https://www.brown.edu/news/2021-01-22/cook
Molly Cook, a junior at Brown, participated in a research project that found that major American news outlets took a more negative tone in their COVID-19 coverage than international news outlets or scientific journals.
PROVIDENCE, R.I. [Brown University] — Molly Cook didn’t know exactly what would come of her Summer 2020 research assistantship — but she certainly never expected it would make national headlines.
Cook, a junior concentrating in economics and applied mathematics at Brown University, spent the warmer months of 2020 working virtually with Dartmouth College economist Bruce Sacerdote and Dartmouth undergraduate Ranjan Sehgal on a timely research question: Why does all American COVID-19 news seem like bad news? And is media coverage equally negative elsewhere in the world?
With supervision from Sacerdote, Cook and Sehgal developed virus-related news search terms, downloaded thousands of news articles from LexisNexis and created a model to assess each article’s tone using sentiment-analysis dictionaries. Ultimately, the research team found that 91% of pandemic-related news stories published in major American media outlets between March and late July were negative in tone, compared to 54% of stories in major international news outlets and 65% of articles in scientific journals. Notably, they saw that those American outlets’ negative tone didn’t let up when cases declined in the summer, nor when pharmaceutical companies made major progress in developing a vaccine.
In November 2020 — the same week Pfizer released news that its COVID-19 vaccine had proven 95% effective in trials — their findings were published in a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper. In the weeks that followed, Cook saw her name appear in the Washington Post, Fortune and MarketWatch, among other high-visibility news sources.
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