This past September we compared the percentage of daily spoken words across BBC News London (TV), BBC World Service and BBC Radio 4 FM that related to Covid-19 using data from the Internet Archive's Television News and Radio News Archives using the Television News 2.0 Ngrams and Radio News Ngrams. To explore how those trends have continued through the last three months, we've produced the updated graph below. Coverage on television decreased from late Sept., bottomed out around the middle of this month and have soared as the pandemic has come rushing back.
To compute this graph we used the following query:
SELECT DATE, SUM(TVCOVID) TVCOVID, SUM(TVALL) TVALL, SUM(RADIOWORLDCOVID) RADIOWORLDCOVID, SUM(RADIOWORLDALL) RADIOWORLDALL, SUM(RADIOFMCOVID) RADIOFMCOVID, SUM(RADIOFMALL) RADIOFMALL from ( (SELECT DATE, SUM(COUNT) TVCOVID, 0 TVALL, 0 RADIOWORLDCOVID, 0 RADIOWORLDALL, 0 RADIOFMCOVID, 0 RADIOFMALL FROM `gdelt-bq.gdeltv2.iatv_1gramsv2` WHERE DATE(TIMESTAMP) >= "2020-01-01" AND (NGRAM='coronavirus' OR NGRAM='covid' OR NGRAM='virus' OR NGRAM='corona') AND STATION = 'BBCNEWS' group by DATE order by DATE) UNION ALL (SELECT DATE, 0 TVCOVID, SUM(COUNT) TVALL, 0 RADIOWORLDCOVID, 0 RADIOWORLDALL, 0 RADIOFMCOVID, 0 RADIOFMALL FROM `gdelt-bq.gdeltv2.iatv_1gramsv2` WHERE DATE(TIMESTAMP) >= "2020-01-01" AND STATION = 'BBCNEWS' group by DATE order by DATE) UNION ALL (SELECT DATE, 0 TVCOVID, 0 TVALL, SUM(COUNT) RADIOWORLDCOVID, 0 RADIOWORLDALL, 0 RADIOFMCOVID, 0 RADIOFMALL FROM `gdelt-bq.gdeltv2.iaradio_1grams` WHERE DATE(TIMESTAMP) >= "2020-01-01" AND (NGRAM='coronavirus' OR NGRAM='covid' OR NGRAM='virus' OR NGRAM='corona') AND STATION = 'BBC World Service' group by DATE order by DATE) UNION ALL (SELECT DATE, 0 TVCOVID, 0 TVALL, 0 RADIOWORLDCOVID, SUM(COUNT) RADIOWORLDALL, 0 RADIOFMCOVID, 0 RADIOFMALL FROM `gdelt-bq.gdeltv2.iaradio_1grams` WHERE DATE(TIMESTAMP) >= "2020-01-01" AND STATION = 'BBC World Service' group by DATE order by DATE) UNION ALL (SELECT DATE, 0 TVCOVID, 0 TVALL, 0 RADIOWORLDCOVID, 0 RADIOWORLDALL, SUM(COUNT) RADIOFMCOVID, 0 RADIOFMALL FROM `gdelt-bq.gdeltv2.iaradio_1grams` WHERE DATE(TIMESTAMP) >= "2020-01-01" AND (NGRAM='coronavirus' OR NGRAM='covid' OR NGRAM='virus' OR NGRAM='corona') AND STATION = 'BBC Radio 4 FM' group by DATE order by DATE) UNION ALL (SELECT DATE, 0 TVCOVID, 0 TVALL, 0 RADIOWORLDCOVID, 0 RADIOWORLDALL, 0 RADIOFMCOVID, SUM(COUNT) RADIOFMALL FROM `gdelt-bq.gdeltv2.iaradio_1grams` WHERE DATE(TIMESTAMP) >= "2020-01-01" AND STATION = 'BBC Radio 4 FM' group by DATE order by DATE) ) GROUP BY DATE order by DATE asc