News in a Digital Age: Comparing the Presentation of News Information over Time and Across Media Platforms (Countering Truth Decay)

This report presents a quantitative assessment of how the presentation of news has changed over the past 30 years and how it varies across platforms. Using RAND-Lex, a suite of tools that combine machine learning and text analysis, the researchers considered such linguistic characteristics as social attitude, sentiment, affect, subjectivity, and relation with authority for four comparisons: newspapers before and after 2000 (through 2017), broadcast television news before and after 2000 (through 2000), broadcast news and prime-time cable programming for the period from 2000 to 2017, and newspapers and online journalism during the 2012-2017 period. Over time, and as society moved from "old" to "new" media, news content has generally shifted from more-objective event- and context-based reporting to reporting that is more subjective, relies more heavily on argumentation and advocacy, and includes more emotional appeals. These changes were observed across platforms, appearing least significant in the evolution of print journalism and most stark in comparisons of broadcast news with prime-time cable programming and of print journalism with online journalism. The report quantifies the sizes of observed changes and provides examples of what these changes look like in context. It also includes a discussion of the implications of these trends for the changing media ecosystem and for Truth Decay-the term RAND uses to refer to the diminishing role of facts and analysis in political discourse Title Page 1 Copyright 2 Preface 3 Contents 5 Figures 7 Tables 9 Summary 11 Acknowledgments 21 Abbreviations 23 CHAPTER ONE: Introduction 25 The Changing Media Ecosystem 28 News Presentation in a Digital Age: Past Research 33 Limitations of Existing Work and Contributions of This Report 39 Objective of This Report 41 Outline of This Report 43 CHAPTER TWO: Data and Methodology 45 Data Collection 46 Preparing the Data for Analysis 53 Periodization and Comparisons 57 Analysis 59 CHAPTER THREE: Changes in Newspaper Reporting over Time 73 Results 74 Discussion 91 CHAPTER FOUR: Differences in Television News 93 Results 94 Discussion 117 CHAPTER FIVE: Comparing Print and Online Journalism 121 Results 122 Discussion 141 CHAPTER SIX: Summary and Conclusions 143 Print Journalism: Modest Shifts Toward More-Subjective Reporting 145 Television News: Stronger Shifts to Subjectivity, Conversation, and Argument 145 Online Journalism: Toward a Subjective Kind of Advocacy 147 Implications for Truth Decay 148 Limitations 155 Next Steps: What Other Research Is Needed?. 157 APPENDIXES 163 A. About RAND-Lex 163 B. Graphs from Subsample Analyses 175 C. ANOVA Results 189 References 231 About the Authors 243