News Ngram

Reading these charts

Two charts, never one

The same phrase runs about 6.5× hotter on the online-news chart than on the TV chart, and over the 94 months where both have data the two move together only loosely (r = 0.69). In January 2023, for instance, “climate change” sat near its high in online news and near its low on television.

They are not the same measurement. One counts articles, the other counts airtime. One watches the world, the other watches nine US networks. Putting them on a shared axis would flatten TV into a line along the floor; giving them two axes on one chart would let any pair of scales manufacture whatever agreement you wanted to see. So each gets its own chart, its own axis, and its own date range.

What the percentage on the y-axis is

Different things on each chart, which is the whole reason there are two.

On the online news chart it is the percent of the articles GDELT monitored worldwide in that interval that contained your phrase. Read 1.1% as: about one in ninety articles mentioned it.

On the TV chart it is the percent of monitored airtime. GDELT cuts each broadcast into 15-second clips and counts the ones whose captions contain your phrase; the line is that percentage averaged across the nine networks listed below. For scale, CNN alone contributes roughly 130,000 clips a month.

Both are shares rather than counts, so an outlet or a network that simply produces more does not dominate. But a percent of articles and a percent of airtime are not the same quantity, and the ratio between them is not meaningful.

Because TV is a mean across nine networks, it hides disagreement between them — a phrase saturating one network and absent from the rest reads as a modest middling value.

Which networks the TV chart covers

Nine, all of them cable or satellite, all with unbroken coverage across the chart's full range:

• CNN
• FOX News
• MSNBC
• CNBC
• FOX Business
• Bloomberg
• C-SPAN
• C-SPAN 2
• C-SPAN 3

ABC, CBS, NBC and PBS are not in that list, and their absence is worth knowing about. GDELT carries no national feed for the broadcast networks — it indexes them only as individual local affiliates, such as San Francisco's KGO for ABC or Washington's WRC for NBC. Averaging one city's affiliate into a line labelled national would misrepresent what you were looking at, so this chart leaves them out rather than quietly standing in a local station for a national network.

BBC News, Al Jazeera, Deutsche Welle and Russia Today are likewise indexed, but as international channels rather than US ones, and mixing them into a US average would blur exactly the thing the chart is measuring. NPR does not appear at all — the archive is built from television captions, so radio is outside it entirely.

The practical consequence: this is a picture of US cable news, which skews toward continuous political coverage. C-SPAN's three channels carry unedited floor and committee proceedings, so legislative language registers more strongly here than it would in a broadcast evening-news average.

Where the data stops

Online news covers 2017-01-01 onward. That is GDELT's own floor, not a setting here; earlier dates are clamped. TV covers 2009-07-02 through 2024-10-31 — it reaches back seven years further, but the archive stops in late 2024, so it cannot tell you about the present. Ask for a range outside either window and that chart quietly narrows to what exists; the date line under each title always states what you actually got.

Searching

Multi-word phrases are matched exactly. Query syntax passes straight through to GDELT, so source filters work: "no evidence" (domain:reuters.com OR domain:apnews.com). A line already containing ", ( or : is sent verbatim; anything else is quoted for you.

GDELT throttles aggressively and will refuse several requests in a row before answering. This page waits and retries, which is why a plot of several phrases takes a while.