Tracking Memes Across TV News: A New Tool for Analyzing How Stories Move Through Broadcast

[Frank W. Baker]

From the MIT Center for Civic Media:  Even though we’re excited about the potential of participatory media to help shape what we pay attention to, our media research consistently finds that broadcast media — primarily TV — still plays a critical role in the amplification of voices.... if you’re looking at how a story trends over several months, you need something more systematic, and may want to use our script. You can use this Ruby script to query Archive.org’s recently-launched TVNews archive and download JSON files with the results. It’s great for tracking how frequently a person or topic shows up in U.S. televised news broadcasts.