Economic stability and the minimization of uncertainty plays a critical role in the overall stability and well-being of a nation. Scholars like Alexopoulos & Cohen and Baker, Bloom & Davis have constructed simple narrative indicators of economic uncertainty by looking for the keywords "economy/economic" and "uncertain/uncertainty" appearing together in media coverage as an indicator of press attention to an uncertain economic climate. In 2015 we applied this measure to GDELT's online news monitoring, but what might these indicators look like through the eyes of television?
The timeline below uses GDELT Summary to plot the density of this language by month over CNN, MSNBC and Fox News using the Internet Archive's Television News Archive from July 2009 to present.
Here is the same chart, but plotted for the business-centric stations Bloomberg, CNBC and FOX Business. NOTE that the Archive did not start monitoring these stations until later, with Bloomberg starting on December 5, 2013, CNBC on July 2, 2009 (though data is missing for late 2010 – 2011), and FOX Business on August 20, 2012.
Looking at US Government hearings, here is the same timeline for CSPAN, CSPAN2 and CSPAN3.
Finally, here is the timeline for San Francisco affiliates of ABC (KGO), CBS (KPIX) and NBC (KNTV), which the Archive began monitoring on July 16, 2010.
While simple, the graphs above demonstrate the fascinating insights about society that can be drawn the Internet Archive's Television News Archive using GDELT Summary with just a simple keyword search.
Let us know what interesting findings you uncover!