Tracking The Similarity Of Television News Word Use Over The Past Decade

How similar are the words spoken across television news each day and has that similarity changed much over the past decade? The timeline below tracks the similarity in word usage across CNN, MSNBC and Fox News by month (using a 3-month rolling average) over the past decade by computing a Pearson correlation of their respective monthly closed captioning histograms. CNN and MSNBC have always been far more similar to one another than to Fox News, but that similarity peaked in September 2016 and has remained fairly stable ever since. Fox News' similarity to the two used to be fairly similar, but since mid-2016 has diverged, with Fox more similar to CNN than to MSNBC. In all, their word usage is extremely similar.

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