Breaking Down the News: February

The news cycle in February was very volatile, even compared to previous months that I've looked at. One of the standout patterns is the stretch beginning on February 4th when economic news stories dominated the news cycle. Both Fox News and the New York Times published daily articles tracking the sudden drop in the stock market and speculating about some of the causes of the shift. Going back to the birth of this project last August, this is the longest stretch where the Dow Jones made headlines.

This display also makes it clear how much has happened but how little really changed during the month. Devin Nunes' memo criticizing the FBI came out early in the month and the Democratic response came at the very end. There were two announcements from the special counsel about the investigation into President Trump and his associates, including a mass indictment of Russian trolls. The Parkland school shooting stayed in the cycle long enough to force Trump to make a statement about gun control at the end of the month. None of these stories have led to actual change so far, but the narrative within the stories has changed dramatically.

• The sheer number of headlines generated by the Parkland shooting is unusual, even by the standards of recent American disasters. There were few stories that generated over twenty headlines in the entire second half of 2017, much less within a single month. Part of that is the horror of the original event and part of that's the successful campaign by the students to keep gun control and the aftermath in the headlines.

• Remember the Nunes memo, or the Democratic response to it? Remember all the outrage around the initial accusations that... (checks notes)... the FBI had lied about the evidence used to watch members of the Trump campaign? Damn, that feels like it was ages ago.

• I'm surprised by the relative lack of headlines from the Winter Olympics. As big of an international event as it was, it's not the kind that results in constant updates or headlines. That says as much about what happened in Pyeongchang as about the outlets I've chosen to focus on.

• How many months will there be speculation about a government shutdown and a panic to get enough funding for America to operate?

The main thing I want to point out here is the 'promotional' section. Understandably, there is a lot of overlap between that section and the other news categories that I arbitrarily named. Most of the stories would fall into the national category, like Uma Thurman's op-ed in the Times about #MeToo. But the section is more for updates about, say, the new Fox News show 'Life, Liberty and Levin' or giving extra exposure to a Times video about a white supremacist. My rule is that headlines that mention the news organization directly belong in this category.

Careful readers will notice that I changed the color scheme from last month. I'll be playing with the tones of a few different color palates until I have enough time to make a custom one of my own.