Polarisation in the media part 2

Jack posted yesterday about how the degree of polarisation (whether someone has a strong positive or negative opinion) varies by media type.  Jack mentioned theCraft, Wanta and Mugur study that showed that broadcast media tends to be the most polarised with internet coverage being only slightly more opinionated than mainsteam newspapers.  Although the paper was presented earlier this year, the data was sourced way back in mid-2003.  As Jack pointed out, this means that it is not up to date with the changes to the online media landscape in the last few years and that “a further sudy would be required to validate this data”.

Luckily since Metrica has pooled a lot of our media evaluation data together in order to publish the recent Metrica Numbers benchmarking report, we can help to answer this point.

Media analysis of more than 200,000 online ‘articles’ published since 2003 shows that there was a strong increase in the percentage of articles with a strong tone (either favourable or unfavourable) over 2007 and 2008.

It is suggested that this is linked with the strong take-up of social media in the last couple of years.  Social media does not have the same levels of editorial control as mainstream media and bloggers in particular are likely to portray strong opinions.

Indeed, if we look at the difference between mainstream offline media, main stream online media and social media across 2007 and 2008, we can see that social media is much more likely to feature strong tone (with online and offline showing similar levels of polarisation).

Maybe this lack of balanced opinion in social media is why our latest UKPulse survey showed that just 5% of people said that they trusted blogs compared to 43% for national newspapers.