270,000 Hours of Cable News, at Your Fingertips
The Stanford Cable TV Analyzer lets you ask who and what is on CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC.
The last twelve months have brought us a presidential impeachment trial, the coronavirus pandemic, sweeping racial justice protests triggered by the death of George Floyd, and a critical presidential election. News coverage of these events shapes popular reaction and popular reaction shapes policy. But until recently, people haven’t had the data to talk about news coverage.
How much coverage does Trump receive compared to Biden? How did this change when coronavirus and the George Floyd protests came into the picture? Now, just weeks before a historic election, what is front and center in the news?
Previously, acquiring data about cable news content meant meticulously and manually coding hours of news coverage by hand. The Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer provides easy access to this information by giving you the ability to not just search transcripts, but also compute the screen time of public figures in nearly 24–7 broadcasts from CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC.
Let’s take a closer look at what cable news has talked about in 2020.
We talked about Trump before, during, and after the impeachment trial… until the coronavirus came along
In early 2020, mentions of “Trump” (red line in the graph above) were high before, during, and after President Trump’s senate impeachment trial (Jan 16 to Feb 5). However, the emergence of coronavirus (green) coincided with a significant drop in mentions of “Trump”. Trump mentions have still not returned to their February levels.
The biggest spikes of 2020 are related to Biden
Joe Biden’s dominance of the Super Tuesday races in early March, and his nomination of Kamala Harris as VP running mate in mid August, led to spikes in mentions of “Biden” (blue) that exceeded the daily keyword counts of other major events. (These spikes occurred on all three channels.) Also evident is the near disappearance of “Biden” mentions in late March as the coronavirus took hold around the country.
Racial injustice dominated the news in early June, then faded
Mentions of words related to racial injustice and the George Floyd protests in late May/early June (yellow) reached a peak in early June that was higher than that of coronavirus at any point in 2020. Words related to this topic still get mentioned at a much higher rate than prior to the protests, but have been slowly declining since.
Who is talked about vs. who is on screen
The graph above showed how often “Trump” and “Biden” were mentioned in cable news transcripts — the amount of time their face appears on screen paints a different picture. While mentions of “Trump” were low during the initial wave of coronavirus coverage in March and April, Trump’s face was on screen more than at any time in his presidency during this period due to the White House’s daily coronavirus briefings.
Try it out yourself
The Stanford TV News Analyzer provides an easy way to measure the representation of people and events on cable news. The site is updated with the latest broadcasts each day, and now includes near 24–7 broadcasts of CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC beginning on January 1, 2010 (over 270,000 hours of video). We encourage you to use its transcript search and screen time measurement features to ask your own questions, like:
- Does coverage of political candidates lead or lag the polls?
- On which channels do controversial phrases like “Chinese coronavirus” first appear? (Tucker Carlson was first on January 23rd, but anchors on all three channels used the term in the same week).
- What is the breakdown of screen time by gender on the most popular cable news programs?
We invite you to our Getting Started page and our explainer article to learn more about how to measure the contents of cable news yourself.
In the coming weeks we will be releasing a series of analyses that use the Stanford Cable TV Analyzer to inspect issues such as gender representation on cable news and coverage of the upcoming 2020 election. For now, you can find more information about our mission and the Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer on our Frequently Asked Questions page, and our technical report.
We understand that the Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer is only as powerful as the questions that people answer with it. So journalists, media critics, and armchair data scientists out there… we want to work with you to get to the bottom of things. We are excited to enable you to approach news analysis and news monitoring in a large-scale and data-driven way.
Our Team
Student research assistants, Stanford University: James Hong (student lead), Jacob Ritchie, Jeremy Barenholtz, Will Crichton, Daniel Fu, Ben Hannel, Michaela Murray, Xinwei Yao, Haotian Zhang
Maneesh Agrawala: Forest Baskett Professor Computer Science and Director of the Brown Institute for Media Innovation at Stanford University
Kayvon Fatahalian: Assistant Professor of Computer Science, Stanford University
Geraldine Moriba: Journalist, documentary filmmaker, broadcast news executive, and former John S. Knight Journalism fellow
Acknowledgments: The Stanford Cable TV News Analyzer is a collaboration between Stanford University’s Computer Science Department, the Brown Institute for Media Innovation, and the Internet Archive.
