How have CNN, MSNBC/MSNOW and Fox News covered Ukraine over the past decade and a half, especially Russia's 2022 invasion? Here we can see that CNN dominates coverage, more than double that of Fox News, but also that Ukraine has faded considerably from the media view this year.
First, let's look at spoken mentions of Ukraine. Here we count the precise number of mentions per day using Spanner and then used Gemini 3.6 Flash to write Python code to visualize the timeline and enabled Google Search Grounding so that Gemini could identify the major peaks in the graph and perform web searches to identify the major events occurring on those dates to annotate the graph. Only the timeline CSV was provided to Gemini, not the transcripts, and no data was used to train or tune any model.
turn this into a beautiful annotated publication-ready timeline. include a station breakdown barchart. it captures the number of times "ukraine OR ukrainian OR kyiv OR kiev OR zelensky OR zelenskyy" is mentioned across CNN, MSNBC and FoxNews since 2009
Similar to the spoken mentions above, below we trace the total seconds of daily airtime that mentioned Ukraine somewhere in the onscreen text.
turn this into a beautiful annotated publication-ready timeline. include a station breakdown barchart. it captures the seconds of airtime per day that mentions "ukraine OR ukrainian OR kyiv OR kiev OR zelensky OR zelenskyy" in the onscreen text across CNN, MSNBC and FoxNews since 2009
Finally, let's give both of these timeline graphics (only the two images below, nothing more) to Gemini Deep Research and ask it to analyze the underlying patterns:
Attached are two timelines. One tracks the number of spoken mentions of Ukraine on CNN, MSNBC/MSNOW and Fox News from 2009 to present. One tracks the number of times Ukraine was mentioned in the onscreen text of CNN, MSNBC/MSNOW and Fox News from 2009 to present. Deeply analyze these two graphs and tell me the deeper trends and implications of these findings. What does all of this mean and tell me?