Good News – Bad News. Proportion between Positive and Negative Headlines in the Global News Feed (Based on the Google News Aggregator)

Abstract

This article tests the assertion about the dominance of the negative agenda in the media space. To this end, Google News, the world’s largest news aggregator, was taken into account, on the basis of which the ratio of positive and negative news headlines in the information flow was analyzed. Three stages of research were conducted, each one week long with 16 country versions of Google News. In total, it was considered a little less than half a million news headlines. According to the results, 70.54% of the headlines turned out to be positive. This outcome questions the stereotype of the dominance of negative agendas in the global news stream. As it turned out, the ratio of positive and negative news depends on the language (versions of Google News in one language showed very similar results) and the day of the week (the news is a little more positive on Sundays), but does not depend on the level of freedom of speech, cultural and geographical factors.