Based on data analysis, is the US mainstream media bullish on Bitcoin?

As Bitcoin has grown from a niche subculture to a global financial phenomenon, mainstream media outlets are grappling with what cryptocurrency is and how they should cover it.

The results are not always pretty, especially when the two first intersect. Crypto supporters often complain about media bias. For example, in a 2018 reddit post, the poster claimed that the media was biased against Bitcoin, and all the comments in the post agreed. In another long thread discussing Bitcoin in the same year, most of the commenters in the thread said there was bias against Bitcoin.

Of course, it’s not hard to find examples of negative media coverage of Bitcoin. But is the media really biased against Bitcoin? Is its coverage out of touch with public interest? Is there a segment of the media that is bullish?

To find out the truth, LongHash delved into the mainstream media’s reporting history over the past few years.

About the dataset

The dataset we used contains 2.6 million articles and news published by 26 different high-profile media outlets between January 2016 and April 2017. These media include major news networks such as CNN and CNBC, major newspapers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as magazines and various popular news websites such as Wired, TechCrunch, Gizmodo, Vice, and Mashable. This dataset does not include media outlets that mainly cover encryption technology.

How much coverage does the media give to Bitcoin?

Of the more than 2.6 million articles in the dataset, 3,580 mention Bitcoin in the title. While this percentage may seem insignificant, it is important to note that our dataset includes articles covering a wide range of topics. For example, Bitcoin seems to have received quite good coverage compared to “dollar” (1,368 articles) and “ethereum” (282 articles).

As expected, our analysis found that the intensity of Bitcoin coverage is closely related to Bitcoin's price movements. According to Pearson correlation analysis, media coverage in 2017 has escalated along with the surge in the price of the currency. During the period covered by the dataset, the number of Bitcoin reports per day showed a moderate correlation (0.39) with the BTC price. Pearson correlation scores range from 1 to -1, that is, from a perfect positive correlation to a perfect negative correlation.

However, if we plot this data, we can see that even after the 2017 bull run, when Bitcoin’s price fluctuated wildly, media coverage dropped to pre-bull run levels. Another price surge in mid-2019 also failed to generate media interest.

When we compared media coverage trends with Google Trends search data for “Bitcoin” during the same period, we found that they were very closely correlated — 0.88, a very strong positive correlation.

But correlation doesn’t necessarily tell us anything about causation. It’s possible that media hype is the primary driver of Google search trends, or it could be that public demand for information about Bitcoin is driving media coverage. But when we spread the data out using the exact same dates, we find that search interest tends to surge before mainstream media coverage.

In other words: mainstream media coverage seems to be following the public’s demand for Bitcoin stories.

Of course, not all media outlets cover Bitcoin in the same way. We analyzed all articles from each outlet to determine what percentage of their total coverage was devoted to Bitcoin.

Our findings aren’t particularly surprising. CNBC is the most finance-focused media on the list, with the highest percentage of articles devoted to Bitcoin. It’s followed by tech-focused blogs Gizmodo, Wired, and TechCrunch. Mainstream media like CNN and The New York Times fall somewhere in the middle. Sites like TMZ and Refinery 29 don’t spend much time on Bitcoin, which makes sense — they’re not designed to provide comprehensive financial coverage.

How objective is the media’s coverage of Bitcoin?

Of course, when Bitcoin is reported and how much it is reported are only part of the story. The more important question is how Bitcoin is reported. Is the media really biased against Bitcoin?

To find out, we ran over 3,500 Bitcoin articles through two different sentiment analysis tools — VADER and TextBlob. While they operate slightly differently, both essentially break down wording to analyze sentiment. Both output results in the same way: a score for each article between -1 (completely negative) and 1 (completely positive).

For example, a sentence typed into TextBlob: “What a great day, I love it!” gets a score of 0.71; “What a terrible day, I hate it!” gets a score of -1. While this machine evaluation is far from perfect, it allows us to understand the sentiment of written text without having to read and evaluate thousands of articles individually.

TextBlob also attempts to assess the subjectivity of the article, scoring it between 0 (completely objective) and 1 (completely subjective).

When we ran Bitcoin-related text through both tools, they scored quite differently, but neither found evidence of a negative bias toward Bitcoin.

VADER’s analysis provides a wide range of scores—each dot represents a score for an article—but the largest cluster falls in the upper half of the graph, closer to 1 (very positive) than to -1 (very negative).

TextBlob’s sentiment analysis produces scores with a much narrower range, but the same general trend, with sentiment leaning more toward positive than negative.

TextBlob also found that most articles tend to fall somewhere between subjective and objective, although there are certainly some very subjective outliers (the small number of pink dots near the top of the graph).

We also looked at the sentiment scores of each media outlet to see if a particular outlet had a bullish or bearish bias towards Bitcoin. For this analysis, we took the average sentiment score of all Bitcoin articles published by each outlet, so we only included data from outlets that published at least 20 Bitcoin-centric articles.

While there are many differences between VADER and TextBlob in terms of specific details, we can still see that the average score for all media is positive in both evaluations.

TechCrunch, Vox, and The New York Times are among the most bullish on Bitcoin according to both tools. Reuters and Axios scored near the bottom in both analyses, but neither fell below zero, so it would be unfair to label any of them as bearish on Bitcoin, at least according to our analysis.

TextBlob’s subjectivity analysis is also worth a look, though again the scores are pretty close. As one might expect, traditional news organizations that value objectivity score lower—they’re more objective. Internet-based new media like Mashable, Vice, Vox, and Gizmodo fall on the more subjective side.

So, is the media really biased against Bitcoin?

In our analysis, we found no evidence of any mainstream media bias against Bitcoin. The data shows that media coverage closely tracks public demand for information about Bitcoin. Neither sentiment analysis tool found any evidence of anti-Bitcoin sentiment in any media that regularly covers Bitcoin.

Of course, these conclusions have certain limitations. The data coverage is large, but still limited. It only includes 26 media outlets and the reference time frame is only a few years, but there are many more media outlets writing about Bitcoin. Machine-based sentiment analysis is far from perfect, and there are other natural language processing tools that, if applied to this same dataset, may produce different results than TextBlob and VADER.

Reasonable human critical thinking is still the best way to evaluate any crypto news article. But the next time you see an article accusing the mainstream media of being bearish on Bitcoin, don’t worry about it. While there are certainly some negative people, overall, the media is actually quite bullish on Bitcoin.

Source/LongHash