News Narratives
What This Measures
This dataset documents the dominant economic and market narratives appearing in major financial news coverage each week. It is designed to provide a systematic record of the themes present in financial media during periods when investor sentiment diverges from its expected path.
Methodology
Each calendar week ending Friday, we identify the dominant economic, policy, and broad market narratives appearing across major financial news outlets. The sources are Reuters, Bloomberg, CNBC, Yahoo Finance, Financial Times, and The Wall Street Journal. A topic qualifies if it appears in at least three of these sources during the week.
The analysis is performed on Saturday so that weekend “Week in Review” coverage summarizing the prior trading week can be incorporated. These summaries are assigned to the prior Friday’s week.
Company-specific earnings stories are excluded unless they clearly reflect broader market themes. Weekend reports introducing new developments are assigned to the following week.
Qualifying themes are standardized using controlled clustering to maintain consistent topic groupings across weeks while allowing small wording differences that reflect how issues are framed in current coverage. Narratives are ranked by the number of outlets reporting the theme, and the five most widely reported narratives are recorded each week.
For each week’s narratives, a tone classification is shown in parentheses. Positive (Pos), Negative (Neg), or Neutral (Neu) reflects the prevailing economic framing across qualifying outlets during that week. The number in parentheses indicates how many outlets reported the theme.
Financial journalism often emphasizes risk developments and downside uncertainty. Tone classifications therefore reflect prevailing media framing rather than a balanced economic scorecard and may exhibit a structural bias toward caution over time.
