•In the presence of informational frictions, news influence peoples’ expectations.•Employ a detailed daily media dataset.•Distinguish between amount of news and content of news.•Find economically significant effect of media reporting on inflation expectations.•More news improve forecast accuracy only if they are not framed in a negative way. The full-information rational expectations model is clearly rejected by the data. The expectation formation process has therefore important implications for macroeconomic outcomes. We examine how consumers react to information provided by the media, by taking into account that this information is imperfect. We show that information rigidities play a role empirically. Intensive news reporting improves the accuracy of consumers’ inflation expectations, because they receive more information. However, this effect depends on the tone of the news. If news are badly toned, the effect reverts.