Which academic studies have quantitatively compared New York Times sentiment or tone for Donald Trump versus prior presidents?
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Executive summary
There is limited direct academic work in the provided search results that performs a quantitative, side‑by‑side sentiment or tone comparison of New York Times coverage of Donald Trump versus prior presidents; most items are Times news and opinion pieces or topical research using NYT as one source among many (for example, a GWU project that includes the New York Times in a multi‑paper sentiment index) [1] [2]. Available sources do not mention a scholarly paper that exclusively and quantitatively compares NYT sentiment toward Trump against multiple prior presidents using a clear, replicated methodology (not found in current reporting).
1. What the reporting shows — lots of NYT content, few academic comparisons
The search returns many New York Times articles and opinion pieces about President Trump’s actions, approval ratings and tone in coverage (for example, pieces on approval ratings, speeches and policy) but doesn’t surface an academic study that explicitly compares NYT sentiment toward Trump with prior presidents in a systematic, quantitative way [3] [4] [5]. The Times itself has produced internal analyses of coverage patterns (the Times’ reporting sometimes analyzes its own coverage short of a formal academic sentiment comparison) [6].
2. Closest scholarly match — multi‑paper sentiment indices that include the NYT
A quantitative project that is relevant but not a direct head‑to‑head NYT‑Trump vs. prior presidents paper is the GWU Regulatory Studies piece that measures “regulatory sentiment” and uncertainty using seven newspapers, including the New York Times, from 1985 through early 2021; it uses dictionary‑based sentiment analysis on ProQuest text data and constructs composite indices to examine changes across administrations, including the Trump era [2]. That project compares sentiment across time and administrations but does so across multiple outlets and focuses on regulatory coverage specifically, not global NYT tone across all reporting.
3. Why the GWU work matters and what it doesn’t answer
The GWU approach demonstrates how scholars quantify press sentiment — extracting text from databases, applying dictionaries or other sentiment tools, and aggregating into indices — and it shows the NYT frequently serves as a data source in such studies [2]. But it does not offer a clean, standalone comparison of “NYT sentiment on Trump vs. prior presidents” across the full paper of record, nor does it isolate editorial/opinion voice from straight news, which matters for claims about tone [2].
4. What news coverage reveals about perceived tone and effect
Numerous Times stories and opinion columns directly address negative or critical angles in coverage of Trump — on his approval ratings, policy decisions, National Security Strategy and public statements — and those pieces frame the paper’s reporting as scrutinizing health, age and actions [4] [7] [1]. The existence of Times reporting that analyzes its own coverage (for example, the Times’ analysis of Trump’s early days and fixation on predecessors) suggests internal attention to tone, but that is journalistic analysis rather than peer‑reviewed quantitative comparison [6].
5. Alternative viewpoints and methodological caveats
Academic sentiment analysis across presidencies faces clear methodological choices that affect outcomes: which texts to include (news vs. opinion), which outlets to compare, dictionary vs. machine‑learning methods, and time windows for each presidency. The GWU work uses a dictionary approach on regulatory stories across seven papers, showing how choices narrow the question and create both strengths (comparability) and limits (scope) [2]. Available sources do not report an academic study that resolves those methodological debates specifically for the NYT‑versus‑past‑presidents question (not found in current reporting).
6. Where scholars or journalists could productively go next
A definitive, quantitative NYT‑specific comparison would require: (a) assembling a representative corpus of NYT articles (news vs. opinion) for each presidency; (b) documenting text‑selection criteria and time windows; (c) choosing and validating sentiment/tone measures (dictionary and supervised models); and (d) making data and code public for replication. The GWU project provides a template for multi‑paper sentiment work, but the available reporting does not show such a replication focused solely on the Times and on Trump vs. predecessors [2].
7. Bottom line for researchers and readers
If you want an academic, quantitative, NYT‑only comparison of tone toward Trump and prior presidents, the current reporting and search results point to related methods and multi‑paper studies [2] but do not provide a published, peer‑reviewed study that answers the question directly (not found in current reporting). For now, the best evidence in the indexed sources is: the NYT is repeatedly analyzed and criticized in public reporting [8] [9], and scholars have quantified sentiment including the NYT as one source [2], but a focused NYT‑versus‑past‑presidents quantitative paper is not shown in these results (not found in current reporting).