I've been interested in objectively measuring media selectivity - and its impact on readers'/viewers' perception of the world. I spent some time analyzing media in a nonpartisan way - backed by real data. I'll be posting my analyses in the coming weeks.

My first analysis was the coverage of terrorism deaths in an American national newspaper, The New York Times versus actual deaths.

These are the distribution of actual terrorism deaths in 2015 by region (representing ~30,000 lives lost, primarily innocent civilians):

Source: National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START). (2016). Global Terrorism Database [Data file]. Retrieved from START

By comparison, this is the distribution of terrorism death articles in the first few pages of the New York Times in 2015 by region:

Source: NY Times links with manual tagging and custom analysis. The only articles counted are those on the first few pages, from the Today's Paper - NY Region links (the first two sections - h3 and h6 tags - before the individual subsections, which leads to ~6000 total articles over 2015 - which I've manually collected and categorized). See the raw data