The Kinks of Financial Journalism

Abstract

This paper studies the content of financial news as a function of past market returns. As a proxy for media content we use positive and negative word counts from general financial news columns from the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. Our empirical analysis allows us to discriminate between theories that predict hyping good stock performance to those that emphasize negative news. The evidence is conclusive: negative market returns taint the ink of typewriters, while positive returns barely do.