combine machine learning with textual analysis “to identify patterns in the use of words and phrases.” The study’s authors managed to process large volumes of text, tens of millions of words, to discern patterns in news reporting over a 28-year period.

They compared the coverage of traditional print and broadcast outlets like the Times and the Washington Post, ABC News and NBC News before and after 2000 between the period of 1989 and 2017. Then they compared print journalism to the news produced by their online cousins — like Politico and Daily Caller — from 2012 to 2017. Similarly, RAND researchers compared traditional broadcast outlets to their spawn — Fox News, MSNBC, and CNN — from the period 2000 to 2017.

What did they find? In the print category, news has gone from more “event and context-based” to “more storytelling… storytelling and emotion.” Broadcast journalism, too, has moved away from “precise and concrete language” to more “expression of opinions, interviews, and arguments.”