Media Sentiment
Planned section — news-tone analysis across administrations
This section is not yet implemented. Media sentiment requires a news-tone feed that covers 1999 to the present at reasonable cost and with terms compatible with a public, open-source site. No such feed is currently wired in. This page documents the options.
What this section would show
Given a daily news-tone feed, the same per-administration framework used on the Economic Sentiment page would apply:
- Tone timeline — daily or monthly media tone score, shaded by admin.
- Per-admin average tone vs. a long-run baseline.
- World-events overlay — sentiment around specific events.
- Cross-correlation — does media tone lead, follow, or diverge from approval polling and economic sentiment?
Candidate data sources
| Source | Coverage | Access | Fit |
|---|---|---|---|
| GDELT | 2015-present, global news at scale | Free BigQuery + public downloads; CC-BY-NC | Best pre-built tone data, but non-commercial restriction needs care for a public site with commercial-adjacent hosting |
| Media Cloud | 2008-present, US news | Free API with key | Good coverage, broader sentiment analysis needs to run on the side |
| Common Crawl + local NLP | 2013-present | Free | Heavy compute; need to run sentiment classifier ourselves |
| NewsAPI | Rolling ~30 days | Free tier very limited; paid beyond | Not useful for historical analysis |
| [Dow Jones / Bloomberg feeds] | 1999-present | Commercial license | Violates “pure open-source” project policy |
Why not all at once?
Running the Media section properly means:
- Choose a source whose license permits redistribution of derived aggregates
- Build a fetch-and-aggregate pipeline for daily tone per period
- Calibrate “tone” across different publications and methodologies
- Handle quota/rate limits in CI
Each of those is a small project. Until one is scoped and agreed, this section sits as a placeholder.
If you want this built
Open an issue (or say the word) and the likely first cut is: GDELT GKG tone aggregated monthly, with a prominent license callout, and treating it as an observational secondary signal rather than a primary measure.