What you can learn from mainstream media — with help from Google
If not predicting the impending collapse of our economy one day, the media is forecasting terrorist attacks the next. The press loves to depress. “How ’bout ya quit makin’ things up?” asked a frustrated Sarah Palin upon resigning last week.
Harsh. How ‘bout we all cool off and step back for a sec?
What if we could zoom out and look at all this clatter and chatter in perspective? With the internet we can. Every hour of every day, Google’s non-partisan computer code aggregates all the news article published online – all around the world.
One great feature Google offers is called “Google Trends,” a visualization of keyword frequency in both search and news articles. I want to show you Google’s monthly news reference volume for two of the biggest words in news: “economy” (in blue) and “Iraq” (in red) since the beginning of 2007.
“Iraq” has been steadily decreasing for the last three years. Meanwhile, the “economy” grew slightly through mid 2008, leaping passed Iraq as the crisis hit. It grew very quickly, thousands upon thousands of new articles crawled by Google each day as the stock market tanked. You’ll notice that just before 2009, the economy took a big dip in news coverage. This is probably due to an emphasis on the election, as it quickly climbed back up after Christmas.
But the overall trend for both the economy and Iraq since October 2008 is a steady, albeit slow decline. Let me emphasize that this is not a reflection of sentiment towards the economy or Iraq, it is simply a report of news mentions.
So when you read those fire and brimstone articles about the collapse of the economy and chaos in Iraq, take a step back and look at the overall news volume reference. If bad-news-hungry journalists are chattering about it less and less each month, maybe things are getting better?
Let’s hope so.
PS, here are Sarah Palin’s news mentions to-date:
