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

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Term evidence

Peak month and share of airtime, in text, for all 336 tracked terms. Labels, queries, and search links for the full catalog are on Terms.

Culture

Geopolitics

Tech

Social

Health

Economy

Climate

Politics

People

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.

Archive ends October 2024; that month is partial because Internet Archive TV coverage trails the calendar month.

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.

theprogram.news

About

THE PROGRAM is a dark archival index of television attention across 9 national cable news stations and 336 tracked terms. It is not a live monitor. Television calls it programming for a reason.

Built by @tsweens. Feel free to reach out with questions or feedback.

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