Earlier today, after reading a WSJ article about Richard Nixon's newfound popularity with the young conservative movement, we explored how he has been covered across CNN, MSNBC/MSNOW and Fox News over the past decade and a half. On Monday, CNN's Brian Stelter explored how Fox News covered the reflecting pool story extensively during the government's initial claims of vandalism, but have not covered Friday's governmental mea culpa nearly as much. Let's dive deeper into this story and take a closer look at spoken and onscreen textual mentions of the reflecting pool across CNN, MSNBC/MSNOW and Fox News and compare their coverage. No data was used to train or tune any model.
First, let's look at spoken mentions of the reflecting pool. 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. it captures the number of times "reflecting pool" 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 the reflecting pool somewhere in the onscreen text.
turn this into a beautiful annotated publication-ready timeline. it captures the seconds of airtime per day that mentions "nixon" 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 "reflecting pool" on CNN, MSNBC/MSNOW and Fox News from 2009 to present. One tracks the number of times "reflecting pool" 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?