THE PROGRAM

US cable news attention index

Jul 2009 – Oct 2024 · 9 networks

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Finding

Six of nine networks gave January 6 their most attention in the same month. (Jun 2022)

CNN
peak
3.67%
Fox News
peak
1.24%
MSNBC
peak
3.98%
Fox Business
peak
0.374%
CNBC
peak
0.669%
Bloomberg
peak
0.177%
C-SPAN
peak
2.18%
C-SPAN2
peak
0.334%
C-SPAN3
peak
0.242%

Jan 2022 – Nov 2022 · dashed line: Jun 2022

Monthly share of news airtime for January 6, Jan 2022 – Nov 2022. Six of nine networks hit their highest month in Jun 2022, during the House select-committee coverage. Each panel uses its own y-scale.

Source: GDELT TV / Internet Archive captions · station caches · 6/9 networks · monthly

Methodology

THE PROGRAM measures how often US cable news said a thing, from closed captions in the GDELT Television API / Internet Archive TV News Archive (Jul 2009 – Oct 2024). The primary metric is share of airtime — the percent of each station's news airtime matching a term (GDELT datanorm=perc). Means are equal-weighted across network × month rows. The Attention index is a scaled sum of those percentages (×10,000), not a raw caption mention count.

Correlations use Pearson r on monthly mean share series with overlap and volume guardrails. Rising & Falling ranks absolute change across the selected year range. Peaks and co-movement describe attention on the archive — not causation, and not a judgment about whether coverage rose or fell for better or worse.

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About

THE PROGRAM is a dark archival index of television attention across 9 national cable news stations and 204 tracked terms. It is not a live monitor. Television calls it programming for a reason.

Archive: Jul 2009 – Oct 2024 · 9 networks · theprogram.news · Source: GDELT TV / Internet Archive