Earlier this year we looked at ingroup/outgroup discourse on television news, looking at the density of pronouns across the major television channels. Is there a major difference between the density of mentions of "i" and "we" on television versus radio news? Using data from the Internet Archive's Television News and Radio News Archives via the Television News 2.0 Ngrams and Radio News Ngrams datasets, the graph below shows the percentage of daily spoken words across BBC News London (TV), BBC World Service and BBC Radio 4 FM by day this year that were the words "i" or "we" reflecting ingroup references. Both radio stations appear to use the terms identical, while television uses them considerably more. Of particular intrest there is a sharp rise in the words from late Feb. when the pandemic triggered global lockdowns through early April. Both radio and television show this trend, while it is more pronounced on television.
Computing this graph was done through this 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='us' OR NGRAM='we') 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='us' OR NGRAM='we') 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='us' OR NGRAM='we') 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