What our media talks about (in helpful chart form)

The chart gurus over at Sociological Images have posted the following visual depiction of what the media talks about (for the humongous version, click here):

This chart is kind of misleading because it groups all forms of media together. For example, if you watch cable TV, I’m sure you saw more Tiger Woods coverage than stories about Italy’s earthquake, and yet their size on the chart suggests they received similar media attention within the US.

To clarify the media’s priorities, SI also posted the weekly index from Journalism.org, which breaks down media topics by type of source (network TV, newspaper, etc.). When we look at these rankings, the media’s priorities become clear. The first list is the top topics covered by newspapers:

And here’s network television:

Points of interest: television is clearly more entertainment-oriented. Check out the “Tiger Woods” ranking, for example. Woods ranked #7 in newspapers, but jumped up to #5 in television possibly because it was just so much darn fun showing the pictures of his pretty blonde mistresses over, and over, and over…

Second, television is clearly more interested in “human interest” stories as SI points out. Note the high rankings of the Goldman custody battle, and the missing climbers. I don’t want television, and I actually had to look up these stories. I had never heard about the missing Utah woman (Susan Powell, one of the “missing persons” in the Cable TV chart below,) or the Goldman custody case, issues not really covered at length in print news.

Cable TV :

Caveat: 35 percent may seem like a reasonable amount of time to devote to the largest healthcare overhaul in US history. However, what this chart doesn’t show is the quality of coverage. Substantive policy debates are few and far between on television news. Rather, healthcare coverage is dominated by the horse race aspects of reform. Are the Republicans still being assholes? Does Nancy have the votes? Will Harry get bitchy today? Are Obama’s numbers up? Are they down??

A couple depressing realities: Afghanistan only makes the top 10 list for newspapers, and even there it got 2% of overall coverage. Iraq just barely made the top 10 list for newspapers (2% as well,) and cable TV (2% again). Pakistan, Somalia, and Yemen didn’t make the list.

Sixty percent of newspaper, 70 percent of cable TV, and 80 percent of network TV stories dealt with domestic issues (I’m counting the economic crisis as a domestic issue, since the media rarely focuses on the struggle of non-American countries in the global meltdown).

Network television devoted 15 percent of its coverage to the Tiger Woods scandal, Goldman custody hearing, and Mt. Hood climbers. Such is the dominance of human interest stories in television – events that involve no more than 20 people hog the airwaves, while events that affect literally millions of people (the wars, the environment, etc.) hover around the 2 percent mark if they make the cut-off at all.