Using Gemini Deep Research To Write Backgrounders For Our Media Trends Reports To Add Context For Journalists & Geopolitical Researchers

Kalev Leetaru

3 hours ago

Our daily Media Trends reports provide extraordinarily rich and detailed analyses of the trends, themes and narratives of television news coverage from around the world. Yet fully understanding many of the themes they identify requires deep contextual knowledge of each country – its geopolitical and economic condition, domestic and foreign policy, leadership, history, societal narratives, etc. What might it look like to give Gemini Deep Research a copy of each Media Trends report and ask it to produce a fully cited backgrounder report for a typical American journalist or geopolitical scholar who may not be deeply familiar with that particular country – one that brings them up to speed on the historical and contemporary context behind all of the key narratives, themes, and trends identified in the report? Here we explore this idea with the August 6th Media Trends reports for one channel each from Iran, Russia and the Republic of Congo. No data was used to train or tune any model and Gemini Deep Research was provided only with our PDF Media Trends report, not the broadcast transcripts.

For each of the reports below we used the following prompt with Gemini Deep Research:

Attached is a deep analysis of IRINN's coverage yesterday.
You are an expert geopolitical analyst.
Go through this report, identify the developments, stories, events, narratives, leaders, background etc that you think
a typical American journalist or scholar who isn't deeply familiar with Iran could benefit from additional background on
and write a backgrounder report that provides sufficient background to bring a reader up to speed to fully understand everything in this report.

You can read the Media Trends reports and their respective Gemini Deep Research Backgrounders below:

Iran's IRINN Coverage 8/6/2026

Russia's RUSSIA24 Coverage 8/6/2026

Republic of Congo's TELECONGO 8/6/2026