Media Analysis Reimagined
In today's rapidly evolving media landscape, understanding how different platforms shape public discourse has become crucial for informed citizenship. Traditional legacy media outlets - newspapers, television networks, and established digital publications - operate under editorial standards developed over decades. Meanwhile, social media platforms like X provide real-time, unfiltered reactions from millions of users, creating a dynamic environment where news spreads instantly but with varying degrees of accuracy and emotional intensity. This AI-powered app monitors top global headlines and finds corresponding X posts, comparing how the same stories are covered, discussed, and received across these fundamentally different media environments. By examining sentiment patterns, emotional responses, and narrative framing, we can discover hidden patterns that influence how society processes information, forms opinions, and makes decisions. This comparative approach doesn't seek to determine which platform is "better," but rather to illuminate how each contributes to the complex tapestry of modern news consumption, helping readers develop media literacy skills essential for navigating our interconnected information age. Specifically, news stories are analyzed for overall sentiment (on a 0-1 scale where 0=very negative, 1=very positive) as well as the dominant emotion expressed, from both legacy sources and X posts. The data is then filtered for news items that are covered substantially differently and conveniently displayed in a table below (see the Latest Data section) for users to peruse, along with a commentary on the differences. The data automatically updates each day at 10pm CST (to capture a full day's worth of news stories), and is automatically posted here as well as on our X account, @Legacy_VS_X. Note that while only stories with a substantial difference in coverage are displayed here (in the latest data section), the full data for each article is in the database in case you'd like to refer to it later. See the source for further details.
Latest Data
Comparison of world news coverage between legacy media outlets and social media discourse on X. Data is automatically updated daily at 10pm to capture evolving narratives based on a full day's worth of news headlines.
| Timestamp | Article Title | Legacy Sentiment | X Sentiment | Legacy Emotion | X Emotion | Analysis |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| December 5, 2025 @ 9:39PM | Whisker's Litter-Robot Just Became the First Automatic Litter Box Eligible for HSA and FSA Spending | 0.75 | 0.95 | Surprise | Enthusiasm | The X posts generally exhibit a more positive sentiment than the article's 0.75, with an average of 0.95, reflecting greater excitement about wellness devices eligible for HSA and FSA. While the article's dominant emotion is surprise, the X posts feature a variety of positive emotions like enthusiasm, making their tone more promotional and engaging. Overall, the X posts come across as more upbeat and personally invested compared to the article's informative and mildly surprising style. |
| December 5, 2025 @ 10:30AM | The AI bubble talk is coming from inside the earnings calls | 0.4 | 0.75 | Fear | Optimism | X posts exhibit a higher average sentiment of 0.75 compared to the article's 0.4, indicating a more positive tone overall. While the article's dominant emotion is fear, reflecting caution about the AI bubble, the X posts lean towards optimism and excitement about AI growth. This contrast suggests X posts are more enthusiastic and less apprehensive than the article's cautious narrative. |
| December 5, 2025 @ 1:31PM | Read the memo Warner Bros. Discovery sent employees after Netflix won the bidding war for its key assets | 0.7 | 0.7 | Excitement | Neutral | The X posts have an average sentiment of 0.7, matching the article's positive sentiment, indicating a similar overall tone. However, the dominant emotion in X posts is neutral, differing from the article's excitement, which suggests users are more detached and factual. This contrast shows that while both convey positivity, X posts lack the article's enthusiastic energy, focusing instead on straightforward reporting. |
| December 5, 2025 @ 6:54PM | OpenAI's Code Red: Protect the loop, delay the loot | 0.75 | 0.65 | Excitement | Neutral | The X posts have an average sentiment of 0.65, which is slightly less positive than the article's sentiment of 0.75, indicating a more balanced view overall. While the article's dominant emotion is Excitement, the most common emotion in the posts is Neutral, reflecting a factual and less enthusiastic tone. This suggests the posts are more observational and competitive in nature compared to the article's upbeat perspective on the AI race. |
| December 5, 2025 @ 6:51PM | Mortal Kombat, Hogwarts Legacy, And Batman: Arkham Are Going To A Company That Closed Its Only AAA Game Studio | 0.8 | 0.5 | Excitement | Neutral | The X posts have an average sentiment of 0.5, which is lower than the article's 0.8, indicating a more neutral overall tone rather than the article's positive enthusiasm. The most common dominant emotion in X posts is Neutral, contrasting with the article's Excitement, as the posts primarily deliver factual updates without strong emotional undertones. Some X posts introduce slight concern, differing from the article's uniformly optimistic perspective. |
Archive
To access data for a previous date, please refer to our account on X, which automatically posts the current day's data at 10pm CST daily.
Source Code
This project is completely open source and free. It requires only PHP, MySQL, and API keys for xAI and NewsAPI. It is webserver agnostic, so you can use Apache, nginx, or whatever else will run PHP. The code that automatically posts the data to X also requires an API key from X and the free software packages wkhtmltopdf/wkhtmltoimage and ImageMagick (if you're running Ubuntu, sudo apt install wkhtmltopdf imagemagick is quick and easy).
Here is a quick rundown on the files:
- config.php - set your API keys here
- database.php - database functions to connect to your MySQL server, uses the MySQLi PHP extension
- get_news.php - gets today's global news headlines from legacy source via NewsAPI
- index.php - this file, which acts as the primary frontend
- main.php - responsible for invoking the functions defined in get_news.php, xai_article.php, and xai_x_posts.php. This is the file you want to execute in your crontab
- table.php - handles the latest data table, index.php calls this file as an include
- xai_article.php - passes a legacy news article to the xAI API to perform sentiment and emotion analysis
- xai_x_posts.php - searches X (via xAI API) for posts describing a particular news story. Finds the average sentiment and dominant emotion among these posts
- x_post.php - responsible for automatically posting the data to X. This should also be executed via cron slightly after main.php. Personally, I run them at 10:00 pm and 10:05 pm. Note that this requires an X API key in config.php as well as the TwitterOAuth package (easy install via composer)