*Insert negative headline here*

News headlines became progressively more negative from 2000 to 2019, while the amount of neutral headlines decreased over that same period, per a new study published this week in the peer-reviewed journal PLOS.

📰😡 A deeper dive… Scientists used machine learning algorithms to analyze 23 million headlines from 47 of the most popular US news orgs. The headlines were broken-down in two ways: based on sentiment (positive or negative) and six basic emotional categories: anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, and neutral.

You ready?

• The proportion of news headlines based around fear (+150%), anger (+104%), sadness (+54%), disgust (+29%) and joy (+14%) all increased over the past two decades.
• There was a pattern of increasing negative sentiment over time, with the average news headline going from slightly positive in 2000 (+0.08) to slightly negative by 2019 (-0.15).
• Headlines from right-leaning news media – as classified by AllSides’ Media Bias Chart – were “consistently more negative [on average] than headlines from left-leaning outlets over the entire studied time period,” the study found.

📱💬 Zoom out: All of this may not come as a surprise in today’s social media-driven age: a separate study measuring the reach of tweets found that each moral or emotional word used in a tweet increased its virality by 20%, on average.