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Groundbreaking study pinpoints Trump’s role in surge of negativity in U.S. political discourse

(Photo credit: Gage Skidmore )

In a significant shift from previous trends, recent research has uncovered a sharp rise in negative language use by politicians in the United States, particularly aligning with Donald Trump’s entry into the political scene in 2015. The new study is unprecedented in its comprehensive analysis of millions of quotes from politicians over 12 years, using advanced linguistic tools to assess the escalation of negative language.

The findings, published in Scientific Reports , provide evidence that this shift towards negativity has persisted beyond election campaigns, indicating a lasting change in the tone of political conversation in the United States.

In recent years, many Americans have felt that the language of politics has grown increasingly negative. This perception has been especially prominent since Trump’s foray into the political arena. Previous studies have suggested growing political polarization and negativity, but until now, concrete evidence showing the evolution of political language over time was lacking. This gap in knowledge spurred researchers to investigate whether the perceived negativity aligns with actual changes in political discourse.

“In 2016, when Trump was elected president, everyone had the impression that the tone of politics had become rougher, uglier, and more negative,” said study author Robert West, an assistant professor and head of the Data Science Lab at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Lausanne.

“As data scientists, we were curious to see whether people’s hunch was right. But we didn’t have data for it yet, since there was no public corpus of news quotations linked to the people who had uttered them. So we went on a four-year journey to compile such a corpus, Quotebank , and by the time we were done collecting the data, Trump’s term was done, too. So by the time we could analyze the tone of politics, we had Obama’s as well as Trump’s presidencies to study.”

Quotebank comprises nearly a quarter-billion quotes extracted from over 127 million online news articles spanning 12 years, from September 2008 to April 2020. To focus specifically on U.S. politics, the researchers extracted 24 million quotes from 18,627 politicians, ensuring a comprehensive and representative sample for the current study.

To objectively measure the tone of political language over time, the research team employed a tool called the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), which analyzes text for various psychological and emotional content. Each quote was scored based on the percentage of words reflecting negative emotions, such as anger, anxiety, and sadness, as well as the use of swear words. The researchers then averaged these scores monthly, creating a timeline of political language tone over 12 years.

The researchers found a substantial spike in the use of negative language starting in June 2015, aligning with the beginning of Donald Trump’s primary campaign. This wasn’t just a small uptick; the frequency of negative emotion words surged by 1.6 standard deviations, an 8% increase from the pre-campaign average. The increase wasn’t limited to general negativity but spanned across specific categories like anger, anxiety, sadness, and swear words.

Interestingly, while there was a significant jump in negative language in 2015, the study also found that the overall tone of political language had actually been decreasing in negativity during Barack Obama’s presidency before this point. This suggests a notable shift in the political climate with Trump’s entry into politics.

One of the most revealing aspects of the study was the influence of prominent speakers, particularly Donald Trump, on this trend. When Trump’s quotes were removed from the analysis, the jump in negative language in June 2015 dropped by 40%, indicating his significant impact. However, the increase in negativity was not solely due to Trump. The trend persisted even when his quotes were excluded, indicating a broader shift in the political landscape. The negative tone persisted throughout Trump’s term, indicating a lasting change in the political discourse.

“People’s hunch is true: during Trump’s presidency, the tone of U.S. politics became significantly more negative, and it happened as a sudden jump at the time when Trump’s primary campaign started,” West told PsyPost.

Additionally, the researchers found systematic differences in the use of negative language based on party affiliation and the party’s role at the federal level. Notably, the increase in negative language from June 2015 onwards was more pronounced among Republican politicians compared to their Democrat counterparts.

While the findings are robust, the study is not without its limitations. One key consideration is the role of media in shaping the dataset. Since the quotes were sourced from online news articles, it’s possible that the observed increase in negativity could be influenced by the media’s reporting preferences or biases. Additionally, the study focused on digital news sources, which might not fully represent the wider media landscape, including traditional news outlets and television.

The study, “ United States politicians’ tone became more negative with 2016 primary campaigns “, was authored by Jonathan Külz, Andreas Spitz, Ahmad Abu-Akel, Stephan Günnemann, and Robert West.

Study reveals “lying for Trump” trend among mail-in voters in Florida

A study of Florida voters found that Trump supporters, particularly those who follow political news, often falsely reported not using mail-in voting in the past. Despite their claims, many still voted by mail in 2020, revealing a gap between stated beliefs and actual behavior.

Trumpism exacerbates the problem of science rejection, study finds

New research in PLOS One reveals that support for former President Trump significantly predicts public rejection of scientific consensus on climate change and COVID-19 vaccination. Trumpism's influence transcends other demographics, intensifying science skepticism in the United States.

MAGA Republicans much more likely to endorse “delusional” and pro-violence statements, study finds

A study in PLOS One found that MAGA Republicans, about 15% of US adults, are more likely to support political violence. They exhibit distinct beliefs on race and democracy, differing significantly from other Republicans and non-Republicans.

Fascinating study reveals how Trump’s moral rhetoric diverges from common Republican language

In a recent study published in PNAS Nexus, researchers uncovered a stark divide in the moral language used by U.S. political candidates during the 2016 and 2020 presidential primaries. The findings also shed light on a notable divergence in Donald Trump's use of fairness language in 2016 compared to typical...

Trump supporters became more likely to express dehumanizing views of Black people after his 2016 victory, study finds

A new study indicates that Donald Trump's 2016 victory had a polarizing effect on white Americans' racial attitudes, with Trump supporters increasingly rating Black people as less "evolved" post-election.

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Study finds half of Americans get news on social media, but percentage has dropped

recent news report that quotes a negative number

A new report from Pew Research finds that around a third of U.S. adults continue to get their news regularly from Facebook, though the exact percentage has slipped from 36% in 2020 to 31% in 2021. This drop reflects an overall slight decline in the number of Americans who say they get their news from any social media platform — a percentage that also fell by 5 percentage points year-over-year, going from 53% in 2020 to a little less than 48%, Pew’s study found.

By definition, “regularly” here means the survey respondents answered they regularly get news from any of the 10 social media platforms Pew asked about.

The change comes at a time when tech companies have come under heavy scrutiny for allowing misinformation to spread across their platforms, Pew notes. That criticism has ramped up over the course of the pandemic, leading to vaccine hesitancy and refusal, which in turn has led to worsened health outcomes for many Americans who consumed the misleading information.

Despite these issues, the percentage of Americans who regularly get their news from various social media sites hasn’t changed too much over the past year, demonstrating how much a part of people’s daily news habits these sites have become.

recent news report that quotes a negative number

Image Credits: Pew Research

In addition to the one-third of U.S. adults who regularly get their news on Facebook, 22% say they regularly get news on YouTube. Twitter and Instagram are regular news sources for 13% and 11% of Americans, respectively.

However, many of the sites have seen small declines as a regular source of news among their own users, says Pew. This is a different measurement compared with the much smaller percentage of U.S. adults who use the sites for news, as it speaks to how the sites’ own user bases may perceive them. In a way, it’s a measurement of the shifting news consumption behaviors of the often younger social media user , more specifically.

Today, 55% of Twitter users regularly get news from its platform, compared with 59% last year. Meanwhile, Reddit users’ use of the site for news dropped from 42% to 39% in 2021. YouTube fell from 32% to 30%, and Snapchat fell from 19% to 16%. Instagram is roughly the same, at 28% in 2020 to 27% in 2021.

Only one social media platform grew as a news source during this time: TikTok.

In 2020, 22% of the short-form video platform’s users said they regularly got their news there, compared with an increased 29% in 2021.

Overall, though, most of these sites have very little traction with the wider adult population in the U.S. Fewer than 1 in 10 Americans regularly get their news from Reddit (7%), TikTok (6%), LinkedIn (4%), Snapchat (4%), WhatsApp (3%) or Twitch (1%).

recent news report that quotes a negative number

There are demographic differences between who uses which sites, as well.

White adults tend to turn to Facebook and Reddit for news (60% and 54%, respectively). Black and Hispanic adults make up significant proportions of the regular news consumers on Instagram (20% and 33%, respectively.) Younger adults tend to turn to Snapchat and TikTok, while the majority of news consumers on LinkedIn have four-year college degrees.

Of course, Pew’s latest survey, conducted from July 26 to August 8, 2021, is based on self-reported data. That means people’s answers are based on how the users perceive their own usage of these various sites for newsgathering. This can produce different results compared with real-world measurements of how often users visited the sites to read news. Some users may underestimate their usage and others may overestimate it.

People may also not fully understand the ramifications of reading news on social media, where headlines and posts are often molded into inflammatory clickbait in order to entice engagement in the form of reactions and comments. This, in turn, may encourage strong reactions — but not necessarily from those worth listening to. In recent Pew studies, it found that social media news consumers tended to be less knowledgeable about the facts on key news topics, like elections or COVID-19. And social media consumers were more frequently exposed to fringe conspiracies (which is pretty apparent to anyone reading the comments!).

For the current study, the full sample size was 11,178 respondents, and the margin of sampling error was plus or minus 1.4 percentage points.

Bad news: Headlines are indeed getting more negative and angrier

New research shows that right-leaning media outlets tend to be more negative and angry. But the left peddles fear, too.

David Rozado

A number of commentators have argued in recent years that the media overemphasises negativity in its content. Is this true?

Answering this question is no trivial matter, as it requires a standard against which the media’s coverage can be compared. That is, it is challenging to establish how negative or positive media content should be.

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What we can certainly determine instead is how the sentiment (positive or negative) and emotional undertones (such as fear, anger or joy) of news content compare with the same metrics at different points in time. This allows us to establish whether news media content is becoming more positive over time, more negative or pretty much staying the same.

For the past two years, we have carried out a research project to find out precisely this – the sentiment and emotional undertones of 23 million headlines from a representative sample of 47 news outlets popular in the United States over the 2000 to 2019 time frame.

The sheer volume of headlines we considered meant that we needed to use artificial intelligence in the form of machine learning models, whose performance is on par with human raters, for the automated classification of sentiment and emotion in headlines.

What we found is that the sentiment of mainstream news media headlines has indeed become gradually more negative since the year 2000. What this means is that headlines with negative connotations, such as “Brazil Prison Riot Leaves 9 Dead”, are becoming more prevalent. In contrast, headlines with positive undertones, such as “A New Lens Restores Vision and Brings Relief”, are becoming less frequent.

Interestingly, when we partitioned news media outlets according to the ideological views they are widely associated with, we found that headlines from right-leaning news media have been consistently more negative than those from their left-leaning counterparts. Post-2013, the negativity of headlines in left-leaning news media appears to increase substantially. These trends might be partially related to a sharp uptick in news media usage of terminology that depicts prejudice (such as racism, sexism and homophobia) and political extremism (such as far right or far left).

When we further analysed the specific emotional undertones of the headlines, we discovered that the proportion denoting anger and fear has almost doubled in frequency over this period. Headlines embedded with anger and fear such as “Giving Poor Kids Free Meals at School Should Not Be Controversial. Tell That to Congressional Republicans!” or “Is rape epidemic in Sweden tied to influx of Muslim immigrants?” are becoming more prevalent. Sadness and disgust are also increasingly reflected in headlines, albeit to a lesser extent. In contrast, the proportion of emotionally neutral headlines is decreasing.

We found that right-leaning outlets tend to use headlines conveying anger more often than left-leaning media. On the other hand, the rise of headlines denoting fear and the decrease of emotionally neutral headlines has been very similar across media regardless of their ideological leanings.

How should we interpret these results? It is obvious from our analysis that the negativity, anger, sadness and fear conveyed by news media headlines are increasing over time. But why is this happening? Does this reflect a wider societal mood or just the sentiments and emotions of American newsrooms?

We believe that financial pressures to maximise click-through ratios as a response to decreasing media-industry revenue could be at play for the increasing negativity and emotionality of headlines over time. The crafting of headlines to advance political agendas through a shift away from fact-based standards of objectivity could also be playing a role.

The higher prevalence of headlines denoting negativity and anger in right-leaning news media is noteworthy, but we can only speculate about its causes.

One possibility is that right-leaning news media simply uses more negative language than left-leaning news media to describe the same phenomena. Some authors have argued that there is a connection between right-leaning political orientation and a disposition or sensitivity to negative stimuli and events.

Alternatively, this trend could be driven by differences in topic coverage between both types of outlets. But to be clear, these are all only possibilities. Much more research is needed to answer these questions.

One thing is certain, however. If you feel your news diet is more depressing these days, you’re not crazy, and just how depressing depends on what you read. The next task for researchers: digging deeper into how this increasing negativity of news content affects readers as well as democratic institutions and processes.

The views expressed in this article are the authors’ own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera’s editorial stance.

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  • Open access
  • Published: 28 June 2023

United States politicians’ tone became more negative with 2016 primary campaigns

  • Jonathan Külz 1 ,
  • Andreas Spitz 2 ,
  • Ahmad Abu-Akel 3 ,
  • Stephan Günnemann 1 &
  • Robert West 4  

Scientific Reports volume  13 , Article number:  10495 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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There is a widespread belief that the tone of political debate in the US has become more negative recently, in particular when Donald Trump entered politics. At the same time, there is disagreement as to whether Trump changed or merely continued previous trends. To date, data-driven evidence regarding these questions is scarce, partly due to the difficulty of obtaining a comprehensive, longitudinal record of politicians’ utterances. Here we apply psycholinguistic tools to a novel, comprehensive corpus of 24 million quotes from online news attributed to 18,627 US politicians in order to analyze how the tone of US politicians’ language as reported in online media evolved between 2008 and 2020. We show that, whereas the frequency of negative emotion words had decreased continuously during Obama’s tenure, it suddenly and lastingly increased with the 2016 primary campaigns, by 1.6 pre-campaign standard deviations, or 8% of the pre-campaign mean, in a pattern that emerges across parties. The effect size drops by 40% when omitting Trump’s quotes, and by 50% when averaging over speakers rather than quotes, implying that prominent speakers, and Trump in particular, have disproportionately, though not exclusively, contributed to the rise in negative language. This work provides the first large-scale data-driven evidence of a drastic shift toward a more negative political tone following Trump’s campaign start as a catalyst. The findings have important implications for the debate about the state of US politics.

