Hi everyone,
I'm a big fan of the SRF "Heute Morgen" podcast and listen to it almost every morning to get an overview of the current day. Recently, however, I started to feel like I was getting hammered with the same, mostly negative topics every morning. In particular, a certain gentleman from overseas seemed to have taken up permanent, rent-free residence in my head.
This made me curious: Was this just my subjective feeling, or was there something more to it?
So, as a small hobby project, I wrote a web application to analyze the episodes from the past year (August 2024 – July 2025).
How did I do it?
- Data Source: I collected the titles and topic lists for each "Heute Morgen" episode from the SRF website.
- AI Analysis: For each entry, I used Gemini (Google's Large Language Model) to get a neutral assessment (yes, also AI's are biased). I combined the headline with the topics provided by SRF and had the AI perform a sentiment analysis (Good, Bad, Neutral) and extract the most important keywords.
The prompt I used for this looked like this: You are a Swiss German news assistant. Analyse the following podcast episode and return STRICT JSON only with keys keywords (array of 5-6 concise, distinct keywords extracted from TITLE + DESCRIPTION) and sentiment (Good, Bad, Neutral). Do NOT wrap the JSON in code fences.\nTITLE: ${title}\nDESCRIPTION: ${desc}
A small peek at the raw data:
Here’s an example of what the processed data looks like:
The Analysis
Here are the charts that resulted from the analysis:
1. Distribution of News Sentiment
Transparency hint: a previous version had neutral and bad exchanged. What remains is the same (low) amount of good sentiments. It turns out my feeling wasn't wrong. The majority of the news was classified as negative.
2. The Top 15 Most Frequent Topics
The Topic "Trump" is the undisputed number 1 most frequently mentioned topic. Closely followed by "Schweiz" (Switzerland) and "USA".
3. Topics over Time (Last Year)
Mentions of the same top 5 Topics over time
4. Sentiment Over Time (Last Year)
This chart shows the distribution of sentiments per month. You can see that negative news was dominant throughout the entire year
Disclaimer: I'm a software engineer, not a data analyst. So, please take this analysis with a grain of salt. It was mainly a fun project to satisfy my curiosity.
What do you all think? Does this match your perception? Are you tired of reading / hearing news in switzerland about the same things all over?
by sinthorius
11 comments
I think it’s a general phenomenon that news tends to be disproportionately negative.
I’ve been asking myself in the past if I should just quit reading/listening to it entirely.
I love that some people take the time to do such things. Thanks op
I’ve also noticed only bad news from SRF, not only that but it seems they play the same 5 songs on repeat everyday and have since a few months completely stopped listening to them because of this.
Nice to see some data about it.
News are usually bad. Take a look at “news values” or “Nachrichtenwerttheorie”. One of them is “negativity”. It has been like this for centuries
Very well done
I suggest sending it to Srf and awaiting a response.
Have you written a paper about that or only this post?
I’d love to include this research in my media classes to show my students an example of bias / negative framing of the world
Bad news are good news…
Bad news sell better maybe?
What would be the point of having a public broadcaster that picks and chooses topics in order to make you feel better? Why should the news not talk about the president of the nation that directly affects our country like almost no other doing maneuvers that will have severe impacts on the global economy and in turn our domestic market?
I have no idea why the goal should be shoehorning in “everything’s alright” news into a programme no matter the relevance so we can pat ourselves on the back and point at a bar graph where exactly equal time is devoted to “positive” and “negative” news.
If that balance is all you want, then stop reading (or read less of) the news, and do something else with your time. Maybe read your local paper if you want to know what’s happening on a smaller scale. The news you’re talking about here isn’t supposed to be your cheer-up machine, it’s supposed to be a window into what’s happening in the world.
Cool idea! From a first glance I’m wondering, in your first bar chart the bad sentiment posts clearly dominate, but in the last stacked bar chart agains time there seem to be more neutral posts (all months but Jan and May). Am I seeing wrong or was something mixed up in the process?
Thank you for the analysis. It’s awesome that you satisfied your curiousity and shared with us. A rare good post in this sub!
This isn’t surprising to me. The news industry on the whole gets more clicks from negativity. This is why I urge everyone to subscribe to ensure you have some good news in your media diet. I subscribe to https://fixthenews.com/. It’s a newsletter that is free and comes to you every 2 weeks with good news from social, technological and environmental wins. If you want to support this work, you can pay $50 p.a. which is like 40- and 1/3 goes to charity anyway.
Angus Harvey who runs the project gave a really good Ted talk this year, here it is as well if intersted
https://youtu.be/D3I8ZeiLX2s?si=m9mJCCL2Ml1cm8Zi
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