Journal of Mass Communication & Journalism

The research follows three broadcasts from NBC Nightly News from the months of February, July, and October to observe the amount of positive, negative, and neutral polarity words in each of them from the specific years of 1988 and 2018 on American television. This study was conducted with public online videos of the broadcasts converted in to transcripts and the MPQA Subjectivity lexicon. The two were compared with a program written specifically to find words that exist on both the transcript and lexicon. The results of this study revealed that approximately 75% each broadcast studied was dedicated to positive and negative words while a quarter was reserved for neutral language. Implications of the results include possibility that positive and negative polarity words may be used more frequently than people assume and that what people think to be normal may not actually be so according to sentiment analysis.