A vast majority of Americans—85% in a representative survey by the Pew Research Center 1 —have the impression that “the tone and nature of political debate in the United States has become more negative in recent years”. Many see a cause in Donald Trump, who a majority (55%) think “has changed the tone and nature of political debate [...] for the worse”, whereas only 24% think he “has changed it for the better” 1 . The purpose of the present article is to investigate whether these subjective impressions reflect the true state of US political discourse.

The answer to this question comes with tangible societal implications: The use of negative affective language in a political debate can worsen the audience’s image of the attacker and of the attackee, while inducing a generalized negative mood 2 . Furthermore, a negative tone of coverage can hurt the level of support and perceived legitimacy of political institutions 3 , resulting in a decrease of trust in political processes 4 . As politics impacts nearly every aspect of our personal lives 5 , changes in political climate can directly affect not only politics itself, but also the well-being of all citizens.

Although longitudinally conducted voter surveys, notably the American National Election Studies, have shown that negative affect towards members of the other party 6 , 7 , 8 , polarization 9 , and partisan voting 10 have steadily increased over the last decades, such survey-based studies do not directly measure the tone of political debate—a linguistic phenomenon—and thus cannot answer whether Americans’ impression of increased negativity is accurate. In contrast, we analyze US politicians’ language as conveyed through the media directly, in an objective, data-driven manner, asking: First, is it true that US politicians’ tone has become more negative in recent years? Second, if so, did Donald Trump’s entering the political arena bring about an abrupt shift 11 , 12 , or did it merely continue a previously existing trend 13 , 14 ?

Our methodology (for details, see “ Materials and methods ”) draws on a long history of research on the language of politics and its function in democracies 15 , 16 , 17 , 18 . For instance, prior work has used records of spoken and written political language to establish the prevalence of negative language among political extremists 19 ; to quantify growing partisanship and polarization 20 , as well as displayed happiness 21 , among US Congress members; to analyze political leaders’ psychological attributes such as certainty and analytical thinking 22 ; to quantify the turbulence of Trump’s presidency 23 ; or to measure the effect of linguistic features on the success of US presidential candidates 24 and on public approval of US Congress 25 . A combination of political discourse analysis and psychological measurement tools has further been applied to obtain insights into the personality traits and sentiments of politicians in general 26 , 27 , as well Donald Trump in particular 28 , 29 , 30 , 31 .

One limiting factor in the above-cited works is the representativeness and completeness of the underlying data, since subtle social or political behavior may only reveal itself in sufficiently big and rigorously processed data 32 , 33 . On the one hand, Congressional records 20 , 21 , 25 and transcripts of public speeches 22 , 24 record scarce events and do not mirror political discourse as perceived by the average American, whose subjective impression of growing negativity we aim to compare with objective measurements of politicians’ language. On the other hand, news text, despite being a better proxy for the average American’s exposure to political discourse, for the most part does not capture politicians’ utterances directly, but largely reports events (laced with occasional direct quotes) and frequently focuses on a commentator’s perspective. Additionally, most of the above-cited linguistic analyses are not longitudinal in nature, but focus on specific points in time.

Transcending these shortcomings, we take a novel approach leveraging Quotebank 34 , a recently released corpus of nearly a quarter-billion (235 million) unique quotes extracted from 127 million online news articles published by a comprehensive set of online news sources over the course of nearly 12 years (September 2008 to April 2020) and automatically attributed to the speakers who likely uttered them by a machine learning algorithm. By focusing on US politicians, we derived a subset of 24 million quotes by 18,627 speakers, enriched with biographic information from the Wikidata knowledge base 35 . (Details about data in “ Materials and methods ”.) As no comparable dataset of speaker-attributed quotes was available before, Quotebank enables us to analyze the tone of US politicians’ public language (as seen through the lens of online news media) at a level of representativeness and completeness that was previously impossible, without confounding politicians’ direct utterances with the surrounding news text.

In order to quantify the prevalence of negative language over time, we use established psycholinguistic tools 36 to score each quote with respect to its emotional content, aggregate quotes by month, and work with the resulting time series. Anchored in the average American’s subjective perception that Donald Trump has changed the tone and nature of political debate (see above), we hypothesized the start of his primary campaign in June 2015 as an incision point and fitted linear regression models 37 with a discontinuity in June 2015 to the time series, as illustrated in Fig. 1 .

figure 1

Quantifying the evolution of negative language in US politics (2008–2020). ( a ) The black points show the fraction of negative emotion words, averaged monthly over all quotes from all 18,627 quoted politicians. The red vs. blue background shows the quote share of Trump vs. Obama (if Trump had T quotes and Obama had O quotes in a given month, the respective red bar covers a fraction \(T/(T+O)\) of the full y -range). Whereas the frequency of negative emotion words had decreased continuously during the first 6.5 years of Obama’s tenure, it suddenly and lastingly increased in June 2015, when Trump’s primary campaign started and his quote share began to surpass Obama’s. ( b ) Regression analysis: The black points again show the fraction of negative emotion words, but now as z -scores (i.e., after subtracting the pre-campaign mean and dividing by the pre-campaign standard deviation). In red, we plot regression lines for the periods before and after June 2015. The coefficients of the ordinary least squares regression model \(y_t = \alpha _0 + \beta _0 \,t + \alpha \,i_{t} + \beta \,i_{t} \,t + \varepsilon _{t}\) (where t is the number of months since June 2015, and \(i_t\) indicates whether \(t \ge 0\) ; cf. Eq. ( 1 )) quantify the slopes of both lines, as well as the sudden increase of \(\alpha =1.6\) pre-campaign standard deviations coinciding with the discontinuity in June 2015 ( \(t=0\) ), as visualized.

The results (cf. Fig.  1 ) provide clear evidence of a sudden shift coinciding with the hypothesized discontinuity at the start of Trump’s primary campaign in June 2015, when the overall political tone became abruptly more negative. The effect was large and highly significant: the frequency of negative emotion words soared by 1.6 pre-campaign standard deviations, or by 8% of the pre-campaign mean. Although the data from the start of the available period (around the 2008 presidential election) suggests that language was highly negative during that time as well, negative language then decreased continuously during Obama’s tenure. However, this trend came to an end with the June 2015 discontinuity, and the level of negative language remained high in the subsequent period, indicating persistent negativity in political discourse not only during election campaigns, but also in day-to-day politics. Similar effects were observed for specific subtypes of negative language (anger, anxiety, and sadness), as well as for swearing terms. Qualitatively, the patterns are universal, emerging within each party and within strata of speaker prominence. Quantitatively, the language of Democrats, more prominent speakers, Congress members, and members of the opposition party is, ceteris paribus, overall more negative, but the shift at the discontinuity remains (and more strongly so for Republicans) when adjusting for these biographic attributes.

These population-level effects are not the results of systematic shifts in the distribution of quoted politicians, but are mirrored at the individual level for a majority of the most-quoted politicians. Moreover, the effect size drops by 40% when omitting Donald Trump’s quotes from the analysis, and by 50% when weighing each speaker equally, rather than by the number of their quoted utterances (but the effect remains highly significant in both cases). Both findings imply that prominent speakers—and particularly Donald Trump—have disproportionately, though not exclusively, contributed to the rise in negative language.

Taken together, these results objectively confirm the subjective impression held by most Americans 1 : recent years have indeed seen a profound and lasting change toward a more negative tone in US politicians’ language as reflected in online news, with the 2016 primary campaigns acting as a turning point. Moreover, contrary to some commentators’ assessment 13 , 14 , Donald Trump’s appearance in the political arena was linked to a directional change, rather than a continuation of previously existing trends in political tone. Whether these effects are fully driven by changes in politicians’ behavior or whether they are exacerbated by a shifting selection bias on behalf of the media remains an important open question (see “ Discussion ”). Either way, the results presented here have implications for how we see both the past and the future of US politics. Regarding the past, they emphasize the symptoms of growing toxicity in US politics from a new angle. Regarding the future, they highlight the danger of a positive feedback loop of negativity.

To quantify negative language in quotes, we used Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) 36 , which provides a dictionary of words belonging to various linguistic, psychological, and topical categories, and whose validity has been established by numerous studies in different contexts and domains 38 , 39 , 40 . We computed a negative-emotion score for each of the 24 million quotes via the percentage of the quote’s constituent words that belong to LIWC’s negative emotion category. Analogously, we computed scores for LIWC’s three subcategories of the negative emotion category— anger, anxiety, and sadness —as well as for the swear words category. We collectively refer to these five categories as “negative language”. As a robustness check, we replicated the analysis using the dictionary provided by Empath 41 instead of LIWC. In contrast to LIWC, the categories in Empath’s dictionary were not hand-crafted but generated by a deep-learning model based on a small set of seed words. The results, which are consistent with those from the LIWC-based analysis, are provided in Figs. S1 , S2 , S3 , and S4 , and in Supplementary Table S1 .

In order to obtain a time series for each word category, we averaged individual quote scores by month. By giving each quote the same weight when averaging, we obtain quote-level aggregates; by giving each speaker the same weight, speaker-level aggregates. (Formal definitions in “ Materials and methods ”.) Quote-level aggregates give more weight to more frequently quoted politicians, and thus better capture the overall tone of political language as reflected in the news. Whenever, on the contrary, we reason about politicians, rather than about the overall media climate created by all politicians’ joint output, we use speaker-level aggregates as the more appropriate aggregation.

Table 1 summarizes the prevalence of the above five word categories via the means and standard deviations of the respective quote-level aggregates during the pre-campaign period (September 2008 through May 2015). We observe that one in 54 words expresses a negative emotion; one in 155, anger; one in 339, anxiety; and one in 285, sadness. Swear words, at a rate of one in 2329, are least common. Given this wide range of frequencies, and in order to make effect sizes comparable across word categories, we standardize all monthly scores category-wise by subtracting the respective pre-campaign mean and dividing by the respective pre-campaign standard deviation. To facilitate the comparability and interpretability of results, standardization always uses the means and standard deviations computed on quote-level aggregates involving all speakers, even in analyses of speaker-level aggregates or of quote-level aggregates when omitting individual speakers. The resulting effect sizes, in units of pre-campaign standard deviations, become more palpable when expressed as multiples of the corresponding pre-campaign means. For this purpose, the rightmost column of Table 1 lists coefficients of variation, i.e., ratios of standard deviations and means.

figure 2

Temporal evolution of negative language. Columns correspond to negative-language word categories from LIWC; rows correspond to aggregation methods for computing monthly averages. Points show monthly averages, expressed as pre-campaign z -scores (i.e., subtracting pre-campaign mean from raw frequency values, and dividing by pre-campaign standard deviation). Lines (with 95% confidence intervals) were obtained via ordinary least squares regression, with coefficients shown in legends (cf. Eq. ( 1 ) and Fig.  1 b for interpretation of coefficients; tabular summary in Supplementary Tables S4 , S6 , S8 , S9 ). ( a – e ) Quote-level aggregation micro-averages over all quotes per month, i.e., speakers have weight proportional to their number of quotes in the respective month. Panel ( a ) shows the same data as Fig.  1 . ( f – j )  Speaker-level aggregation macro-averages by speaker, i.e., all speakers with at least one quote in a given month have equal weight in that month. ( k – o )  Quote-level aggregation by party performs the analysis of ( a – e ), but separately for quotes from Democrats vs. Republicans (coefficients omitted for clarity; cf. Supplementary Tables S8 and S9 ). Significance of regression coefficients: *** \(p<0.001\) , ** \(p<0.01\) , * \(p<0.05\) . We observe drastic shifts toward a more negative tone at the modeled June 2015 discontinuity (Trump’s campaign start).

Temporal evolution of negative language

Figure  2 visualizes the evolution of negative language between September 2008 and April 2020, with one row per aggregation method, one column per word category, and one point per monthly aggregate score. In order to quantify the shape of the curves, we fitted ordinary least squares linear regression models with a discontinuity in June 2015, the starting month of Donald Trump’s primary campaign. For a given word category, we model the aggregate score \(y_t\) for month t as

where \(t \in \{-81, \dots , 58\}\) , with \(t=0\) corresponding to June 2015; \(i_t\) indicates whether t is located before vs. after the campaign start (i.e., \(i_t=0\) for \(t < 0\) , and \(i_t=1\) for \(t \ge 0\) ); and \(\varepsilon _t\) is the residual error. As illustrated in Fig.  1 b, the coefficient \(\alpha\) captures the immediate jump coinciding with the campaign start, and \(\beta\) , the change in slope, such that \(\beta _0\) and \(\beta _0 + \beta\) describe the slopes of the regression lines before and after the campaign start, respectively. Figure  2 plots the fitted regression lines, alongside 95% confidence intervals.

