The Emotional Landscape of American Television News: 2000-2020

Abstract

Public opinion is often shaped by elite discourse, with most Americans receiving elite opinions via the media: newspapers, television, and now the Internet. All teach citizens about the world and the preferences and attitudes of political leaders and pundits. Since the mid 1990s, in an increasingly varied and crowded media landscape, these elite cues no longer produce the kind of cross-party political consensus that characterized much of the 20th century. Citizens choose information environments that provide news which is congenial to their political identities and more easily avoid ideas and news in conflict with them. Knowing that Americans opt into congenial news environments, I theorize that the current polarized and energized electorate is the result of differing emotional environments among partisan and nonpartisan news sources. I argue that the emotionality of partisan news media likely drives current upward trends in both political polarization and participation. Anger-driven political behavior, observed in greater voter turnout and out-partisan hostility, is the likely result of exposure to far more anger cues in partisan media than are typically expressed in nonpartisan news media. I find that partisan news is angrier, less anxious, and less enthusiastic than nonpartisan news, because partisan anchors construct an emotional context for politics by expressing anger, assigning blame, and motivating copartisan action. This dissertation explores how media institutions construct the emotional context of politics, focusing on how the partisan identities of news outlets are associated with variation in the emotional landscape of news. This variation is not unique to the contemporary period: the partisan press of the 19th century dominated the pages of political newspapers, where partisan editors and publishers expressed anger, assigned blame, and galvanized copartisans during elections. I theorize that the same emotionality of the 19th century partisan press has reemerged with the rise of cable television news programming over the first two decades of the 21st century. Elite cues from partisan news anchors are likely mobilizing and enraging the American public through increased expressions of anger to their television news audiences. I establish this by mapping emotional landscape of contemporary American news, focusing on two distinct time periods: 2000-2008, in which I analyze the early partisan cable news environment with the establishment of both Fox News and MSNBC alongside the more established CNN; and 2010-2020, in which I test the oft-repeated theory that during the 2016 presidential campaign Donald Trump changed the media environment. To do this, I construct and validate a methodological framework for measuring emotional cues delivered to audiences by the hosts of news programs, enabling me to measure differences in the emotional cues that are delivered to partisan and nonpartisan news viewers. I find that nonpartisan news is more anxious and more enthusiastic than partisan news over both time periods, but that the key difference is that partisan news is more intensely and frequently angry. I also find that while expressions of anger increased in partisan news from 2000-2008 as Fox established itself as a ratings contender, there is no perceptible shift in the emotional environment from 2010-2020. Donald Trump did not cause changes to the media, but rather took advantage of a partisan press that was already conveying anger to the mass public.