Differences in News Coverage
By: Jeff Clark Date: Mon, 13 Jul 2009
I'm continuing to explore the idea of accentuated Word Clouds that I introduced in the previous post about New Testament Word Clouds. This time I compared the news coverage from four different sources about Obama's recent speech delivered in Ghana. The source texts are from the New York Times, Fox News, Al Jazeera, and AllAfrica.com.
The first word cloud was created from the text of all four articles put together and does a reasonable job of showing the key words for the event. The top words are 'Obama' , 'Africa', 'Ghana', 'president', 'life', 'future' etc.
These four accentuated clouds below are created by comparing each source article in turn against the overall collection. They illustrate the words that are used frequently and proportionally more often in that particular text.
Here are a few prominent words that I notice from a quick glance at these clouds:
- NYT - 'take', 'kept', 'cairo', 'effort', 'muslims', 'bill', 'rich'
- Fox News - 'great' , 'need', 'gym', 'hour', 'peace', 'blame', 'hotel', 'stem', 'cell', 'pope'
- Al Jazeera - 'set', 'based', 'oil', 'jazeera', 'london', 'investment', 'gold', 'cocoa'
- AllAfrica.com - 'civil' , 'control' , 'brother', 'returning', 'speaking', 'map', 'liberation'