We compare the contents of Fox and MSNBC weekday evening telecasts using natural language analysis with Linguistic Inventory Word Count (LIWC) and sociopolitical dictionaries tapping into moral foundations, values, grievances, and personality. Across time, the two networks differed substantially across many constructs, particularly those from LIWC. The core of the difference between the networks was captured by a four‐component measure which we labeled Personalizing versus Formal speech. Scores on this measure were particularly volatile during 2019 and 2020, a period which included Trump's first impeachment, the beginning of the COVID pandemic, and the 2020 presidential campaign. In comparison with prior presidential election years, only MSNBC showed a drop in positive emotions in 2020, while both networks increased in the use of communal and analytic language. Contrary to our expectations, the language style of the two networks did not demonstrate increasing divergence over time.
Some scholars have presented models of the United States as a set of “nations” with distinct settlement histories and contemporary cultures. We examined personality differences in one such model, that of Colin Woodard, using data from over 75,000 respondents. Four nations were particularly distinct: The Deep South, Left Coast, New Netherland, and the Spanish Caribbean. Differences between nations at the level of the individual person were typically small, but were larger at the level of community, revealing how aggregation can contribute to differences in the lived experience of places in nations such as Yankeedom or Greater Appalachia. We represented effects in a three-dimensional model defined by Authoritarian conventionalism (which differentiated ‘Red’ and ‘Blue’ nations) as well as Cognitive resilience and Competitiveness (which differentiated among the Blue nations). Finally, we adjusted Woodard’s model to better fit the data, and found that nations largely maintained their boundaries, with the most drastic changes occurring on the East Coast.
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