Beyond Neutrality: A Longitudinal Analysis of Gender, Party, and Media Visibility in the Tone of US Political Coverage

Research shows that female politicians often receive more negative news coverage than their male counterparts, which can undermine voter support and contribute to their underrepresentation in politics. Despite the increase in politically active women and heightened attention to gender issues in political discourse in the United States, the past decade has also witnessed a rise in divisive rhetoric and political polarization. These changes not only transformed the political environment but also may have impacted media coverage of political figures. Despite the evolving sociopolitical landscape, existing research on news sentiment lacks a longitudinal perspective. This study uses transformer-based classifiers for sentiment detection and state space models for time series analysis to provide new longitudinal evidence on the evolution of positive and negative coverage of 1,095 US politicians in almost 900,000 news articles during the 2010s. The results indicate that while some female politicians experienced more negative coverage than men, the pattern varied depending on the politicians’ party affiliation and media visibility. In both election and routine periods, the media portrayed female Democrats, who received moderate levels of media coverage, less negatively than male Republicans, but more critically than female Republicans and male Democrats. Notably, Democratic and Republican women received slightly more positive coverage in most election years of the 2010s. Highly visible politicians, especially women, received more negative attention overall. The study and its findings advance our understanding of how news sentiment varies across different groups of politicians and how it fluctuates between election and nonelection periods.