The Very Different Views Of "Economic Uncertainty" On General And Business Television News
How can we measure the degree of "economic uncertainty" being expressed in the news each day? Scholars like Alexopoulos & Cohen and Baker, Bloom & Davis have constructed simple narrative indicators of economic uncertainty by looking for the keywords "economy/economic" and "uncertain/uncertainty" appearing together in media coverage as an indicator of press attention to an uncertain economic climate. What might this measure look like on television news?
The timeline below plots the percent of airtime across CNN, MSNBC and Fox News using data from the Internet Archive's Television News Archive since 2009 (the start of the data) mentioning this metric of economic uncertainty, showing a surge in the aftermath of the 2008 recession and tapering out by the end of 2013, then building again since early 2018, but at a low bore. Thus far in 2020, despite a US and global economy in shatters, mentions have not increased this year compared with last.
Similarly, here are the same results for the business-oriented channels Bloomberg, CNBC and Fox News since January 2014 (the start of the data), shwoing a surge in mentions in late 2018 continuing through present, with no noticable surge in 2020.
