Based on 35,344 news articles published in the Financial Times that cover 40 companies that have been included in the Dow Jones Industrial Average, we find that a negative media sentiment in the form of a negative language tone in news articles is a priced factor in five of nine asset-pricing models that aim to explain the cross-section of stock returns. In particular, the sentiment factor is a priced factor in the market model augmented with the sentiment factor in all three samples—the 2005–09 subsample, the 2010–18 subsample, and the 2005–18 full sample—and in the Fama-French three- and five-factor models augmented with the sentiment factor in the 2010–18 subsample. In addition, factor-spanning regressions with the Fama-French five-factor model as the right-hand-side model confirm that the sentiment factor contributes to the model’s explanation of the stocks’ mean excess returns in the 2005–09 subsample and the 2005–18 full sample.