Introduction

Thanks for reading. This is a follow up to the previous post Comparing the headlines of Capitol Weekly and CalMatters for 2023. If you’re interested in that piece you can read it here. In this post we will be looking specifically at the opinion pieces of these sites. The articles analyzed for CalMatters are from their Commentary section and the articles analyzed for Capitol Weekly come from their Opinion section. We will analyze them for positivity and negativity as well as specific sentiments (e.g. trust, fear, surprise).

Data Collection

The links for the articles were collected on October 8th, 2023. The articles themselves were scraped from the websites on October 11th, 2023. For CalMatters there were 3,354 articles scraped from their Commentaries ranging from November 22nd, 2015 through October 8th, 2023. The Capitol Weekly dataset consists of 1,038 articles from their Opinions ranging from November 5th, 2012 through October 6th 2023. For this analysis though, the articles were limited to those in 2023 resulting in 316 articles from CalMatters and 123 articles from Capitol Weekly.

For both sites the headline, author, date and text of the article were collected.

Average Positivity by Site

TLet’s take a look at CalMatters’ and Capitol Weekly’s articles and determine what the average sentiment score is for each site.

In the graph below we can see that Capitol Weekly averaged higher levels of positivity in their opinion pieces than CalMatters did in their commentary pieces for the year 2023. Capitol Weekly averaged 58.5% positive words in their 2023 opinion pieces and CalMatters averaged 46.8% positive words in their commentary articles.

Sentiment by Author

Now let’s take a look and see which authors were the most positive and negative at each site for their Opinion/Commentary articles

We can see below that, by far, the author who uses the highest ratio of positive words in this dataset is Greg Lucas writing Opinion pieces for Capitol Weekly. The author who uses the highest ratio of positive words for CalMatters is Alejandro Lazo, their Climate Policy Reporter. All of Capitol Weekly’s top five most positive authors in this dataset use a significantly higher ratio of positively coded words in their articles than CalMatters’ top five most positive authors.

Now for the most negative authors. It’s important to mention that in this dataset CalMatters only has 8 unique authors for their Commentaries in 2023. Capitol Weekly, on the other hand, has 122 unique authors! That’s a huge difference especially when you consider CalMatters has significantly more articles in this dataset than Capitol Weekly. It’s a small handful of authors writing commentaries for CalMatters while Capitol Weekly seems to give platform to many authors in their opinion section. In addition, this means that our averages for Capitol Weekly authors are mostly calculated from one observation or article, while the average positivity/negativity of the CalMatters authors is being calculated across many articles.

It looks like Capitol Weekly takes the cake on both ends. We saw above that their most positive authors were the most positive, and below we see that their most negative authors are the most negative with John S. Lam using the highest ratio of negatively coded words on average in his articles for Capitol weekly followed by Laura L. Carstensen and Paul Irving penning an article together. On the CalMatters side Pedro Rios averages the highest ratio of negative coded words in his articles.

Sentiment Over the Year

We’ve looked at the average sentiment of the sites, and by authors. Now I’m curious, is there a trend over time for the average positivity or negativity of these sites? Let’s find out!

There doesn’t seem to be any oviouse trend looking at a daily level, as seen below. Despite having more articles in total, it does look like Capitol Weekly does have some gaps in the year when they weren’t publishing Commentary articles as often.

Okay, what if we averaged by week? Would a trend be visible then?

Something seems to be forming here. Both CalMatters and Capitol Weekly seem to hit peak positivity at around the 10th week of the year (about a month after Valentine’s Day? And around daylight savings time? When we lose an hour of sleep? What are they so happy about then?) with Calmatter reaching near that peak again just a couple weeks before the writing of this post.

Maybe a clearer pattern by month?

A little bit more of a pattern appears. Capitol Weekly hits peak positivity in May, right after the April showers, and hits another peak in August (probably because of my Birthday), while ending at a low at the start of October, but limited data was collected for this month.

CalMatters seems to have a trend of gradually climbing in positivity and then dropping to climb again. Their peaks appear to be in March and at the start of this month in October.

Beyond just Positive and Negative

Alright, so we’ve taken a look at which site is more positive and which authors are more positive. Now Let’s take a look at the primary sentiments of the words used in these articles, beyond just positive and negative.

Below we can see both sites are pretty similar with the kinds of words they use. At both news sites, words coded for a sentiment of trust are by far the most commonly used, followed by anticipation and fear. The middle is where we see some difference with Capitol Weekly using words coded for joy more than sadness and anger, while CalMatters uses words coded for sadness and anger more than joy. The sentiments of disgust and surprise round out the bottom at both sites.

These findings fall in line with what we observed above. Both sites have similar rankings and somewhat similar distributions of the sentiments they use in their articles, but Capitol Weekly, which we saw above tends to be more positive, uses joy more and CalMatters uses sadness more. While not a huge difference based on the data we are observing, Captiol Weekly seems to have a more optimistic view in their Opinions section than CalMatters has in their Commentary section this year.

Summary

In closing, we found that Capitol Weekly’s Opinion articles of 2023 generally tend to be more positive than CalMatters’ Commentary pieces. This is despite the fact that the most negative authors in our dataset were still for Capitol Weekly because the most positive authors in our dataset were also writing for Capitol Weekly. Beyond just positive and negative, the sentiments in the articles were very common for both sites, but Capitol Weekly used words coded for the joy sentiment on at a higher rate than CalMatters did. Overall Capitol Weekly would seem to have a more positive outlook of California news in their Opinion section than CalMatters does in their Commentary section.

Join me next week when I think I might look at partisan support of ethnic groups in Central Valley State Assembly districts based on election results data, maybe, possibly.