As President Trump compared impeachment hearings to a "lynching" and Biden condemned the president's remarks before acknowledging using the same language two decades ago during the Clinton impeachment hearings, how have the media covered the topic in the past?
The timeline below shows television news coverage of "lynching" from July 2009 to present on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News. Here the greatest surge came earlier this year with the Jussie Smollett incident, while the 2011 surge came from discussion of a Politico article about Herman Cain that was dismissed as a "high tech lynching."
Looking to online coverage, the timeline below shows worldwide online news coverage of the term since January 2017. Here the current story can be seen to be garnering more attention than any previous story of the past three years. The surge in April 2018 was due to the opening of a new memorial to lynching victims.
The timeline below shows the same results with the word "noose" added in. It seems the Smollett story was contextualized not as a "lynching" but rather by the appearance of a "noose," meaning that when the two terms are combined, the current story ranks lower than the Smollett story, but still is the second-most covered related story of the past third of a decade.
