The 3 Things Far-Right & Far-Left Political News Sources have in Common

When researchers analyzed almost 6,000 political news stories produced by partisan and nonpartisan media outlets in 2021, three things became clear:

• Media outlets with extreme biases — regardless of whether it was a conservative or liberal bias — tended to use shorter sentences and less formal language than nonpartisan outlets.

• Mainstream news organizations, as a whole, wrote at a higher reading level.

• Far-right and far-left outlets took a more negative tone than nonpartisan outlets. They generally had a lower ratio of positive to negative words.

The researchers describe their findings in a paper forthcoming in Journalism Studies, “At the Extremes: Assessing Readability, Grade Level, Sentiment, and Tone in US Media Outlets.”

Read the full article from Journalist’s Resources here.