Source/LongHash
Source/LongHash
As Bitcoin has grown from a niche subculture to a global financial phenomenon, mainstream media outlets have been figuring out what cryptocurrency is and exactly how they should cover it.
The results are not always rosy, especially when the two initially meet. Crypto proponents often complain about bias in the media. For example, in a 2018 reddit post, the poster claimed that the media was biased against Bitcoin, and all the comments on the post agreed. There was also a long thread discussing Bitcoin that same year, and most of the commenters on the thread stated that there was a bias against Bitcoin.
To find out the truth, LongHash delved into the history of mainstream media coverage over several years.
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The dataset we use contains 2.6 million articles, news published by 26 different high-profile media between January 2016 and April 2017. These outlets include major news networks like CNN and CNBC, major newspapers like The New York Times and The Washington Post, as well as magazines and popular news sites like Wired, TechCrunch, Gizmodo, Vice, and Mashable. This time the dataset does not include media outlets that primarily report on encryption technology.
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How much media coverage is there on Bitcoin?
Of the more than 2.6 million articles covered by the dataset, 3,580 mention bitcoin in the title. Although this ratio may seem insignificant, it must be noted that our dataset contains articles covering a wide range of topics. For example, Bitcoin seems to be getting pretty good coverage compared to "USD" (1,368) and "Ethereum" (282).
Unsurprisingly, our analysis found a strong correlation between the intensity of Bitcoin coverage and Bitcoin’s price action. According to the Pearson correlation analysis, in 2017, the intensity of media coverage escalated along with the soaring currency prices. The daily number of Bitcoin reports shows a moderate correlation (0.39) with BTC price over the time period covered by the dataset. Pearson correlation scores range from 1 to -1, from perfect positive correlation to perfect negative correlation.
But if we graph this data, we can see that even after the 2017 bull run, when Bitcoin’s price fluctuated wildly for a while, media coverage dropped to pre-bull market levels. Another price spike in mid-2019 also failed to spark media interest.
When we compared media coverage trends with Google Trends search data for “Bitcoin” over the same period, we found that they were very closely correlated — 0.88, a very strong positive correlation.
But the existence of correlation does not necessarily tell us about causation. It is possible that media hype is the main driver of Google search trends, or it is possible that public demand for information on Bitcoin is driving media coverage. But when we lined up the data using the exact same dates, we found that search interest tended to spike ahead of mainstream media coverage.
In other words: mainstream media coverage seems to be following public demand for the Bitcoin story.
What we found was not particularly surprising. CNBC is the most finance-focused outlet on the list, with the highest percentage of articles devoted to Bitcoin. It was followed by tech-focused blogs Gizmodo, Wired and TechCrunch. Mainstream outlets like CNN and The New York Times are somewhere in the middle. Sites like TMZ and Refinery 29 don't spend much time on Bitcoin, and for good reason—they're not designed to provide comprehensive financial coverage.
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How objective is media coverage of Bitcoin?
Of course, when and how much Bitcoin is reported is only part of the story. The more important question is how Bitcoin is being reported. Is the media really biased against Bitcoin?
To find out, we analyzed more than 3,500 Bitcoin articles through two different sentiment analysis tools — VADER and TextBlob. While they operate in slightly different ways, they all primarily analyze sentiment by dismantling wording. Both output results in the same way: each article has a score between -1 (totally negative) and 1 (totally positive).
For example, entering a sentence into TextBlob: "Today was great, I loved it!" would result in a score of 0.71; "What a horrible day, I hated it!" would result in a score of -1. While this machine assessment is far from perfect, it could allow us to understand the sentiment of written texts without having to read and evaluate thousands of articles individually.
TextBlob also attempts to rate the subjectivity of the article, giving a score between 0 (totally objective) and 1 (totally subjective).
When we ran Bitcoin-related reporting text through both tools, they scored quite differently, but neither found evidence of a negative bias toward Bitcoin.
The results of VADER's analysis provide a wide range of scores—each dot represents an article's score—but the largest clusters fall in the upper half of the graph, closer to 1 (very positive) rather than -1 (very negative).
TextBlob's sentiment analysis produces a much narrower range of scores, but the general trend is the same, with sentiment leaning more towards positive than negative.
TextBlob also found that most articles tend to fall somewhere between subjectivity and objectivity, although there are certainly some very subjective outliers (the handful of pink dots near the top of the graph).
We also looked at the sentiment scores of various media outlets to understand whether a particular media outlet tends to be bullish or bearish on Bitcoin. In this analysis, we refer to the average sentiment score of all Bitcoin articles published by each media outlet, so we only include data from media outlets that have published at least 20 Bitcoin-centric articles.
While VADER and TextBlob disagree on the specifics, we can still see that the average score for all outlets is positive in both evaluations.
TextBlob's subjectivity analysis is also worth a look, although the scores are also pretty close. As one might expect, traditional news organizations that value objectivity score lower—they are more objective. New Internet-based media such as Mashable, Vice, Vox, and Gizmodo fall on the more subjective side.
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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 the intensity of media coverage will closely follow the public's demand for Bitcoin information. Neither sentiment analysis tool found any evidence of targeting Bitcoin in any of the media outlets that regularly cover Bitcoin.
Reasonable human critical thinking is still the best way to evaluate any crypto news article. But next time you see an article blaming the mainstream media for bad news about Bitcoin, don’t bother. While there are certainly some people who take a negative view, overall, the media is actually quite bullish on Bitcoin.
LongHash, Use data to understand the blockchain.
