A Computer's Hot Take on the 2016 Election

I wondered if it would be possible to use that list--and Reagan's computer skills--to assess a huge trove of campaign coverage over time, so we could compare the overall tone of articles about the different candidates. But to do this, we would need a ginormous database of campaign coverage. Digging into the Nexis newspaper archives, I collected tens of thousands of articles about Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump--whatever was published in more than 50 U.S. newspapers and websites over a 13-month period from July 2015 through August 2016. Reagan then took the data and fed it into his computer model, which spit out a complex portrait of the tone of campaign coverage over the past year. We had the beginnings of a sentiment analysis of presidential campaign coverage, one that might suggest the emotional tone of media stories about each candidate.