The art of positive reporting in media discourse: <i>Time</i> magazine’s linguistic positivity bias over the 20th century

Abstract Linguistic positivity bias is widely examined in spoken communication and written academic communication. Existing research proposes that this trend of favoring positive language use is common and universal in human communication. However, to date, no existing study has confirmed this tendency to use more positive words than negative ones in media discourse. By examining a list of positive and negative words and how they are distributed in the Time Magazine Corpus of American English, a large diachronic corpus with nearly 100 million words, the study reveals a greater increase in the use of positive words compared to negative ones in journal articles published in Time magazine between the 1920s and the 1990s. Finally, such an increased use of positive words in media discourse may be a result of the general tendency for positive communication, the shift toward constructive journalism, the application of positive psychology in media discourse, and the post-war socio-economic and technological development coupled with media commercialization.