Someone is wrong on the Internet, reporters!
The other day I was just scrolling along Twitter when I came across this nugget:
I did hear about Tide Pods – from people making jokes on Reddit and Facebook – but was a little skeptical that they got more actual media coverage than the Women’s March.
So I headed over to something I’ve been wanting to try out for a while, and sure enough, nope, they didn’t.
Media Cloud counts the number of sentences, published by media outlets, that contain a certain word or phrase. This way you can see how much something really was in the news. It’s not comprehensive, unfortunately: Media Cloud doesn’t include TV news, for instance, or social media posts, which some people consider to be news.
It was made by MIT and Harvard, which I like, because it means it’s about as impartial as you can get. It’s easy to just pop in some phrases and do a quick comparison, or do a much more detailed investigation. You can search “Digital Native” media, for instance (read: BuzzFeed), or Mainstream Media, or even Fake News sites.
Give it a try! At least now when people say stuff like, “The media ignored [major news event that everybody covered]!” we have some data to toss in their faces.