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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