The US Congress mentions “terrorism” in the same pattern the NYT does:
(The Congress data covers two-year intervals (as in the source), so it may seem like gaps above.)
The US Congress mentions “terrorism” in the same pattern the NYT does:
(The Congress data covers two-year intervals (as in the source), so it may seem like gaps above.)
Does The New York Times devote its attention proportionally to the issue? It depends on the reader. I took the fraction of articles mentioning “terrorism” and “terrorist” from from NYT Chronicle and compared it with the number of actual terrorist attacks and casualties from the Global Terrorism Database.
The last two charts show that The NYT ignores terrorist attacks in general. While terrorism casualties are at their peak, the newspaper devotes to them only 1/3 of the 9/11 volume.
The New York Times evolved over time in words and topics (one, two). And so did the US Congress.
To track topics in the congressional agenda, I compared the word frequency in bill titles over the last 40 years (see Appendix for details):
Health care takes about 18% of US GDP, but the US Congress mentions it only 400 times a year in its bill titles.
About ten times more important. But the two correlate, so one serves another in certain contexts.
The Soviet Union appears in US Congress documents after 1991, when it ceased to exist. But China became popular around that time. The EU is less so, mainly because it’s still treated as two dozens of independent states, not a single union.
Unemployment gets moderate attention (about 1/20th of “security”). Congresspersons ignore inflation, while the NYT devotes lot of attention to both and clearly prefer talking more about inflation:
The US Congress bill titles are available from two sources:
The New York Times’ choice of words tells much about history and the media. As seen before, their Chronicle shows great snapshots of the newspaper’s wording evolution.
Here, a few more cases.
Though in general money and knowledge move in the same directions, money moves in greater magnitudes. Also, notice that in the Great Depression, as well as in the Great Recession, the NYT mentioned money less frequently. And the opposite happened during stagflation in the 70s.
Inequality never was an issue for the NYT. Even in the late 20s, when inequality was extremely high. So, it’s a new topic. Meanwhile, previous mentions of equality are generally associated with civil rights movements, as in the 60s.
At its peak, war themes took up to 30% of the newspaper materials. But local wars, like Iraq and Afghanistan, never draw so much attention.
A similar graph was in the previous post, but here changes in wording are clearer. Especially right after the Civil War, when politicians no longer needed support from the black population, and one hundred years later, when politicians and media had to update their vocabulary.
The New York Times released a tool for tracking words in the newspaper’s historical issues. Google had done this for all books published after 1500, but NYT is a reputable source, and it’s interesting to compare the results.