45 years of economic news from 24 US newspapers analyzed

Pessimism outlasts optimism once a mood takes hold

Social media's role remains unconfirmed

[Getty Images Bank]
[Getty Images Bank]

It is a common complaint that the news these days is nothing but bad news. A flood of gloomy economic stories — recessions, inflation, unemployment — has raised concerns that relentlessly negative coverage is chilling public confidence in the economy.

Yet an analysis of 45 years of US economic news coverage found that positive and negative articles were nearly balanced overall. What has changed, a new study finds, is that once the mood tilts toward optimism or pessimism, it now tends to stay that way for longer than it used to.

The findings were published in the latest issue of the international journal PNAS Nexus (Volume 5, Issue 10) by Luis Rocha, a professor at Ghent University in Belgium, who examined how the tone of US economic news shifted from 1980 to 2025.

This photo is unrelated to the article. [AFP]
This photo is unrelated to the article. [AFP]

Average tone unchanged over 45 years

Rocha analyzed the Daily News Sentiment Index, a measure developed by researchers at the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco. The index scores the words used in economic and financial articles from 24 US newspapers as positive or negative, producing a daily reading of how upbeat or downbeat economic coverage is on any given day. The analysis covered 16,737 days in total.

The index moves in tandem with the University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment Index, which is based on direct surveys of consumers, suggesting it captures real-world economic sentiment to a meaningful degree.

The analysis found that the average tone of economic news did not grow noticeably brighter or darker over the 45-year period. Major events — the dot-com bust, the global financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic — caused sharp swings in tone, but over the long run the balance between positive and negative coverage remained stable.

This photo is unrelated to the article. [TASS]
This photo is unrelated to the article. [TASS]

Negative moods last longer

When Rocha examined how long a given day's tone carried over into the following days and weeks, he found that persistence weakened gradually between 1980 and 1995, held roughly steady from 1996 to 2008, and then strengthened markedly again from 2009 onward.

Day-to-day swings in tone shrank by about 30 percent compared with the early years of the analysis. The share of days on which the tone flipped — from positive to negative or vice versa — also fell, from 47 percent to 35 percent.

The trajectories of good and bad news also diverged. Stretches of unusually positive coverage tended to be short-lived, while runs of unusually negative coverage more often extended for longer periods.

"News sentiment should be understood not as a daily reset that reacts to each new event, but as a persistent regime," Rocha wrote in the paper.

He added that models forecasting economic conditions or risks "should not treat news sentiment as an immediate signal" but must also account for how past shocks reverberate and are retained over time.

This photo is unrelated to the article. [AFP]
This photo is unrelated to the article. [AFP]

Rocha said, however, that the study could not identify the cause of these shifts. The research divided the period into the pre-internet era, the years of internet expansion, and the social media age — but that division alone does not establish that social media caused news sentiment to become more persistent.

Changes in how articles are distributed online, editorial practices that track reader responses in real time, and shifts in underlying economic conditions could all have played a role. Variations in the volume of coverage, the range of topics addressed, and the tendency to revisit the same events repeatedly may also have influenced the results.

Rocha noted several limitations: the study was confined to economic reporting in US newspapers and excluded broadcast media, foreign outlets and social media; and the possibility that word usage itself evolved over 45 years could not be entirely ruled out.

Reference

DOI: 10.1093/pnasnexus/pgag318

Luis E C Rocha, Stable sentiment and persistent dynamics in US economic news over 45 years, PNAS Nexus, Volume 5, Issue 10, October 2026, pgag318.


dbsdn1110@heraldcorp.com