The Rise of Affective Framing in TV News

Abstract

Using a novel, people-centric method to quantify media content, we study how cable news networks (CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC) have covered the news from 2012-2024. By separately measuring who is discussed and how they are discussed, we document three key findings. First, TV networks have increasingly focused airtime on the opposing party while adopting an increasingly negative tone — a pattern consistent with affective framing. Second, we show that standard topic-based models fail to capture this pattern because they neglect the identity of the people being discussed. Who is covered is as important as what is covered. Third, coverage has grown more hypocritical over time. A single network covers the same topic (e.g. improper handling of classified documents) with starkly different tone depending on the party affiliation of the subject. Our findings contribute to the literature on media polarization by providing direct empirical evidence of the shift toward affective, anger-based polarization in news content.