Negativity makes us polarized: a longitudinal study of media tone and opinion polarization in Hong Kong

Abstract

Public opinion polarization has recently become a prominent social problem in many societies, but whether negative media tone is a possible culprit for opinion polarization remains unclear. Using opinion-polling data on approval ratings of Chief Executive from the Public Opinion Program at the University of Hong Kong, we examined the longitudinal relationship between media tone and opinion polarization in Hong Kong. Opinion polarization is conceptualized as the dispersion and the bimodality of opinion distribution, and is operationalized by opinion distribution variance, kurtosis and a composite score. Positive and negative media tones are coded using computerized text analysis programs. Time series analysis suggests that negative news media tone Granger causes opinion polarization but the reverse causal relationship does not hold. In addition, positive news media tone is not related to opinion polarization.