Categories: OLD Media Moves

The NY Times coverage of Facebook has been more critical, data shows

The New York Times coverage of social media company Facebook has become more critical in the past few years, according to data in a story by Recode’s Rani Molla.

Molla writes, “Sentiment in the Times’ coverage of Facebook has been, on average, almost exclusively negative since the 2016 elections, according to new data analyzed by researcher Joe Hovde, a full-time data analyst at a retail tech company.

“That’s a turnaround from the paper’s Facebook coverage in the four years leading up to Donald Trump’s election, and it has continued into this year.

“For the analysis, Hovde included stories with ‘Facebook’ in the article headline and summary text, and then scored the surrounding words on a scale of -5 (very negative words like curses unlikely to show up in the Times) to +5 (extremely positive, using words like ‘superb’ or ‘breathtaking’). This data was updated from one of his studies that was published in BuzzFeed last spring.

“Of course, there are many well-documented reasons for the Times, and other publications covering Facebook, to write more critically about the world’s largest social network.”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.