We first focus on the time series of quote-level aggregates (Fig.  2 a–e). The regression coefficients indicate a significant, sudden increase in the relative frequency of negative emotion words (Fig.  2 a) in June 2015, by \(\alpha =1.6\) ( \(p=4.1\times 10^{-6}\) ) pre-campaign standard deviations (SD), translating to a relative increase of 8% over the pre-campaign mean (cf. Table 1 ). All three subcategories of negative emotion words, as well as swear words, also saw significant jumps in June 2015: anger, by 1.3 SD ( \(+11\%\) of the pre-campaign mean, \(p=0.0015\) , Fig.  2 b); anxiety, by 1.5 SD ( \(+11\%\) , \(p=5.6\times 10^{-4}\) , Fig.  2 c); sadness, by 0.86 SD ( \(+4\%\) , \(p=0.021\) , Fig.  2 d); and swear words, by 0.92 SD ( \(+31\%\) , \(p=2.9\times 10^{-6}\) , Fig.  2 e). Note that the pre-campaign regression line for swear words (Fig.  2 e) underestimates the values just before the discontinuity, mostly due to outliers at the left boundary (2008/09). For swear words, the actual June 2015 jump should thus be considered to be smaller than the estimate \(\alpha\) . The June 2015 discontinuity was not only associated with a sudden increase in negative language, but also with a change in slope: whereas the frequency of negative emotion words (Fig.  2 a) had steadily and significantly decreased over the first 6.5 years of Obama’s tenure by \(\beta _0=-0.023\) SD per month ( \(p=9.5 \times 10^{-7}\) ), i.e., by about a quarter SD per year, this trend came to a halt in June 2015, with a (non-significantly) positive slope of \(\beta _0+\beta =0.0076\) (compound \(p=0.21\) ) from June 2015 onward. These results hold when removing outlier months whose quote-level aggregate score lies more than three standard deviations from the mean (Supplementary Fig. S1 , S5 and S7 ).

We emphasize that the June 2015 discontinuity was chosen ex ante based on incoming hypotheses grounded in the general public’s subjective impression that Donald Trump’s entering the political scene had changed the tone of US politics 1 . A data-driven analysis, conducted ex post, revealed that June 2015 is in fact the optimal discontinuity for modeling the data: out of 140 regression models analogous to Eq. ( 1 ), but each using another one of the 140 months of our analysis period as the discontinuity, the model with the June 2015 discontinuity yielded the best fit for negative emotion words and anger (Supplementary Fig. S5 ). (For anxiety and sadness, slightly better fits were obtained when using different discontinuities; for swear words, a 2009 discontinuity led to a better fit due to outliers around that time; see Supplementary Fig. S5 ).

Role of speaker prominence

When repeating the analysis using speaker-level, rather than quote-level, aggregates, i.e., weighing all speakers equally when averaging, all of the above effects persisted qualitatively, but were reduced quantitatively (Fig.  2 f–j): in each of the five word categories, the immediate increase \(\alpha\) at the June 2015 discontinuity dropped by between one-third and one-half, remaining significant for negative emotions, anger, and swear words ( \(p=9.1\times 10^{-5},\) 0.0025, and 0.030, respectively), but becoming non-significant for anxiety and sadness ( \(p=0.11\) and 0.43, respectively). The change of slope observed in the quote-level analysis also persisted in the speaker-level analysis.

The fact that speaker-level effects are weaker than quote-level effects indicates that prominent, highly quoted speakers contribute disproportionally to the increase in negative language. To confirm this conclusion more directly, we divided the speakers into four quartiles with respect to the number of quotes attributed to them, and repeated the speaker-level analysis for each quartile individually. Figure  3 shows (1) that the abrupt increase in negative emotion words emerges in all strata of speaker prominence except the least prominent stratum, and (2) that quotes by more prominent speakers generally contain more negative emotion words. (Results for other word categories in Supplementary Fig. S3 .)

figure 3

Role of speaker prominence. The set of 18,627 US politicians was split into four evenly-sized quartiles with respect to their total number of quotes (i.e., prominence); each panel shows the time series for negative emotion words obtained by performing monthly speaker-level aggregation on the respective quartile separately. That is, the figure shows the data of Fig.  2 f after stratifying speakers by prominence. Lines (with 95% confidence intervals) were obtained via ordinary least squares regression, with coefficients in legends (cf. Eq. ( 1 ) and Fig.  1 b for interpretation of coefficients) (tabular summary of regression coefficients in Supplementary Tables S11 , S12 , S13 , and S14 ). Significance of regression coefficients: *** \(p<0.001\) , ** \(p<0.01\) , * \(p<0.05\) . We observe that the abrupt increase in negative emotion words emerges in all strata of speaker prominence except the least prominent stratum, and that quotes by more prominent speakers overall contain more negative emotion words. The figure focuses on one category of negative-language words (negative emotion); for the other four categories, see Supplementary Fig. S3 .

Biographic correlates of negative language

The patterns identified above—a sudden increase in negative language in June 2015 followed by a change in slope—hold across party lines, but are more pronounced for Republicans, as seen in Fig.  2 k–o, which tracks the (quote-level) evolution of negative language over time, analogously to Fig.  2 a–e, but separately for quotes by Democrats vs. Republicans (all \(\alpha\) coefficients of Fig.  2 k–o are positive; for Republicans, all are significant ( \(p<0.05\) ); for Democrats, the coefficients for anger ( \(\alpha =0.57\) ) and sadness ( \(\alpha =0.43\) ) are non-significant ( \(p>0.05\) )). For instance, the party-wise estimates of the June 2015 increase in negative emotion words is \(\alpha =0.89\) pre-campaign SD for Democrats ( \(p=0.014\) ) and \(\alpha =2.3\) SD for Republicans ( \(p=5.6 \times 10^{-9}\) ).

We further considered the possibility that the distribution of speaker characteristics may have changed over time; e.g., members of one party or gender may have become more frequently quoted over time. To account for potential confounding due to such factors, we repeated the regression analysis with added control terms for four biographic attributes: party affiliation (Republican, Democrat), the party’s federal role (Opposition, Government), Congress membership (Non-Congress, Congress), and gender (Male, Female; due to small sample size, we discarded speakers of a non-binary gender according to Wikidata). For a given month, party affiliation fully determines the party’s federal role, so for each month, the set of speakers can be partitioned into \(2^3=8\) speaker groups, one per valid attribute combination. We computed monthly aggregate scores \(y_{gt}\) separately for each speaker group g , obtaining eight aggregate data points per month, and modeled them jointly using the following extended version of Eq. ( 1 ):

where \(\text {Democrat}_g=1\) (or 0) if group g contains Democrat (or Republican) speakers, and analogously for \(\text {Government}_g\) , \(\text {Congress}_g\) , and \(\text {Female}_g\) .

Inspecting the fitted coefficients (shown in Fig.  4 for quote-level aggregation; for speaker-level aggregation, see Supplementary Fig. S6 ), we make two observations: First, the sudden June 2015 jump \(\alpha\) in negative language (Fig.  4 b) appears even after adjusting for the four biographic attributes. Second, we observe systematic correlations of negative language with biographic attributes, whereby quotes by members of the opposition party, Congress members, and Democrats contain, ceteris paribus, significantly more negative language. Moreover, quotes by females contain more anxiety and sadness, and quotes by males, more negative emotion, anger, and swear words. The fact that quotes by members of the opposition party contain more negative language may reflect their role as corrective agents in the democratic process. The fact that quotes by Congress members contain more negative language echoes previous work that has highlighted high-ranked politicians’ role not only as deputies of their own party, but also as antagonists of the opposing party, epitomized in the finding that “ideological moderates won’t run” 42 for Congress.

figure 4

Biographic correlates of negative language. Coefficients (with 95% confidence intervals) of ordinary least squares regression (Eq. ( 2 )) for modeling time series of word categories (quote-level aggregation; speaker-level aggregation in Supplementary Fig. S6 ) while adjusting for party affiliation ( \(\gamma\) ), the party’s federal role ( \(\delta\) ), Congress membership ( \(\zeta\) ), and gender ( \(\eta\) ) (tabular summary in Supplementary Tables S15 and S16 ). Positive coefficients mark word categories that are, ceteris paribus, used more frequently by Democrats than by Republicans, by members of the governing than by members of the opposition party, by Congress members than by others, or by females than by males (and vice versa for negative coefficients). We observe that quotes by members of the opposition party, Congress members, and Democrats contain significantly more negative language. Importantly, the sudden June 2015 jump in negative language ( \(\alpha\) ) remains significant after adjusting for biographic attributes.

Role of individual politicians

In order to determine to what extent the above population-level effects mirror individual-level effects, we fitted regression models (cf. Eq.  1 ) to individual speakers’ time series and analyzed the corresponding \(\alpha\) coefficients (i.e., the size of the June 2015 jump; for completeness, \(\beta\) in Supplementary Fig. S9 ). In order to avoid data sparsity issues, this analysis focuses on the 200 most-quoted speakers, with \(\alpha\) plotted in Fig.  5 a–e. Additionally, Fig.  5 f–j plots the fraction of speakers with positive \(\alpha\) among the speakers with at least n quotes, as a function of n . We observe that, although many individual \(\alpha\) coefficients are non-significant ( \(p>0.05\) , gray confidence intervals in Fig.  5 a–e), the majority of coefficients are positive, particularly among the top most-quoted speakers (as manifested in the increasing curves of Fig.  5 f–j). For instance, for negative emotion words (Fig.  5 f), all of the top four most-quoted politicians have positive \(\alpha\) . Among the top 50, 74% have positive \(\alpha\) ; among the top 100, 63%; and among the top 200, 59%. In other words, the June 2015 discontinuity emerges not only by aggregating at the population level, but mirrors a disruption that can also be perceived in the most-quoted politicians’ individual language. We further illustrate (Supplementary Fig. S10 ) using as examples the two presidents (Barack Obama, Donald Trump), vice presidents (Joe Biden, Mike Pence), and runners-up (Mitt Romney, Hillary Clinton) from the study period. Four of these six speakers were associated with a significant ( \(p<0.05\) ) positive \(\alpha\) for negative emotion words, and none with a significant negative \(\alpha\) . Interestingly, although both Donald Trump ( \(\alpha =3.6\) , \(p=0.026\) ) and Barack Obama ( \(\alpha =3.7\) , \(p=0.0094\) ) followed the population-wide pattern by increasing their frequency of negative emotion words in June 2015, their pre- and post-discontinuity slopes were opposite to the population-wide pattern: their language first became more negative, then less negative.

figure 5

Role of individual politicians: single-speaker study. Results of ordinary least squares regressions (Eq. ( 1 )) fitted separately to the time series of each of the 200 most quoted speakers. ( a – e ) Each speaker’s \(\alpha\) coefficient (capturing the size of the June 2015 jump, with 95% confidence intervals) as a function of the speaker’s number of quotes. Significant coefficients ( \(p<0.05\) ) in color, others in gray. ( f – j ) Fraction of speakers with positive \(\alpha\) among the speakers with at least n quotes, as a function of n . We observe that, although many individual \(\alpha\) coefficients are non-significant ( a – e ), the majority of coefficients are positive, particularly among the most-quoted speakers (as manifested in the increasing curves of ( f – j )). That is, the June 2015 jump in negative language emerges even at the individual level for a majority of the most-quoted politicians.

Next, we sought evidence whether individual politicians contributed particularly strongly to the overall increase in negative language. We proceeded in an ablation study of the 50 most quoted speakers and all runners-up for the 2016 Democratic and Republican primaries, totaling 61 speakers. For each of these speakers, we repeated the quote-level regression (Fig.  2 a–e) on a dataset consisting of all quotes except those from the respective speaker. If \(\alpha\) is particularly low when removing a given speaker, that speaker contributed particularly strongly to the overall June 2015 increase in negative language. Figure  6 a shows that no single speaker’s removal leads to an important change in \(\alpha\) for negative emotion words, with one exception: Donald Trump. By removing Donald Trump’s quotes, the June 2015 increase in negative emotion words drops by 40%, from \(\alpha =1.6\) to \(\alpha =0.98\) pre-campaign SD (more precisely, \((1.622-0.974)/1.622 = 0.40\) ). When considering quotes by Republicans only (cf. Fig.  2 k–o), \(\alpha\) drops by 43% when removing Trump’s quotes, from 2.3 to 1.3 pre-campaign SD (Supplementary Tables S9 and S10 ). Put differently, by adding Donald Trump’s quotes, the June 2015 increase in negative emotion words is boosted by 63%. Note that this is not merely an artifact of Trump’s being quoted especially frequently: Obama was quoted about twice as frequently as Trump over the course of the 12-year period, yet removing his quotes does not notably affect the June 2015 increase in negative emotion words. Qualitatively similar results hold for the other word categories (cf. Fig.  6 b–e), in particular for swear words (Fig.  6 e; \(\beta\) in Supplementary Fig. S11 for completeness). Although the size of the June 2015 jump in negative emotion words decreased drastically when removing Trump’s quotes, note that it remained highly significant ( \(p=0.0032\) ). That is, Trump was the main, but not the sole, driver of the effect.

figure 6

Role of individual politicians: ablation study. Results from ordinary least squares regression (Eq. ( 1 ); quote-level aggregation) on data sets obtained by removing all quotes by one target speaker and retaining all quotes from all 18,626 other speakers. The 50 most quoted speakers and 11 other runner-up candidates for both party primaries were used as target speakers. Each point shows the \(\alpha\) coefficient (capturing the size of the June 2015 jump, with 95% confidence intervals) obtained after removing the target speaker’s quotes from the analysis, as a function of the target speaker’s number of quotes. Dashed horizontal lines mark the coefficients obtained on the full data set without removing any speaker (cf. Fig.  2 a–e). We observe that no single speaker’s removal leads to a notable change in \(\alpha\) , except Donald Trump: e.g., by removing Trump’s quotes, \(\alpha\) drops by 40% for negative emotion words ( a ).

Positive emotion words

Complementary to the five word categories related to negative language analyzed above, we also conducted an exploratory analysis of positive language, as captured by LIWC’s positive emotion category. As seen in Fig.  7 a–b, the time series of positive emotion words does not simply mirror that of negative emotion words. In particular, no particular changes are observed in June 2015. Rather, positive emotion words appear stable well into Trump’s term, and then decline. (The best regression fit is achieved when using July 2018 as the discontinuity, with a sharp drop in quality of fit after February 2019; Supplementary Fig. S12 ). As in the case of negative emotion words, the same pattern emerges within each party (Fig.  7 c), with a more pronounced drop in positive emotion words for Democrats than for Republicans.

figure 7

Temporal evolution of positive emotion words. Points show monthly averages, expressed as pre-campaign z -scores. One panel per aggregation method for computing monthly averages. We observe that positive emotion words appear stable well into Trump’s term, and then decline.

