Last month the Wall Street Journal published a fascinating article about how Richard Nixon has emerged as an unlikely icon of the young conservative movement. This got us wondering if all of the online discussion of Nixon was reflected in television news coverage. Below we trace spoken and onscreen textual mentions of Nixon ("nixon -cynthia) across CNN, MSNBC/MSNOW and Fox News from July 2009 to present, showing that his digital resurgence is not reflected in television news coverage. No data was used to train or tune any model. Interestingly, spoken mentions decline sharply in early 2020, while onscreen textual mentions increase since then.
First, let's look at spoken mentions of Nixon. 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 Nixon-related 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 "nixon" 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 his name 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 Richard Nixon on CNN, MSNBC/MSNOW and Fox News from 2009 to present. One tracks the number of times Richard Nixon 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. Contrast with social media discussion of Nixon. What does all of this mean and tell me?