Wall Street news on Main Street

Over the past decades, people have had an increasing chance to receive eco- nomic information, especially news related to the stock market. This is because the fraction of the U.S. population owning stocks has increased rapidly. However, it does not mean that a majority of news sources have started to deal with financial news more. We do not know how traditional media, such as newspapers, have dealt with financial news during the same period, nor do we know the influence of this environmental change on political attitudes.

In this report, I analyze the type of contexts in which the stock market has been described in The New York Times from 1981 to 2011 by Wordfish and the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model. I find that a plunge in the stock market and political events affect the amount of political topics in stock market news. In particular, after the financial crisis of 2008–2009, stock market news consisted of economic, political, and social topics.