The goal of this work has been to determine the accuracy of the average American’s subjective impression (as of mid 2019) that “the tone and nature of political debate in the United States has become more negative in recent years”, and that Donald Trump “has changed the tone and nature of political debate [...] for the worse” 1 . Based on an analysis of 24 million quotes uttered by 18,627 US politicians between 2008 and 2020, we conclude that both of the above impressions are largely correct.

The tone of US politicians (as seen through the lens of online media) indeed became suddenly and significantly more negative with the start of the 2016 primary campaigns in June 2015, and the frequency of negative language remained elevated between then and the end of our study period (April 2020). Intriguingly, the shift at this incision point coincides with a similar abrupt shift in political polarization on online platforms 43 , 44 . The sudden increase in negative language reported here was not only significant, but also strong; e.g., the frequency of negative emotion words jumped up by 1.6 pre-campaign standard deviations, or by 8% of the pre-campaign mean. The disruption becomes particularly stark when contrasted with the first 6.5 years of Obama’s tenure, during which negative language had decreased steadily—at odds with a commonly held belief that Trump merely continued an older trend 13 , 14 . The potential of negativity, incivility, and fear as tools to support political campaigns has been long known 45 , 46 and might explain the increase of negative language during the campaigns. It cannot, however, explain the fact that the boost in negative language continued for years after the campaigns had ended.

Rather, our results show that political debate during Donald Trump’s entire term was characterized by a negative tone, and they specifically point to Trump as a key driver of this development: when removing Trump’s quotes from the corpus, the magnitude of the June 2015 jump in the frequency of negative emotion words drops by 40%. Interestingly, Trump’s own negative tone (Supplementary Fig. S10 (z)) followed long-term trends opposite to the population-wide trends, with an initial increase and a subsequent decrease (and with a sudden June 2015 increase akin to that of the population). But as his language was overall far more negative than the average (Trump’s mean monthly average was 8.0 pre-campaign standard deviations larger than the overall mean monthly average), he strongly skewed the overall tone toward the negative end when he moved to the center of the media’s attention 47 .

Despite Trump’s disproportionate impact, the increase in negative language was, however, not due to Trump alone. It remained significant in various complementary analyses: when removing Trump’s quotes from the analysis, when giving equal weight to all speakers, when analyzing each party separately, and when analyzing the most-quoted speakers individually. The negative tone of others might be partly provoked by Trump’s statements and actions, but as we do not have access to a counterfactual world without Trump, our analysis cannot speak to this possibility.

Our analysis also cannot disambiguate to what extent the observed shift in negative language is caused by a real shift in what politicians say vs. a shift in what online media choose to report. It is well known that media outlets are biased in what they report 48 , 49 , 50 , typically towards negative news that tend to increase engagement on readers’ behalf 51 , and this bias may have drifted during the 12 years analyzed here.  Future work may investigate this possibility by comparing quotes reported in the media to complete records of certain politicians’ utterances in certain contexts, e.g., via Congressional records or public speeches 52 . (But whether the shift was caused by politicians or by the media, the effect would be identical: a more negative tone as perceived by news-reading citizens.) Individuals also have access to news from a plethora of media types, of which only a subset is covered by this study. Nevertheless, despite the continued influence of traditional outlets and TV stations 53 , digital sources have become the primary means by which most individuals consume news, and this trend has been consistently on the rise in recent years 54 .

Moreover, although word-counting is a powerful tool for detecting broad trends in large textual data 39 , 55 , and although our results are robust to the specific choice of dictionary (Empath 41 yields qualitatively identical results to LIWC 36 ; Supplementary Figs. S1 , S2 , S3 , S4 , and S11 , and Supplementary Table S1 ), word-counting is crude and insensitive to nuances in context 56 . Our findings should thus be considered a starting point and hypothesis generator for more detailed analyses based on a closer inspection of the text and context of quotes, e.g., using a combination of advanced natural language processing tools and human annotation in order to shed light on the relation between negative language and polarization and partisanship: e.g., has politicians’ tone become more negative specifically when they talk about opponents?

The present study is also limited with respect to its time frame. Although Quotebank 34 is the largest existing corpus of speaker-attributed quotes in terms of size and temporal extent, the 12 years it spans are but a short sliver of the United States’ long political history. It is thus unclear when the decrease in negative language at the beginning of the corpus (during the initial 6.5 years of Obama’s tenure) started. Gentzkow et al. 20 observed a concurrent decrease in partisan language in Congressional speeches during Obama’s tenure (2009–2016), which might be yet another manifestation of the processes that underlie the initial decrease in negative language observed here. Gentzkow et al.’s corpus of Congressional speeches, however, spans a much longer time (144 years, 1873–2016), during which overall partisanship increased much more—especially from the 1980s onward—than it eventually decreased during Obama’s tenure. We must therefore consider the possibility that, analogously, the 2009–2015 decrease in negative language may have been merely a short anomaly in a longer increasing trend in negative language. (Unfortunately, Gentzkow et al.’s corpus ends with Obama’s tenure, so we cannot compare trends in negative quote language to trends in partisan Congress language during Trump’s tenure.)

We saw that the June 2015 rise in negative language was not accompanied by a simultaneous drop in positive language. Rather, maybe in line with a general positivity bias in human language 57 , positive language remained stable until it eventually dropped during Trump’s term. What happened at this point is an open question that lies beyond the scope of this work. The phenomenon highlights, however, that positive and negative emotion words are not necessarily complementary. From the start of the 2016 primary campaigns through the first half of Donald Trump’s term, political tone was both highly positive and highly negative—akin to Trump’s own style, characterized by typical features of affective polarization such as positive self-representation and negative other-presentation 28 , 29 , 31 : “Sorry losers and haters, but my I.Q. is one of the highest -and you all know it! Please don’t feel so stupid or insecure,it’s not your fault” 58 .

This said, a key contribution of this work is the conclusion that, despite Donald Trump’s key role in setting the tone of political debate, the shift towards a more negative tone permeates all of US politics. The consequences are tangible, as shown by research that highlights the detrimental effects of affective polarization on altruism 59 , trust 60 , and opinion formation 61 , 62 , and by polls showing that politics has become a stressful experience for Americans 1 , 63 , exacting an ever increasing toll on their physical, emotional, and social well-being 5 , 64 . Exposure to negative political language can also exert a notable impact on an individual’s affective state, leading to negative emotion biases and influencing reasoning and decision-making 2 . Finding ways to break out of this cycle of negativity is one of the big challenges faced by the United States today.

Materials and methods

Us politicians.

We considered as politicians all people for whom the Wikidata knowledge base 35 (version of 27 October 2021) lists “politician” (Wikidata item Q82955) or a subclass thereof as an occupation (P106). Given our focus on the United States, we included only those politicians whose party affiliation (P102) was listed as Democrat (Q29552) or Republican (Q29468). We considered as members of Congress those for whom Wikidata listed a US Congress Bio ID (P1157), making no distinction between former and active members of Congress. Due to the small number of speakers of a non-binary gender, we included only speakers whose gender (P21) was listed in Wikidata as male (Q6581097) or female (Q6581072).

The analyzed quotes were obtained from Quotebank 34 , a publicly available 65 corpus of 235 million unique speaker-attributed quotes extracted from 127 million English news articles published between September 2008 and April 2020, provided by the large-scale online media aggregation service Spinn3r.com. While Spinn3r.com collects and supplies content from a comprehensive set of news domains 66 , it also includes much content beyond news alone, including “social media, weblogs, news, video, and live web content” 67 . Therefore, Quotebank was extracted from a filtered data set consisting only of content from a set of about 17,000 online news domains, defined as the set of domains appearing at least once in the large News on the Web corpus 68 , which has been collecting large numbers of news articles from Google News and Bing News since 2010 and may thus be considered to provide a comprehensive list of English-language media outlets. We emphasize that the News on the Web corpus was only used for defining the set of news domains. It was not used for obtaining the news articles themselves, which originated from Spinn3r.com only.

We use the quote-centric (as opposed to the article-centric) version of Quotebank, which contains one entry per unique quote and aggregates information from all news articles in which the quote occurs. In constructing Quotebank, a machine learning algorithm (based on the large pre-trained BERT language model 69 ) was used to infer, for each quote, a probability distribution over all speaker names mentioned in the text surrounding the quote (and an additional “no speaker” option), specifying each speaker’s estimated probability of having uttered the quote. For a given quote, we maintained only the name with the highest probability and consider it to indicate the speaker of the quote (a heuristic that was shown to have an accuracy of around 87% 34 ). A speaker name may be ambiguous. In such cases, Quotebank does not attempt to disambiguate the name, but rather provides a list of all speakers to whom the name may refer, where speakers are identified by their unique ID from the Wikidata knowledge base 35 . In our analysis, we attributed quotes that were linked to ambiguous speaker names (less than 6% of all quotes, see below) to each speaker to whom the respective name may refer.

To further clean the data set, we discarded quotes that were clearly non-verbal (e.g., consisting of URLs, HTML tags, or dates only). Moreover, on some days, Spinn3r.com, which provided the news articles for Quotebank, failed to deliver content due to technical problems 34 . We therefore identified missing days as those having less than 10% of the median number of unique quotes and dropped eight (out of 140) months with 20 or more missing days: May 2010, June 2010, January 2016, March 2016, June 2016, October 2016, November 2016, January 2017.

Quotes by US politicians

Keeping only quotes attributed to US politicians (see above), we obtained 24 million quotes attributed to 18,627 unique US politicians. Out of these, 4487 were female, 14,140 male; 9390 were Democrats, 9237 Republicans; and 1790 were labeled as members of Congress. Out of an original set of 18,954 US politicians appearing in Quotebank, Wikidata listed 327 as (former) members of both parties, usually because they switched membership during their careers. Out of these 327, we manually checked the 21 politicians with over 10,000 quotes, of whom 16 could be unambiguously assigned to one party for the study period. The remaining 311 politicians were dropped from the analysis. The most prolific speakers were Barack Obama (1.5m quotes), Donald Trump (763k quotes), Mitt Romney (281k quotes), Hillary Clinton (230k quotes), George W. Bush (200k quotes), John McCain (161k quotes), and Joe Biden (127k quotes). For a list of the 30 most frequently quoted politicians, see Supplementary Table S17 . While it seems unreasonable that any single person could utter over 300 different quote-worthy statements a day, the large numbers can be explained by news outlets attending to different parts of a politician’s spoken output (for instance, a long sentence can be quoted in various ways). Although, as mentioned, ambiguous names led to some quotes being attributed to multiple speakers, this happened rarely: the vast majority (94.3%) of quotes were attributed to a single politician, 4.3% to two politicians, 1.2% to three politicians, and 0.13% to four politicians. Supplementary Fig. S14 shows the number of quotes and the number of unique speakers per month.

Aggregation methods

Consider a fixed LIWC word category c and a fixed month t . Let S be the set of speakers with at least one quote during month t . Let \(Q_s\) be the set of quotes attributed to speaker \(s \in S\) during month t , and let \(Q = \bigcup _{s \in S} Q_s\) be the set of all quotes from month t (the few quotes attributed to multiple speakers are included in Q once per speaker). Let \(\psi (q)\) be quote q ’s score for word category c .

Then, the quote-level aggregate score for word category c in month t is defined as

and the speaker-level aggregate score, as

    That is, in quote-level aggregation, every speaker contributes with weight proportional to their number of quotes, whereas in speaker-level aggregation, all speakers contribute with equal weight.

Data availability

The Quotebank corpus is publicly available on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.4277311 . Aggregated data derived from Quotebank are available on GitHub at https://github.com/epfl-dlab/Negativity_in_2016_campaign .

Code availability

All analysis code is available on GitHub at https://github.com/epfl-dlab/Negativity_in_2016_campaign .

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Acknowledgments

R.W.’s lab is partly supported by grants from Swiss National Science Foundation (200021_185043), Swiss Data Science Center (P22_08), H2020 (952215), Microsoft Swiss Joint Research Center, and Google, and by generous gifts from Facebook, Google, and Microsoft. This research emanated from a project funded by CROSS (Collaborative Research on Science and Society). We thank Felix Grimberg and Marko Čuljak for help with data cleaning.

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A.S., J.K., and R.W. conceptualized and developed the study with support from A.A. J.K. handled data curation. J.K. carried out the software implementation. J.K. performed the statistical analysis. A.A., J.K., and R.W. wrote the manuscript with support from A.S. and S.G. J.K. and R.W. visualized the findings with support from A.A. and A.S. J.K. compiled the supplementary information with support from A.A., A.S., and R.W. R.W. provided compute resources. S.G. and R.W. were in charge of project administration. All authors reviewed the manuscript. All authors contributed to the revised version.

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Külz, J., Spitz, A., Abu-Akel, A. et al. United States politicians’ tone became more negative with 2016 primary campaigns. Sci Rep 13 , 10495 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-023-36839-1

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Many Americans Are Fleeing the Bad News Cycle 

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By Charlotte Klein

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When Americans’ engagement with the news dropped significantly last year, the plunge was in some ways seen as inevitable . The change in news consumption habits in 2021 came after a year with no shortage of storylines—the arrival of the coronavirus pandemic, a presidential election and the ongoing circus of the Trump era, and a nationwide reckoning over race and police violence. And for many Americans stuck at home, there was plenty of time to tune in. However, the pace of news waned in 2021, as did interest in the presidency under the far more stable Joe Biden . The news cycle in 2022, comparatively, has more closely resembled the frenetic Trump years, between the war in Ukraine , a spate of mass shootings , the Supreme Court’s obliteration of abortion rights , and existential threats to democracy and the planet . Yet six months into 2022, data shows Americans are even more disengaged than they were this time last year. (Speaking of, thanks for reading!) 

