What’s in the News: Visualizing Mainstream News Headlines
Comparing mainstream media’s coverage of President Biden and former President Trump during the inauguration and the following days.
by Daphne Yang. Edited by Maya Crowden
On Wednesday, January 20th, 2021, President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris were sworn into office. While the COVID-19 precautions limited the attendance of a live audience, over 40 million Americans were eagerly live streaming the inauguration. With live updates and articles published within the hour from every major news outlet, President Biden’s inauguration was a big, if not the biggest, topic reported that morning.
We were curious about what news would look like after President Biden’s inauguration and sought to take a deeper dive into the headlines. At the center of our research, we were primarily interested in the following:
- What did news reporting look like in the days following Biden’s inauguration?
- Did partisan lean impact headline reporting?
Our analysis provides insight into how mainstream news is being reported, highlighting ways partisan lean influenced news coverage.
Data Collection
To conduct our research, we focused on 11 mainstream news sources encompassing left, right, and center partisan leans based on categorizations of media bias ratings from AllSides. The breakdown of our sources are as follows:
- Left (Democrat): ABC News, CBS News, CNN News, MSNBC, New York Times, Politico, Washington Post
- Center: Axios, USA Today
- Right (Republican): Fox News, New York Post
By compiling every article featured on the homepage of each source for an 8 day period, starting on inauguration day (January 20th, 2021), we were able to collect each article’s name, authors, and other metadata.
Our dataset consists of thousands of individual articles & op-eds featured on the front page of 11 different news sources, collected over an eight-day data collection period (January 20, 2021 — January 27, 2021).
Part I: What does news reporting look like in the days following Biden’s inauguration?
Our analysis showed an interesting trend in name mentions as the inauguration passed. Unsurprisingly, on the day of the inauguration, Biden’s name was referenced the most number of times; however, mentions of the former President Trump were also frequent.
In the days following inauguration, former President Donald Trump maintained a stronghold on the mainstream media. Trump was mentioned more frequently than the sitting president for half of the days recorded.
The large number of mentions of Trump was particularly surprising given that President Biden was just sworn into office and the Biden administration’s numerous executive orders and high level of political activity.
Deeper Dive: January 25th, 2021
Mentions of Trump exceeded mentions of Biden by the greatest number of occurrences on January 25th, warranting a deeper analysis to provide some additional context for analysis.
On January 6th, 2021, we observed an increased proportion of headline articles on the impacts on national security and legal action against the storming of Capitol Hill. Trump’s connections to the responsible right-winged conspiracy and extremist groups led him to be impeached by the House of Representatives on the charge of incitement of insurrection. The charges were formally delivered from the House of Representatives to the Senate on the 25th.
Trump continued to maintain a stronghold on the mainstream headlines in the days following the inauguration, outpacing Biden in the number of article mentions per day. This trend peaked on January 25th, 2021, when the House delivered the formal charges against him to the Senate. Not all attention is good attention.
Part II: Could partisan lean potentially impact headline reporting?
Partisan media bias is a well-documented phenomenon and one of particular concern due to the polarization of the mainstream media. According to researchers in media polarization, there is no consensus on which news source is considered the most trustworthy.
Understanding how partisan media bias may affect news coverage is particularly relevant because there is an overwhelming concentration of viewership and trust towards one source, Fox News, for Republicans while Democrats have a high level of trust in multiple sources outside of their top source, CNN.
At a high level, our analysis supports current research efforts on partisan media bias. Right-leaning sources mentioned topics like Trump’s impeachment in a slightly more negative way than left-leaning sources. They also reported on topics about national security (including actions against Capitol Hill Rioters) more negatively than their left-leaning counterparts.
The magnitude of this problem is highlighted in the chart above. In regards to Trump’s impeachment, left-leaning sources mentioned this topic more often compared to their right-leaning counterparts. However, after the formal delivery of charges in a Democrat-controlled Congress on January 25th, 2021, right-leaning sources began to mention Trump’s impeachment at increasingly higher percentages and generally with more negative sentiment towards the impeachment trials. Additionally, right-leaning sources such as Fox News often had more opinion pieces in the headlines with polarizing remarks, as shown below.
So What Now?
Despite hopes that the incoming Biden administration could help bridge partisan divides, Biden’s inauguration was never going to be the cure for the deep partisanship within the US nor was it going to fully close the chapter on the Trump presidency. But, we have learned a few lessons from the post-inauguration headlines.
Trump maintains and likely will continue to maintain a stronghold on mainstream media even after leaving the White House.
After analyzing headline articles after the inauguration, it is even more apparent the major role partisan bias plays in not only WHAT gets news coverage but also HOW news gets covered.
