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.

The 336 tracked terms are listed A–Z on Terms, including the caption query each term uses.

THE PROGRAM is provided for scholarship and research purposes and is not a commercial redistribution of Internet Archive TV News Archive captions or the underlying GDELT Television data.

theprogram.news