News engagement across all platforms—website visits, news app sessions, cable viewership, and with articles on social media—in the first half of 2022 is down compared to the first half of 2021, Axios reports . The steepest decline—50 percent—pertains to engagement with news articles on social media, and probably stems from changes Facebook made to its news curation model. Cable viewership across the three big networks “is, on average, down 19% in prime time,” according to Axios, losses that “skew heavily toward CNN and MSNBC, which are down 47% and 33%, respectively.” By contrast, “Fox’s ratings are up 12% in that six-month span.” News media app sessions fell 16 percent in the first half of this year; visits to the top five news websites dropped 18 percent.

The numbers reported by Axios underscore a collective weariness that has cropped up in recent op-eds, discussions, and surveys. Journalist Amanda Ripley confessed she has “been actively avoiding the news for years” in a Washington Post Opinion piece last weekend and, citing the newest edition of the Reuters Institute Digital News Report, noted she’s not alone. The annual report found the U.S. has one of the highest-news avoidance rates in the world, with over 42 percent of Americans saying they actively avoid the news. Concerns about the news having a negative impact on their mood are higher for avoiders in the U.S. (along with the U.K.) than they are elsewhere. Part of the problem is today’s news “is not designed for humans,” Ripley argued, going on to identify three essential components that could help remedy this—a sense of hope, agency, and dignity—and pointing to few-and-far between examples. Hope, for example, was present in a recent New York Times story on Houston’s remarkable progress on homelessness. There was both hope and agency in a Post story laying out six climate-change solutions.

Vox publisher Melissa Bell also cited the Reuters findings and the need to empower audiences on CNN , as she called on news organizations to rethink their product, or else risk turning more people away. “I think that we aren’t building a service for our audiences. We’re not actually helping them navigate the world around them,” Bell told Reliable Sources ’ Brian Stelter . “What we’re doing is we’re telling them horrible, frightening news every single day, and not providing any solutions.”

One change Bell suggested pertained to political coverage, which she noted is too often chronicled like a sport, with politicians as players. “But actually, politicians are paid employees of the American public. What are we doing to give them a job review?” she asked. “When you have something like gun control, who is succeeding and who is failing to make any progress with something that 90% of the population agrees needs to change?”

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63% of Black Americans say news about Black people is more negative, study finds

A new pew research center study aimed to get a 'deeper understanding' of black americans' experiences with news media.

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A new Pew Research Center report released Tuesday centers on Black Americans and their experiences, habits and attitudes around news and information.

Key findings touch on everything from how news coverage of Black people is perceived to how coverage can be improved.

In 1967, the report notes, the Kerner Commission (which was undertaken by then-President Lyndon Johnson’s administration to investigate the causes behind urban riots) took a harsh view of the news media’s stance toward Black Americans. It cited sensationalist and divisive coverage, and found news media represented Black communities inaccurately and unfairly.

“More than half a century later, there is continued discussion of many of the themes raised in the report,” the 63-page report reads. “This new study asks Black Americans themselves about their experience with news today, including views around portrayals of Black people in news stories, representation in newsrooms, and where they go and whom they trust for information. The focus on the Black population allowed the Center to tailor the study to the experiences of Black Americans rather than comparing them to other groups.”

Below is a summary of some of the findings:

  • Almost two-thirds of Black adults (63%) say news about Black people is often more negative than news about other racial and ethnic groups, while 28% say it is about equal and 7% say it is often more positive.
  • At least half (57%) of Black adults say the news they see or hear about Black people only covers certain segments of Black communities or is often missing important information (50%). According to the study, 9% of those surveyed say it covers a wide variety of Black people and often reports the full story, and 14% say that it is extremely or very likely that Black people will be covered fairly in their lifetimes.
  • Forty-three percent say the coverage largely stereotypes Black people, far higher than the 11% who say it largely does not stereotype. “These critical views of coverage of Black people are widely shared within the Black population, regardless of age, gender and even political party affiliation,” the report reads.

Researchers surveyed 4,742 U.S. Black adults from Feb. 22 to March 5, and held nine online focus groups of Black Americans facilitated between July and August 2022.

Throughout the report are quotes from participants in the nine online focus groups. Regarding problems in news coverage of Black people, one 55-year-old Black woman had this to say: “(News about Black people) is not accurate. They overemphasize the bad, and not some of the good things that are happening in the community, or if they do talk about the good things, it’s just a blurb and they want to focus on the one thing (that) was just terrible.”

One question Pew asked that may be of particular interest to journalists: “How can news coverage of Black people improve?” The survey asked about several practices for journalists when covering Black people, and found: “Among those who report at least sometimes seeing racist or racially insensitive coverage about Black people, nearly two-thirds (64%) identify educating all journalists about issues impacting Black Americans as an extremely or very effective way of making coverage fairer.”

Other suggestions to improve coverage: Include more Black people as sources, according to 54% of those surveyed; and hire more Black people as newsroom leaders (53%) and more Black journalists (44%) at news outlets.

Katerina Eva Matsa, the managing director of the center’s news and information research team, said this new study builds on the work the Pew Research Center has been doing around Black Americans for the past decade.

Matsa said she hopes members of the public will see all different aspects of the relationship people have with the news media — in this case, Black Americans.

“I know there has been so much conversation about news from diversity and how the news covers black Americans, but I feel that this study puts numbers and confirms a lot of those conversations, or doesn’t confirm some of these conversations,” she said. “And I’m very proud of that — to have that out there, and help people understand not everything, but part of what is happening.”

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A new tool confirms the shift towards more a negative political tone in the US

by Tanya Petersen, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne

A new tool shows the decline of political tone in the US

Negativity confirmed

Journal information: Scientific Reports

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‘A nightmare’: Special counsel’s assessment of Biden’s mental fitness triggers Democratic panic

WASHINGTON — President Joe Biden sidestepped any criminal charges as the investigation into his handling of classified documents concluded, but the political blowback from the special counsel’s report Thursday could prove even more devastating, reinforcing impressions that he is too old and impaired to hold the highest office.

Special counsel Robert Hur’s portrait of a man who couldn’t remember when he served as Barack Obama’s vice president, or the year when his beloved son Beau died, dealt a blow to Biden’s argument that he is still sharp and fit enough to serve another four-year term.

In deciding not to charge Biden with any crimes, the special counsel wrote that in a potential trial, “Mr. Biden would likely present himself to a jury, as he did during our interview with him, as a sympathetic, well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

It was tough enough for Biden to reassure voters about his health before Hur’s report hit like a thunderclap Thursday afternoon, prompting members of his own party to question whether he could remain the nominee in November.

“It’s a nightmare,” said a Democratic House member who asked to speak anonymously to provide a frank assessment, adding that “it weakens President Biden electorally, and Donald Trump would be a disaster and an authoritarian.”

“For Democrats, we’re in a grim situation.”

Biden wasted little time before attempting to minimize the fallout. He held an unexpected exchange with reporters in the White House on Thursday night, in which he disputed Hur's assessment of his mental acuity.

Biden grew emotional when invoking the part of the report addressing the date of his son's death.

"How in the hell dare you raise that?" Biden said. "Frankly, when I was asked the question I thought to myself, 'It wasn't any of their damn business.' "

‘Beyond devastating’

Polling has long shown that age looms as Biden’s greatest liability in his expected rematch with Trump. A January poll by NBC News found that 76% of voters have major or moderate concerns about Biden’s mental and physical health.

“It’s been a problem since way before this ever happened,” said a longtime Democratic operative who noted that when focus groups are asked to apply one word to Biden, it is often “old.”

Just this week, Biden twice referred to conversations he’s had as president with foreign leaders who’ve long since died. In his remarks Thursday night defending his competency, while talking about the war in Gaza, he referred to Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sissi as being the head of Mexico. White House press aides have downplayed such lapses as the sort of mistake anyone in public life can make.

The Hur report strips away the defenses that Biden’s press operation has used to protect him and raises fresh doubts about whether Biden is up to the rigors of the presidency, Democratic strategists said in interviews.

“This is beyond devastating,” said another Democratic operative, speaking on condition of anonymity to talk candidly about Biden’s shortcomings. “It confirms every doubt and concern that voters have. If the only reason they didn’t charge him is because he’s too old to be charged, then how can he be president of the United States?”

Asked if Hur’s report changes the calculus for Democrats who expect Biden to be the party’s nominee, this person said: “How the f--- does it not?”

Another Biden ally called it “the worst day of his presidency.”

“I think he needs to show us this is a demonstrably false characterization of him and that he has what it takes to win and govern.”

Biden has overwhelmingly won the first primary contests — notching victories in New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. It would be virtually impossible for anyone else to challenge him at this point; the deadline has passed in more than 30 states to get on primary ballots.

Some of the president’s allies were quick to defend him. They pointed to the timing of the interview with the special counsel — days after Hamas’ attack on Israel, which had captured much of the president’s focus. Others said that in their own dealings with Biden, he shows no sign of infirmity.

“He did so well in this discussion with members,” Rep. Susan Wild, D-Pa., told NBC News after seeing the president on Thursday. “He’s very sharp, no memory issues, and his only stumbling is when he trips over words consistent with his lifelong speech impediment.”

‘Prejudicial language’

Though Biden was fortunate to escape indictment, the special counsel report may give Trump additional fodder as he fights charges for allegedly mishandling classified records at his Mar-a-Lago social club. Republicans are already accusing Biden of benefiting from a double standard . Trump will likely brandish the Hur report as proof that Biden has “weaponized” the Justice Department for political advantage.

What’s more, Democrats will now be hard-pressed to capitalize on Trump’s indictment over retaining classified records. Before Hur’s report came out, Democrats argued that the two cases were very different. Whereas Trump failed to turn over classified records even after he was asked to do so, Biden willingly cooperated with authorities and relinquished all the material he had, Biden allies had argued.

“The public understands the essential difference between presidents or vice presidents like Joe Biden who occasionally behaved in sloppy ways with respect to where they were taking documents, and a president like Trump, who deliberately makes off with hundreds of classified government documents and then hides them and refuses to return them,” Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said on Wednesday, before the report was released. (Trump has denied any wrongdoing.)

Now, the distinctions may be harder for Biden allies to draw, given that Hur wrote that there was evidence Biden “willfully retained and disclosed classified material after his vice presidency when he was a private citizen.”

The report mentions an instance in February 2017, when he was no longer vice president, when Biden read notes containing classified information “nearly verbatim” to a ghostwriter helping him with his book, “Promise Me, Dad.”

Storage of sensitive government secrets was haphazard. The report describes certain classified records involving the war in Afghanistan in Biden’s Delaware garage inside a “badly damaged box surrounded by household detritus.”

Before the report was released, Biden aides had been bracing for a finding that he had simply been careless in his treatment of classified records, a person familiar with the White House’s thinking said.

The political fallout from the report, though, is likely to be “worse,” this person said. What will stick in people’s minds is what Hur said about Biden’s memory, the person added.

Biden’s lawyers disputed the report’s description of Biden’s forgetfulness.

“We do not believe that the report’s treatment of President Biden’s memory is accurate or appropriate,” two of his lawyers wrote in a letter to Hur. “The report uses highly prejudicial language to describe a commonplace occurrence among witnesses: a lack of recall of years-old events.”

In the hours after the report was released, people close to the Biden campaign rolled out a different rebuttal. Jim Messina, who ran Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, wrote on X, the site formerly known as Twitter, that Hur is a Republican who “knew exactly how his swipes could hurt Biden politically.”

That’s a familiar argument. Trump has also claimed that law enforcement is trying to sway the election, meaning both sides are now claiming victimization at the hands of partisan prosecutors.

“Hur knew exactly what he was doing here,” Stephanie Cutter, a veteran Democratic operative, wrote on X. “To provide political cover for himself for not prosecuting, he gratuitously leveled a personal (not legal) charge against the president that he absolutely knows is a gift to Trump. And, guess what we are all talking about?”

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Peter Nicholas is a senior national political reporter for NBC News.

Articles on Numbers

Displaying 1 - 20 of 33 articles.

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How counting by 10 helps children learn about the meaning of numbers

Helena Osana , Concordia University ; Jairo A. Navarrete-Ulloa , Universidad de O’Higgins (Chile) , and Vera Wagner , Concordia University

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Quantum computers in 2023: how they work, what they do, and where they’re heading

Christopher Ferrie , University of Technology Sydney

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Arithmetic has a biological origin – it’s an expression in symbols of the ‘deep structure’ of our perception

Randolph Grace , University of Canterbury

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X marks the unknown in algebra – but X’s origins are a math mystery

Peter Schumer , Middlebury

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Why is 13 considered unlucky? Explaining the power of its bad reputation

Barry Markovsky , University of South Carolina

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How a desire to help led me to track COVID numbers and make sense of them through graphs

Ridhwaan Suliman , Council for Scientific and Industrial Research

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Brains are bad at big numbers, making it impossible to grasp what a million COVID-19 deaths really means

Lindsey Hasak , Stanford University and Elizabeth Y. Toomarian , Stanford University

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Happy Twosday! Why numbers like 2/22/22 have been too fascinating for over 2,000 years

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Adele’s ‘30’: A mathematician explores number patterns in album titles

Anthony Bonato , Toronto Metropolitan University

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Emmy Noether faced sexism and Nazism – 100 years later her contributions to ring theory still influence modern math

Tamar Lichter Blanks , Rutgers University

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Numbers can trip you up during the pandemic – here are 4 tips to help you figure out tricky stats

Ellen Peters , University of Oregon

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Support for Biden’s $1.9 trillion coronavirus relief package may not be as broad as it seems – it’s all a matter of perspective

Aaron Saiewitz , University of Nevada, Las Vegas and M. David Piercey , UMass Amherst

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More testing will give us a better picture of the coronavirus spread and its slowdown

Haydar Demirhan , RMIT University

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Why having fewer OSHA inspectors matters

David Weil , Brandeis University

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So your kid’s finished their first year of school. Here’s what they should have learnt

Jenny Johnston , Southern Cross University

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Bees can learn higher numbers than we thought – if we train them the right way

Adrian Dyer , RMIT University ; Jair Garcia , RMIT University , and Scarlett Howard , Université de Toulouse III – Paul Sabatier

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Math skills aren’t enough to get through hard decisions – you need confidence, too

Ellen Peters , University of Oregon and Brittany Shoots-Reinhard , The Ohio State University

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Curious Kids: how was maths discovered? Who made up the numbers and rules?

