Atheism in US and UK Newspapers: Negativity about Non-Belief and Non-Believers

Atheists are among the most disliked “religious” groups in United States, but origins of this aversion remain poorly understood. Because media an important source public attitudes, we analyze coverage atheism and atheists American British newspapers. Using computational text analysis techniques, including sentiment topic modeling, show that is portrayed negatively by print media. Significantly, greater negativity associated with as a concept than individuals. Building on insight, challenging arguments prominent atheist intellectuals attract negative coverage, also find famous actually more positive or general. Overall, our findings add new dimension to scholarship differences between individual-targeted group-targeted tolerance establishing for first time mirrors such differences.