The GDELT Project

Tracing The Trajectory Of 'Criminal Justice' In the News

The phrase "criminal justice" is finding increasing but divergent adoption in the press, often leading to cases like today's descriptions of the London Bridge attack in which the BBC referred to a "conference on prisoner rehabilitation" while CNN's homepage described a "criminal justice conference."

The timeline below shows the airtime devoted to mentions of "criminal justice" since July 2009 on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News using the Internet Archive's Television News Archive. The phrase appears to have begun to take off in March-April 2013, but beginning January 2014, MSNBC adopted it far more often than either CNN or Fox News. By mid-2016 all three stations were using the phrase in roughly equal amounts, though mentions faded until late 2017 when it enjoyed a renaissance until August 2019 when it has begun to decrease in usage again. Over the past decade MSNBC has used the phrase almost twice as often as Fox News and CNN.

Live Version.

Mentions of "crime" also began to increase in 2013 and again in 2017, increasing through 2019.

Live Version.