Linda Galligan , University of Southern Queensland

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We’ve found a quicker way to multiply really big numbers

David Harvey , UNSW Sydney

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Why have we become so bamboozled by numbers?

Shabnam Mousavi , Max Planck Institute for Human Development

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The (Political) News is Too Negative 

"> Daniel A. Cox November 2, 2023

A series of clipped newspaper headlines in a disorganized pile

News coverage of American politics is not known for an abundance of positivity. Lots of people have noted that our political coverage tends to be overwhelmingly negative. And it’s getting worse. Dylan Mathews at Vox recently reported on a 2022 study that documented a growing number of news organizations featuring negative emotions, namely “anger, fear, disgust and sadness,” in their headlines. Mathews says journalists are a “morose bunch.” But is it all journalists? Or are political reporters uniquely prone to cynicism?  

recent news report that quotes a negative number

It turns out that not all news is unrelentingly negative. In a recent report , we found that perceptions of news negativity varied substantially across topics. More than eight in ten (82 percent) Americans who say their preferred news topic is politics and government say the coverage was mostly negative. Only four percent said it was mostly positive. At the other end of the spectrum is science and technology. Sixty-two percent of Americans who follow news about science and technology report that the coverage leans positive.    If you’re exclusively focused on political news or international affairs, your sense of the world is going to be quite different than if your news diet is mostly science and technology. Studies that track negativity in headlines are almost certainly going to disproportionately sample political, financial, and international news: topics that skew more negative. 

Why has this Happened?  

There are some obvious reasons why political reporting has grown more negative. The economics of news reporting have changed—the Internet severely depressed advertising revenue and opened up more competition. The rapid growth of online news meant advertisers were paying for clicks, and negative content tends to produce more of them. The Atlantic’s Derek Thompson reported on a study earlier this year that found that “negative words in news headlines increased consumption rates.” The authors conclude that each additional negative word included in a headline increases the click-through rate by more than two percent. Scaring people and riling them up can be good for the bottom line.  

But that’s not the only reason why negative news has increased. The decline of local news coverage played a role as well. In The Increasingly United States, political scientist Dan Hopkins documented the long decline of local news and the ways this has impacted American politics, from polarization to political activism. Over the last several decades, local news consumption plummeted as Americans turned to national news outlets increasingly published online. National news stories are far more likely to focus on political conflict and division, placing the negative aspects of America’s political system front and center.  

A couple of years ago, New York Times writer David Leonhardt reported on research that found a substantial disparity in the way national, local, and international news outlets covered the COVID-19 pandemic. Leonhardt wrote: “The coverage by U.S. publications with a national audience has been much more negative than coverage by any other source that the researchers analyzed, including scientific journals, major international publications and regional U.S. media.” Is it any wonder that the tenor of our national pandemic conversation was so antagonistic?  

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Is Political Cynicism Alienating Young People?  

Young adults may be particularly disinclined to follow negative news. They are already abandoning traditional news sources for social media at a rapid clip. Young people have typically shown less interest in political news than older Americans, but that’s less true when it comes to other news topics. Our May 2023 American Perspectives Survey found that seniors are roughly three times more likely than young people to report that they “often” follow news and current events (73 percent vs. 26 percent). But if you drill down and ask about what news topics people are interested in, the overall age gap in news attention drops. 

Young people tend to gravitate to news topics—such as science and technology, entertainment, and sports—that typically include far more positive (or neutral) coverage. Put another way, they assiduously avoid news topics—such as politics—that are awash in negativity. The comparisons to older adults are stark. 

A growing number of young people now say social media is their most trusted source for information. This is hardly shocking. But it does not mean that they have given up on journalism. According to Pew , 59 percent of young people have a great deal or a fair amount of confidence in journalists, a rate higher than the public overall. 

Rather, like many Americans, young people are understandably tired of the way political news is presented. It’s not the job of the political press to boost the president’s popularity or reinvigorate public trust in Congress, but a relentless focus on negativity degrades the political process by increasing public cynicism and encouraging apathy. A new Pew poll finds that roughly two-thirds of Americans feel exhausted when they think about the state of American politics. A majority say they feel angry. Hope is in short supply. 

In, perhaps, an acknowledgment of how pervasive news negativity has become, mainstream outlets have developed entire sections devoted to positive news. CBS News publishes The Uplift , dedicated to “stories that uplift and inspire,” while the New York Times publishes “ The Week in Good News ” to provide readers with a happiness boost. There are independent news sites, such as Upworthy or the Good News Network, exclusively focused on reporting upbeat stories. Even Fox News—not known for producing a lot of cheerful content—has a “ Good News ” section. At the time of writing, its lead item is about a dog helping a lost toddler stay warm in the woods. The problem with these efforts is that they mostly include human-interest stories of the type that you would see on a local news broadcast. For people interested in foreign affairs or government, these sites do not provide a meaningful alternative. 

If technology and science reporters spent most of their time documenting the multitude of technical failures and setbacks as opposed to the breakthroughs, the public would have a very different understanding of human ingenuity and progress. The United States is a politically diverse place with a complex political system. There are positive political developments worth discussing, just as there is an audience ready to read about it. 

Read More on American Storylines

Survey reports.

Generation Z and the Transformation of American Adolescence Cover Image

Daniel A. Cox, Kelsey Eyre Hammond, Kyle Gray November 9, 2023

Generation Z and the Transformation of American Adolescence: How Gen Z’s Formative Experiences Shape Its Politics, Priorities, and Future

This report explores the foundational differences between American generations through their formative adolescent experiences.

Young man sitting in a dark room before a wall featuring various conspiracy theory-related items illuminated by a computer screen

Daniel A. Cox, M. Anthony Mills, Ian R. Banks, Kelsey Eyre Hammond, Kyle Gray September 28, 2023

America’s Crisis of Confidence: Rising Mistrust, Conspiracies, and Vaccine Hesitancy After COVID-19

America is experiencing a crosscutting crisis of expertise and scientific distrust accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic that poses significant challenges to democratic debate and public decision-making

A cartoon showing a vibrant office from the ceiling view.

Daniel A. Cox, Brent Orrell, Kyle Gray, Jessie Wall September 14, 2023

The Social Workplace: Social Capital, Human Dignity, and Work in America, Volume II

The Social Workplace, Volume II examines Americans’ expectations and experiences surrounding work, the workplace, and key job-related priorities such as pay and interpersonal connections.

An empty debate stage featuring red and blue podiums below a stage light face an audience of nearly-empty seats.

Daniel A. Cox, Ruy Teixeira June 29, 2023

The 2024 Presidential Election: Evolving Political Coalitions and Familiar Partisan Divisions

Ahead of the 2024 presidential election, the AEI Survey Center on American Life conducted a national survey of Americans that explored a wide range of political attitudes, current voting preferences, and perceptions of the political parties.

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Republican Parents, Democratic Daughters and What They Mean for the GOP

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AT&T outage disrupts some 911 calls as tens of thousands lose service

A sign is posted in front of an AT&T retail store in 2021 in San Rafael, Calif. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images hide caption

AT&T outage disrupts some 911 calls as tens of thousands lose service

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Biden and Haley spar over abortion after Alabama court rules embryos are 'children'

Left: President Joe Biden delivers remarks to the National Association of Counties Legislative Conference on Feb. 12 in Washington. Right: Nikki Haley, former governor of South Carolina and 2024 Republican presidential candidate, during a bus tour campaign event in South Carolina on Feb. 21. Evan Vucci/AP; Victor J. Blue/Bloomberg via Getty Images hide caption

Biden and Haley spar over abortion after Alabama court rules embryos are 'children'

February 22, 2024 • Nikki Haley seemed to side with the Alabama court's decision, telling NBC News, "Embryos, to me, are babies." President Biden has seized the opportunity to call for enshrining Roe .

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Guinness World Records posthumously strips Bobi of his title of 'oldest dog ever'

Bobi, a purebred Rafeiro do Alentejo Portuguese dog, poses for a photo with his Guinness World Records certificates for the oldest dog ever, at his home in Conqueiros, central Portugal, on May 20, 2023. Jorge Jeronimo/AP hide caption

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The New York Times

The learning network | that figures: understanding numbers in news reports.

The Learning Network - Teaching and Learning With The New York Times

That Figures: Understanding Numbers in News Reports

man being rescued in the rubble of the Haiti earthquake

Mathematics

Teaching ideas based on New York Times content.

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Overview | What can understanding the magnitude of numbers tell us about what is happening in the world around us? Why is it important to comprehend numbers in the news? In this lesson, students develop the skill of understanding numbers in news stories by examining a story that interests them, developing a meaningful context and visually representing the numbers.

Materials | Markers, paper, computers with Internet access, newsprint or posterboard, handouts.

Warm-Up | Have students complete the Number the News handout (PDF), in which they try to fill in the blanks in quotes from recent Times articles with the correct numbers. Note that two sentences have two blanks to fill in, and that all 10 of the numbers will be used.

Before they begin, tell students that this activity is not a test, but rather a chance to focus on processing the sorts of numbers that we hear every day and consider what they mean about the world around us.

When all students have completed the handout, go over the correct answers (PDF) as a class. For which quotes did most students guess the correct values? Why were these easier than the rest? For which quotes did most students guess incorrect values? Why were these more difficult? Were any of the correct answers particularly surprising? Why? What can we learn about our world by looking closely at these quotations? Did completing this exercise change the way you think about these news stories? Did completing this exercise change the way you think about these values?

Related | Note to Teacher : This article details the vast extent of lost life as a result of the earthquake in Haiti. The lesson asks students to develop the skill of understanding numbers in the context of the news. Be sure to explain to students that this is not merely a lesson about numbers, but about how understanding numerical magnitude in context can provide us with a more accurate perspective on the world around us, especially in times of crisis. You may wish to substitute a Times article on a different subject if this article is not appropriate for your students.

The article “More Than 150,000 Have Been Buried, Government Says” describes the rising death and migration count after the recent Haitian earthquake:

Haiti’s government provided a preliminary assessment of the earthquake’s body count on Saturday, putting it at more than 150,000, and declared that the search for survivors trapped in the rubble would soon be coming to an end.

Read the article with your class, using the questions below.

Questions | For discussion and reading comprehension:

  • Which of the numbers reported in this article are officials sure are correct? Why? Which of the numbers are officials less sure about? Why?
  • Why are some numbers so hard to collect? Why might it be important to have an accurate count?
  • What would the ramifications be if one of these numbers was misreported as having one fewer or one more zero?
  • What do the numbers in this story tell you about the magnitude of the earthquake?

How do these numbers compare to those of other disasters? Do you think the numbers of dead, injured or dislocated are more or less than the numbers from Hurricane Katrina? The Indian Ocean tsunami? The terrorist attack of 9/11? What can comparing the numbers of disasters like these tell us? What can’t they tell us?

Comparative numbers can be found in the following articles: “Relief Effort Gains as Aid Is Reaching More Survivors,” “A Nation Challenged: The Death Toll” and “Louisiana Releases Details on Deaths from Hurricane Katrina and Later Flooding.”

Are the numbers of dead, injured or dislocated persons the most important criterion for how devastating a tragedy is? Why or why not? What else might we consider, if anything?

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  • Lesson: A Numbers Person?

From NYTimes.com

  • Haiti Earthquake 2010
  • AP: “Haiti by the Numbers: Damage, Help on Giant Scale”
  • AP: “A By-the-Numbers Look at Obama’s First Year”

Around the Web

  • The MegaPenny Project
  • Poynter Institute: “1,000 Dead: Journalism By the Numbers”
  • No Train No Gain: News by the Numbers

Activity | As a class, brainstorm current news stories that are of interest to students. Then inform students that they will be working in groups to investigate the numbers in these news stories, put those numbers into a meaningful context and then create visual representations of the numbers that clarify each number’s magnitude.

For younger students, you might modify this lesson as an exploration of the number 100 (perhaps for a 100th day of school celebration) by having all students work on the same news story, “Fire Destroys 20 Houses in California,” which describes 100 firetrucks being called in to fight a fire, or by having students use print copies of The Times to make a collage of 100 newsworthy people. Have students form small groups based on interests.

Step 1: Find Articles and References Groups start by finding a timely New York Times article about their topic of interest, then searching NYTimes.com or using Times Topics pages to find relevant numbers.

They may have to look through several articles about their topic to find the numbers that they want. Depending on what stories they choose, they could find numbers of people, dollars, births, deaths, animals, plants, pounds, miles and so on.

Step 2: Put Numbers Into Context Next, they work together to think of what other numbers and information they might need to collect in order to put the numbers they have found into a meaningful context.

Use the article about the Haitian earthquake that you read as a class as an example of the importance of putting numbers into a meaningful context in order to fully understand their magnitude. As you discussed as a class, the numbers of dead, injured and dislocated persons resulting from the Haitian earthquake mean much more when they are put into the context of the numbers of dead, injured and dislocated persons, or of destroyed buildings and neighborhoods, resulting from other tragedies.

