An Experiment In Deeply Analyzing The Trends & Themes Of Two Days Of Global Television News

 February 20, 2026

What if journalists and scholars could see the news each day not as a roaring river of realtime unrelated narratives, but in terms of the overarching themes and trends that bridge and connect all of those narratives together? Could this help journalists and scholars better understand global events by seeing how they are all interconnected and drawing their eye to events and patterns they never could have seen without tools that could look at such massive scale? In other words, could we create something like a Google News-style interface, but organized around overarching themes, patterns and trends, rather than around individual narratives, leveraging AI's unique ability to look across huge volumes of information to tease out their collective trends and connect them back via links to the source material.

Earlier this month we explored how Congressional staffers could do precisely this: leveraging Gemini 3 in helping to prepare briefings for their members, looking across a day of CSPAN coverage of the legislative business of Congress and identify its overarching themes and trends, producing a richly annotated thematic analysis with source links to connect each thematic insight back to the original source material.

What might it look like to apply this same vision to a selection of television news channels from around the world over the past two days to help a journalist or scholar see the themes its coverage and be able to click through from each theme and insight directly to the original source material that supports it? In other words, organizing the news according to patterns and trends, not narratives. In collaboration with the Internet Archive's TV News Archive is a first experimental glimpse at what this might look like, reasoning deeply about all of the coverage on each channel below during February 18th and 19th and organizing it according to themes and trends, with links from each to the defining coverage that best support that theme or trend.

Only the public enterprise Gemini API was used and no data was used to train or tune any model.

February 19, 2026

Below are the Media Trends reports for each channel:

And below are the full-resolution infographics from each of their covers:

February 18, 2026

Below are the Media Trends reports for each channel:

And below are the full-resolution infographics from each of their covers: