Data and Method

Headlines for every month were collected from the New York Times Archive API. They were then filtered down to only entries of type “article” that were a page one (front page or section front) story. The appearance of a country was flagged by looking for the common English country name, commonly used acronym, demonym, large cities, previously used country names, and a handful of colloquial references. The country of Jersey was excluded from this analysis because of too many references to New Jersey. Results were manually reviewed for false positives, and the scripts were re-run to see if a new top country emerged. Due to an issue with the API, there is no data available for 1964, and Sep and Oct of 1978. Months with less than five results for a single country were excluded. Flags images from here.