It is also helpful when such numbers are put into a familiar context (i.e., comparing to a local or otherwise recognizable equivalent for the numbers in the article; for example, students could think about what percentage of their town 150,000 people is, and find a way of expressing that in real, accessible terms).

Groups search NYTimes.com for numbers and information that they believe could put the numbers that they’ve collected into a meaningful context.

Step 3: Create Visual Representations Groups decide how to visually represent these numbers in a meaningful way. Their visual representations should put the numerical values into perspective and clarify the true meaning of the numbers in the context of the news story.

Give students several examples of how visual representations can clarify a numbers’ contextual magnitude. For example, students reading about population growth in another country might want to compare that country’s population to the population of their own country or their hometown.

The following interactive graphics from the Times are good examples of graphics that visually compare numbers to each other: “Tracking Swine Flu Cases Worldwide,” “A Map of Olympic Medals,” “Prison Population Around the Globe” and “States of Conflict.” They might also look at numbers-based articles and blog posts, like “The Bay Area’s Year by the Numbers.”

Still other examples can be found in the Multimedia/Photos Archive and in the work of Charles M. Blow , The Times’s visual Op-Ed columnist, and his blog, By the Numbers .

Some students may want their representations to compare their number to a physical object instead of another number. A good example of how to do this is the MegaPenny Project , which illustrates the value of large numbers by showing what stacks of pennies of different amounts would look like compared to a person. Students might also collect pennies, small candies or another small object in jars to represent a numerical value in a physical form.

Encourage groups to come up with new and different ways of representing their numbers so that their value is clarified and put into perspective.

Finally, groups annotate their visual representation to provide context, using information about and from their news story, analogies they developed and so on.

Step 4: Discuss and Prepare Class Exhibit Bring the class together for a discussion; tell them that they will share their work soon.

Ask: Did this activity give you new insight into your news story? How? What did you learn about the magnitude of the numbers you were working with? How would the magnitude have been different if there had been one zero missing? What if there had been one zero added? Do you usually pay attention to the numbers in news stories, and try to understand them and what they mean? Why or why not? Why and how does paying close attention to these numbers and understanding their value give greater meaning to a story?

Going Further | Groups display their annotated graphics around the classroom, and the entire class does a gallery walk to learn from each other’s work.

Ask students what they learned from the graphics. Ask: Did you gain a new perspective on current events by thinking about the numbers from different news stories in comparison to one another? How so? What were the most surprising numbers that you encountered? Why were you surprised by the magnitude of these particular numbers? Did gaining a new understanding of the magnitude of these numbers provide you with a new perspective on the news story associated with them? How so?

Standards | From McREL , for Grades 6-12:

Mathematics 1- Uses a variety of strategies in the problem-solving process. 2- Understands and applies basic and advanced properties of the concepts of numbers. 9-Understands the general nature and uses of mathematics.

Life Skills: Thinking and Reasoning 2- Understands and applies basic principles of logic and reasoning. 3- Effectively uses mental processes that are based on identifying similarities and differences.

Language Arts 4- Gathers and uses information for research purposes. 5- Uses the general skills and strategies of the reading process. 7- Uses reading skills and strategies to understand and interpret a variety of informational texts.

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Warnings of the impact of fertility treatments in Alabama rush in after frozen embryo ruling

The Alabama Supreme Court recently ruled that frozen embryos can be considered children under state law. This is raising concerns about how the decision could affect in vitro fertilization, commonly known as IVF.

The exterior of the Alabama Supreme Court building in Montgomery, Ala., is shown Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2024. The Alabama Supreme Court ruled, Friday, Feb. 16, 2024, that frozen embryos can be considered children under state law, a ruling critics said could have sweeping implications for fertility treatments. The decision was issued in a pair of wrongful death cases brought by three couples who had frozen embryos destroyed in an accident at a fertility clinic. (AP Photo/Kim Chandler)

The exterior of the Alabama Supreme Court building in Montgomery, Ala., is shown Tuesday, Feb. 20, 2024. The Alabama Supreme Court ruled, Friday, Feb. 16, 2024, that frozen embryos can be considered children under state law, a ruling critics said could have sweeping implications for fertility treatments. The decision was issued in a pair of wrongful death cases brought by three couples who had frozen embryos destroyed in an accident at a fertility clinic. (AP Photo/Kim Chandler)

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FILE - In this Tuesday, Oct. 2, 2018 photo, containers holding frozen embryos and sperm are stored in liquid nitrogen at a fertility clinic in Fort Myers, Fla. (AP Photo/Lynne Sladky, File)

MONTGOMERY, Ala. (AP) — The Alabama Supreme Court has ruled that frozen embryos can be considered children under state law, a decision critics said could have sweeping implications for fertility treatment in the state.

The decision was issued in a pair of wrongful death cases brought by three couples who had frozen embryos destroyed in an accident at a fertility clinic. Justices, citing anti-abortion language in the Alabama Constitution, ruled that an 1872 state law allowing parents to sue over the death of a minor child “applies to all unborn children, regardless of their location.”

“Unborn children are ‘children’ ... without exception based on developmental stage, physical location, or any other ancillary characteristics,” Justice Jay Mitchell wrote in Friday’s majority ruling by the all-Republican court.

Mitchell said the court had previously ruled that fetuses killed while a woman is pregnant are covered under Alabama’s Wrongful Death of a Minor Act and nothing excludes “extrauterine children from the Act’s coverage.”

FILE - Republican presidential candidate former President Donald Trump speaks at a Get Out The Vote rally in Conway, S.C., Feb. 10, 2024. A major anti-abortion group is praising Trump after a New York Times report Friday, Feb. 16, that Trump has privately told people he supports a national ban on abortion after 16-weeks of pregnancy, though his campaign denied the report and said Trump plans to "negotiate a deal" on abortion if elected to the White House again. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta, File)

The ruling brought a rush of warnings about the potential impact on fertility treatments and the freezing of embryos, which had previously been considered property by the courts.

“This ruling is stating that a fertilized egg, which is a clump of cells, is now a person. It really puts into question, the practice of IVF,” Barbara Collura, CEO of RESOLVE: The National Infertility Association, told The Associated Press Tuesday. The group called the decision a “terrifying development for the 1-in-6 people impacted by infertility” who need in-vitro fertilization.

She said it raises questions for providers and patients, including if they can freeze future embryos created during fertility treatment or if patients could ever donate or destroy unused embryos.

Sean Tipton, a spokesman with the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, said at least one Alabama fertility clinic has been instructed by their affiliated hospital to pause IVF treatment in the immediate wake of the decision.

Dr. Paula Amato, president of the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, said a decision to treat frozen fertilized egg as the legal equivalent of a child or gestating fetus could limit the availability of modern health care.

“By insisting that these very different biological entities are legally equivalent, the best state-of-the-art fertility care will be made unavailable to the people of Alabama. No health care provider will be willing to provide treatments if those treatments may lead to civil or criminal charges,” Amato said.

Gabby Goidel, 26, who is pursuing IVF treatment in Alabama after three miscarriages, said the court ruling came down on the same day she began daily injections ahead of egg retrieval.

“It just kind of took me by by storm. It was like all I could think about and it was just a very stressful thing to hear. I immediately messaged my clinic and asked if this could potentially halt us. They said we have to take it one day at a time,” Goidel said.

She said her clinic is continuing to provide treatment for now, but said it will let her know if they have to change course.

Goidel said she turned to IVF and preimplantation genetic testing after the multiple miscarriages related to genetic issues.

“Without IVF, I would have to probably go through several more miscarriages before I even had an option of having a baby that is my own,” she said.

The plaintiffs in the Alabama case had undergone IVF treatments that led to the creation of several embryos, some of which were implanted and resulted in healthy births. The couples paid to keep others frozen in a storage facility at the Mobile Infirmary Medical Center. A patient in 2020 wandered into the area and removed several embryos, dropping them on the floor and “killing them,” the ruling said.

The justices ruled that wrongful death lawsuits by the couples could proceed. The clinic and hospital that are defendants in the case could ask the court to reconsider its decision.

Michael Upchurch, a lawyer for the fertility clinic in the lawsuit, Center for Reproductive Medicine, said they are “evaluating the consequences of the decision and have no further comment at this time.”

An anti-abortion group cheered the decision. “Each person, from the tiniest embryo to an elder nearing the end of his life, has incalculable value that deserves and is guaranteed legal protection,” Lila Rose, president and founder of Live Action said in a statement.

Chief Justice Tom Parker issued a concurring opinion in which he quoted the Bible in discussing the meaning of the phrase “the sanctity of unborn life” in the Alabama Constitution.

“Even before birth, all human beings bear the image of God, and their lives cannot be destroyed without effacing his glory,” Parker said.

Justice Greg Cook, who filed the only full dissent to the majority opinion, said the 1872 law did not define “minor child” and was being stretched from the original intent to cover frozen embryos.

“No court — anywhere in the country — has reached the conclusion the main opinion reaches,” he wrote, adding the ruling “almost certainly ends the creation of frozen embryos through in vitro fertilization (IVF) in Alabama.”

The Alabama Supreme Court decision partly hinged on anti-abortion language added to the Alabama Constitution in 2018, stating it is the “policy of this state to ensure the protection of the rights of the unborn child.”

Supporters at the time said it would have no impact unless states gained more control over abortion access. States gained control of abortion access in 2022.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said the Alabama decision reflected the consequences of the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade and blamed Republican elected officials from blocking access to reproductive and emergency care to women.

“This president and this vice president will continue to fight to protect access to reproductive health care and call on Congress to restore the protections of Roe v. Wade in federal law for all women in every state,” Jean-Pierre told reporters aboard Air Force One.

Aamer Madhani aboard Air Force One contributed to this report.

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Eight Words and a Verbal Slip Put Biden’s Age Back at the Center of 2024

A special counsel’s stinging report and an uneven White House appearance captured Democrats’ fears about President Biden and fueled Republicans as they try to cast him as weak.

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President Biden appearing at a last-minute news conference at the White House on Thursday.

By Shane Goldmacher ,  Reid J. Epstein and Katie Glueck

When President Biden appeared at a last-minute news conference on Thursday night, he hoped to assure the country of his mental acuity hours after a special counsel’s report had devastatingly referred to him as a “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory.”

Instead, a visibly angry Mr. Biden made the exact type of verbal flub that has kept Democrats so nervous for months, mistakenly referring to the president of Egypt, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, as the “president of Mexico” as he tried to address the latest developments in the war in Gaza.

The special counsel’s report and the president’s evening performance placed Mr. Biden’s advanced age, the singularly uncomfortable subject looming over his re-election bid, back at the center of America’s political conversation.

The 81-year-old president — already the oldest in the nation’s history — has for years fought the perception that he is a diminished figure. “My memory is fine,” he insisted on Thursday from the White House.

Yet in a single cutting phrase, the report from Robert K. Hur , the special counsel who had investigated Mr. Biden’s handling of classified documents, captured the fears of Democrats who hold their breath when Mr. Biden appears in public and the hopes of Republicans, especially former President Donald J. Trump and his allies. The Trump operation has made plain its intent to use Mr. Biden’s stiffer gait and sometimes garbled speech to cast him as weak.

The Biden campaign has built its strategy around telling voters that the November election is a choice between the president, whatever doubts the public has about his age, and an opponent in Mr. Trump, 77, whom they paint as a threat to democracy and personal freedoms.

Democrats long ago cast their lot with Mr. Biden. With no serious alternative in the primary race, many in the party believe the country’s future is riding on the president’s ability to persuade voters that he is still up for the job for another four years.

But for all of Mr. Trump’s vulnerabilities — the Republican Party has been on a protracted losing streak since he rose to power — the upward of $2 billion that the Biden campaign and its allies hope to raise and spend will not make the current president any younger.

And Thursday night’s news conference was an example of the political dangers for Mr. Biden, whose missteps are magnified in part by the White House team’s tight control over his media exposure. His aides are so risk averse that they passed even on a pre-Super Bowl interview this weekend before one of the nation’s largest annual television audiences.

“Fair or not, you can’t unring the bell,” said David Axelrod, the former strategist for Barack Obama who has emerged as one of the Democratic Party’s leading figures warning about how voters view Mr. Biden’s age. Mr. Axelrod said the special counsel’s report was so troubling for Democrats because it “goes to the core of what is plaguing Biden politically now, which is a widespread fear that he’s not up to it.”

He added: “The most damaging things in politics are the things that confirm people’s pre-existing suspicions, and those are the things that travel very fast. It’s a problem.”

The Biden campaign declined to comment.

As a legal matter, Mr. Hur’s report absolved Mr. Biden of criminal wrongdoing, announcing that there was insufficient evidence to charge him. But Democrats seized on his loaded language — Mr. Hur also invoked Mr. Biden’s “diminished faculties in advancing age” as something that would have been sympathetic to a jury — to accuse the special counsel, who was once a Trump appointee, of partisan motives.

For Republicans aiming to oust Mr. Biden, the report and the president’s angry response came as a gift after several days in which their own dysfunction in Congress dominated the news . The Republican National Committee quickly created a graphic with the report’s eight most brutal words — “well-meaning, elderly man with a poor memory” — grafted onto the Biden campaign logo.

Never mind that the special counsel declined to charge Mr. Biden while Mr. Trump’s own, more serious case over whether he mishandled classified documents remains part of the 91 felony charges he faces across four jurisdictions.

Still, Chris LaCivita, a top strategist for Mr. Trump, called the special counsel’s description of Mr. Biden “damning and defining.”

