Last week, jumping off of Recorded Future's Senate Campaign Analytics Dashboard, we discussed in this space the claim of Christine O'Donnell, the Republican candidate for US Senate in Delaware, that a liberally biased media had been unduly negative of her in an attempt to assassinate her character. Recorded Future's news analytics allowed for the mass export of all O'Donnell events written in the media, and with them the auto-generated sentiment score gauging both the positive and the negative sentiment in the writing. The results showed that all sources of media wrote positively about her, with mainstream news writing both more positively and less negatively than blogs. What that analysis did not take into account was time.
Recorded Future analyzes text from online media sources and extracts entities, events, and time. The temporal extraction works by recognizing within the text both actual timestamps (On November 8, 2009, etc) or relative timestamps (next week, two months ago, etc) which are compared to the published date. By doing this, we can use the Recorded Future API to search for and extract events based either on published date or on event date.
Looking at the Campaign Dashboard, we see that sentiment for all candidates seems to have fallen over the past thirty days. To test this hypothesis, I exported the last five weeks of coverage for the 29 candidates we're following and analyzed all events that had any sentiment calculation associated with the text describing the event. I then calculated both the average positive and negative sentiment across all candidates per week over the time period. Here are the results.
During the week of September 12th, the coverage of all candidates combined was written with a considerably more positive than negative tone. If the media had any bias, it was towards painting in a favorable light. However, as time carried forward and campaigns progressed, the tone used to describe candidates in general has grown increasingly negative. Last week's coverage, from October 10th through the 16th, was the first week that we have tracked a stronger average negative tone than positive tone.
We can further break this down by party. How has the tone changed over time for Democrats versus Republicans? Here are the results for the Democrats:
And here is the tone of the Republican coverage:
What we find is that the Democrats saw much more negative coverage two weeks ago, and have since seen the trend reverse itself, with a slightly higher average positive sentiment attached to their events last week. The Republicans, meanwhile, have seen the media simultaneously become increasingly negative, while their positive sentiment score last week also hit an all-time low. This can be attributed to a number of factors -- some falling poll results, President Obama's increasing presence on the campaign trail, the inevitable backlash against frontrunners -- and to determine which is which requires examining the individual races. The trend, though, is clear: coverage is getting less favorable for the Republicans, both in absolute terms and in comparison to the Democrats.
If you're interested to learn more about how our news analytics technology works, check out this white paper on Recorded Future. If you have any questions or would like to learn more, please contact us.