The US political and online news systems have been increasingly defined by their polarization. Since 2016, media researchers and journalists have found strong evidence of this. This has led to two sets of media that speak about completely differing things.
This site lets you explore media polarization via the top words used in article headlines across five partisan quintiles of American online news sources. These partisan sets are based on sharing patterns of Twitter users, and thus more of an assessment of what registered voters from each party are sharing rather than a direct assessment of the editorial positions of the publication itself. The data is collected from an the Media Cloud online news archive.
Select a term see how its headline usage has varied over time across far-left, center-left, center, center-right, and far-right media. Or try one of the suggested terms we've listed. Rollover the streamgraph to see the exact percentage of headlines from each partisan collection that contained that term in that week. Click the graph to jump to a Media Cloud query that lets you explore the details.