“The report confirms what Americans have been witnessing across their TV screens for the last few years — that an elderly man with a poor memory is leading America into a morass of wars, inflationary disaster and lack of opportunity for taxpaying Americans,” Mr. LaCivita said.

Senator Chris Coons, a Delaware Democrat who is close to Mr. Biden, predicted that he would receive more calls from “people expressing concern.” But he said he would respond by recounting his direct experiences with Mr. Biden, which he said demonstrated that the president was “sharp, engaged and purposeful.”

Still, Mr. Biden’s mix-up of Egypt and Mexico came soon after a couple of slips in the last week regarding deceased European leaders. First, during a campaign swing in Nevada, he confused François Mitterrand, a former French president who died in 1996 , with the country’s current president, Emmanuel Macron. Then, on Wednesday, he referred twice to having met in 2021 with Helmut Kohl, a former German chancellor who died in 2017 , instead of with Angela Merkel, who led the country three years ago.

Mr. Coons made light of “the calls I get from freaked-out Democrats saying, ‘Oh my God, the president said X!’ I think, ‘And the former president said Y!’ If you asked Donald Trump who François Mitterrand was, he would look at you like, ‘What are you talking about?’”

Mr. Trump has made his own series of verbal stumbles — he recently confused Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi and previously mixed up the leaders of Hungary and Turkey — but polls show that voters do not question his sharpness the same way they do Mr. Biden’s. An NBC News poll released this week found that voters gave Mr. Trump an advantage of 16 percentage points on the question of who was more competent and effective — a 25-point swing since 2020, when Mr. Biden held a nine-point edge on that question.

Ms. Haley has argued that a new generation would better serve the country and both parties. “The first party to retire its 80-year-old candidate is going to win this election!” she wrote in a fund-raising email on Thursday.

Mr. Biden’s aides stressed privately that suggestions that his memory is lapsing would not hurt him because voters have already priced in his age when considering whether to support him against Mr. Trump. Some of the president’s allies on Thursday dusted off a playbook used by past presidents facing inquiries: Attack the investigators as motivated by partisan politics.

Representative Robert Garcia, a California Democrat, said Mr. Hur had no expertise to judge Mr. Biden’s memory.

“The folks writing this report, they are lawyers, they’re not doctors,” Mr. Garcia said. “This person’s a Republican who couldn’t find any evidence. He’s probably trying to hurt the president politically .”

For many Democrats, the episode was an unwelcome echo of the approach to the 2016 election. James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director at the time, held a news conference that summer to declare that he would not charge Hillary Clinton over her use of a private email server, but he still excoriated her judgment — and then, months later, reopened his investigation in the days before the election.

“This, for many of us, brings back the 11 days prior to Clinton-Trump,” said Bakari Sellers, a Democratic strategist, who predicted that Mr. Biden’s troubles would blow over because the election remains far away. “The blessing for Biden is that he was old before this report, he’ll be old after this report. We all knew he is old.”

The special counsel’s report was surprisingly blunt. It described Mr. Biden’s memory as appearing to have “significant limitations,” characterized an interview he recorded in 2017 as “painfully slow” and said Mr. Biden did not remember some key dates of his vice presidency or “when his son Beau died.”

In a letter to the special counsel, Mr. Biden’s lawyers called the numerous references to Mr. Biden’s memory “gratuitous,” as well as “prejudicial and inflammatory.” And Mr. Biden himself, with visible frustration, expressed disbelief at the idea he did not know when his son had died: “How in the hell dare he raise that?”

Representative Daniel S. Goldman, a New York Democrat and a former federal prosecutor, said the attention that Mr. Biden’s Mexico-Egypt slip instantly attracted was a “perfect example of where the age issues get completely exaggerated and blown out of proportion.”

Mr. Biden remains almost certain to be the Democratic nominee. He has won his party’s first nominating contests with ease, and deadlines to qualify for the Democratic primary ballot have passed in about 80 percent of states and territories.

Representative Dean Phillips of Minnesota, who is Mr. Biden’s only remaining Democratic primary challenger, has attracted little support so far. Mr. Phillips said the special counsel’s description of Mr. Biden’s memory showed that “the president is not in a position to continue to serve as our commander in chief beyond January 2025.”

James Carville, the veteran Democratic strategist, said that the negative perceptions of Mr. Biden’s age could not be dismissed as a distraction.

“The public does not view his age as — that’s not a Fox News issue,” he said in an interview after the news conference. “It’s not a Taylor Swift rigging the Super Bowl kind of thing. So — I don’t know how you get out of this.”

“The whole day,” he added, “was confirming an existing suspicion.”

Maggie Haberman contributed reporting.

Shane Goldmacher is a national political correspondent, covering the 2024 campaign and the major developments, trends and forces shaping American politics. He can be reached at [email protected] . More about Shane Goldmacher

Reid J. Epstein covers campaigns and elections from Washington. Before joining The Times in 2019, he worked at The Wall Street Journal, Politico, Newsday and The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. More about Reid J. Epstein

Katie Glueck is a national political reporter. Previously, she was chief Metro political correspondent, and a lead reporter for The Times covering the Biden campaign. She also covered politics for McClatchy’s Washington bureau and for Politico. More about Katie Glueck

Biden’s Mental Acuity Under Scrutiny

Comments about president biden’s age and memory in the special counsel’s report have captured democrats’ fears ahead of the november election and fueled republicans in their efforts to cast the president as weak..

An Age-Old Question: How old is too old to be president? The report has thrust the issue back into the spotlight  just as America seems poised to elect a commander in chief well past typical retirement age, no matter who wins in November.

Implications for 2024 Election: Why is the age issue hurting Biden  so much more than Donald Trump? Both are over 75, but voters are much less likely to worry that Trump is too old to serve .

Voter Reactions: To Americans in their 70s and 80s, the renewed questions swirling around Biden’s age have resonated in deeply personal ways . Many agree that it’s an issue, while others feel the criticism of Biden is insulting.

Rebuffing the Report: Vice President Kamala Harris and other White House officials have sought to discredit the report , suggesting that it was more of a political attack than an unbiased legal document .

The Science of Memory Loss: After the report’s release, medical experts noted that the special counsel’s judgments on Biden’s mental health did not appear to be based on science .

A Protective White House: Biden’s top aides have created a cocoon around him out of concern that his mistakes could be amplified and damage his image. The events that followed the report’s release emphasized those risks in striking ways .

Read our research on: Immigration & Migration | Podcasts | Election 2024

Regions & Countries

How americans view the situation at the u.s.-mexico border, its causes and consequences, 80% say the u.s. government is doing a bad job handling the migrant influx.

recent news report that quotes a negative number

Pew Research Center conducted this study to understand the public’s views about the large number of migrants seeking to enter the U.S. at the border with Mexico. For this analysis, we surveyed 5,140 adults from Jan. 16-21, 2024. Everyone who took part in this survey is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the ATP’s methodology .

Here are the questions used for the report and its methodology .

The growing number of migrants seeking entry into the United States at its border with Mexico has strained government resources, divided Congress and emerged as a contentious issue in the 2024 presidential campaign .

Chart shows Why do Americans think there is an influx of migrants to the United States?

Americans overwhelmingly fault the government for how it has handled the migrant situation. Beyond that, however, there are deep differences – over why the migrants are coming to the U.S., proposals for addressing the situation, and even whether it should be described as a “crisis.”

Factors behind the migrant influx

Economic factors – either poor conditions in migrants’ home countries or better economic opportunities in the United States – are widely viewed as major reasons for the migrant influx.

About seven-in-ten Americans (71%), including majorities in both parties, cite better economic opportunities in the U.S. as a major reason.

There are wider partisan differences over other factors.

About two-thirds of Americans (65%) say violence in migrants’ home countries is a major reason for why a large number of immigrants have come to the border.

Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are 30 percentage points more likely than Republicans and Republican leaners to cite this as a major reason (79% vs. 49%).

By contrast, 76% of Republicans say the belief that U.S. immigration policies will make it easy to stay in the country once they arrive is a major factor. About half as many Democrats (39%) say the same.

For more on Americans’ views of these and other reasons, visit Chapter 2.

How serious is the situation at the border?

A sizable majority of Americans (78%) say the large number of migrants seeking to enter this country at the U.S.-Mexico border is eithera crisis (45%) or a major problem (32%), according to the Pew Research Center survey, conducted Jan. 16-21, 2024, among 5,140 adults.

Related: Migrant encounters at the U.S.-Mexico border hit a record high at the end of 2023 .

Chart shows Border situation viewed as a ‘crisis’ by most Republicans; Democrats are more likely to call it a ‘problem’

  • Republicans are much more likely than Democrats to describe the situation as a “crisis”: 70% of Republicans say this, compared with just 22% of Democrats.
  • Democrats mostly view the situation as a major problem (44%) or minor problem (26%) for the U.S. Very few Democrats (7%) say it is not a problem.

In an open-ended question , respondents voice their concerns about the migrant influx. They point to numerous issues, including worries about how the migrants are cared for and general problems with the immigration system.

Yet two concerns come up most frequently:

  • 22% point to the economic burdens associated with the migrant influx, including the strains migrants place on social services and other government resources.
  • 22% also cite security concerns. Many of these responses focus on crime (10%), terrorism (10%) and drugs (3%).

When asked specifically about the impact of the migrant influx on crime in the United States, a majority of Americans (57%) say the large number of migrants seeking to enter the country leads to more crime. Fewer (39%) say this does not have much of an impact on crime in this country.

Republicans (85%) overwhelmingly say the migrant surge leads to increased crime in the U.S. A far smaller share of Democrats (31%) say the same; 63% of Democrats instead say it does not have much of an impact.

Government widely criticized for its handling of migrant influx

For the past several years, the federal government has gotten low ratings for its handling of the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border. (Note: The wording of this question has been modified modestly to reflect circumstances at the time).

Chart shows Only about a quarter of Democrats and even fewer Republicans say the government has done a good job dealing with large number of migrants at the border

However, the current ratings are extraordinarily low.

Just 18% say the U.S. government is doing a good job dealing with the large number of migrants at the border, while 80% say it is doing a bad job, including 45% who say it is doing a very bad job.

  • Republicans’ views are overwhelmingly negative (89% say it’s doing a bad job), as they have been since Joe Biden became president.
  • 73% of Democrats also give the government negative ratings, the highest share recorded during Biden’s presidency.

For more on Americans’ evaluations of the situation, visit Chapter 1 .

Which policies could improve the border situation?

There is no single policy proposal, among the nine included on the survey, that majorities of both Republicans and Democrats say would improve the situation at the U.S.-Mexico border. There are areas of relative agreement, however.

A 60% majority of Americans say that increasing the number of immigration judges and staff in order to make decisions on asylum more quickly would make the situation better. Only 11% say it would make things worse, while 14% think it would not make much difference.

Nearly as many (56%) say creating more opportunities for people to legally immigrate to the U.S. would make the situation better.

Chart shows Most Democrats and nearly half of Republicans say boosting resources for quicker decisions on asylum cases would improve situation at Mexico border

Majorities of Democrats say each of these proposals would make the border situation better.

Republicans are less positive than are Democrats; still, about 40% or more of Republicans say each would improve the situation, while far fewer say they would make things worse.

Opinions on other proposals are more polarized. For example, a 56% majority of Democrats say that adding resources to provide safe and sanitary conditions for migrants arriving in the U.S. would be a positive step forward.

Republicans not only are far less likely than Democrats to view this proposal positively, but far more say it would make the situation worse (43%) than better (17%).

Chart shows Wide partisan gaps in views of expanding border wall, providing ‘safe and sanitary conditions’ for migrants

Building or expanding a wall along the U.S.-Mexico border was among the most divisive policies of Donald Trump’s presidency. In 2019, 82% of Republicans favored expanding the border wall , compared with just 6% of Democrats.

Today, 72% of Republicans say substantially expanding the wall along the U.S. border with Mexico would make the situation better. Just 15% of Democrats concur, with most saying either it would not make much of a difference (47%) or it would make things worse (24%).

For more on Americans’ reactions to policy proposals, visit Chapter 3 .

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Report Materials

Table of contents, fast facts on how greeks see migrants as greece-turkey border crisis deepens, americans’ immigration policy priorities: divisions between – and within – the two parties, from the archives: in ’60s, americans gave thumbs-up to immigration law that changed the nation, around the world, more say immigrants are a strength than a burden, latinos have become less likely to say there are too many immigrants in u.s., most popular.

About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

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News in numbers.

Joe Tate

  • Workforce Florida Workers Are Losing Union Representation. What Comes Next? Feb. 21, 2024  ·  TNS
  • Finance Rural Colleges in Colorado Band Together to Request More Funding Feb. 21, 2024  ·  TNS

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    A comprehensive analysis of millions of political quotes over 12 years revealed a significant rise in negative language by U.S. politicians, notably coinciding with Donald Trump's entry into politics in 2015. This shift, persisting beyond election campaigns, indicates a lasting change in the tone of U.S. political discourse.

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    Explaining the news through visualizations and data analysis from the NBC News Digital Data/Graphics team.

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  10. How Biden Has Been Covered in the News 100 Days Into His Administration

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  11. America's Homelessness Crisis Is Getting Worse

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  12. Many Americans Are Fleeing the Bad News Cycle

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  13. 63% of Black Americans say news about Black people is more negative

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  14. A new tool confirms the shift towards more a negative political tone in

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  18. The (Political) News is Too Negative

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  28. News in Numbers

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  29. Intro to negative numbers (article)

    Problem 1A Move the dot to − 4 . − 5 − 4 − 3 − 2 − 1 0 1 2 3 4 5 − 5 5 Why do we need negative numbers? Negative numbers help us describe values less than zero. Example: When the temperature is 8 ∘ below 0 ∘ , it is less than 0 . We can say the temperature is − 8 ∘ . 0 5 − 5 − 8 ∘ A few more negative situations Problem 2A