Breaking Down the News: May

Palestinian protester uses a slingshot during the May 15 protest on the Israel-Gaza border.

Picture by Mohamed Abed/AFP/Getty Images and The Guardian

Daily News Breakdown

As with most national tragedies in the last year, the Santa Fe school shooting had a huge spike in daily headlines. There's not much I can say about this that I haven't already said about Parkland or anything else. Instead, I want to point out this study about the contagious nature of school shootings and suicides. Mass coverage of either tragedy can lead to an increase in copycat events, which has been documented in multiple articles and studies. One of the notifications from May 30 is even about this; the New York Times wrote about the influence of Columbine on later mass shootings. In another Colorado story, Newsweek wrote about a spree of 'copycat suicides' near Colorado Springs.

I want to expand the range of outlets that I use for these graphics. And a major part of that is the huge bias by both outlets in favor of American political stories. The two red headlines that I included on the chart are significant news events- a mass shooting of Palestinian protesters storming the border with Israel and an updated study on the death toll of Hurricane Maria. And those days did have peaks in stories coming out. But I still feel like those topics are either covered less by the outlets or discussed less by the public. This doesn't even touch the other international stories that get widely ignored. I'd like to include a more international view of important news stories, so I may consider adding BBC News or a similar outlet to get that extra bit of perspective.

News Subject Breakdown

• North Korea is at the top with an overwhelming number of stories. The June 12 meeting in Singapore has been made official, called off, and put back on the table again within a very short time frame. Part of that is because both the leaders involved are pretty unpredictable and inflexible. But that unstableness, and the announcements made by both countries about the meeting, has kept the story in the headlines.

• Because of the drawn-out nature of the top news stories, the Santa Fe shooting has been bumped down the total ranking. It ended up with roughly the same amount of coverage as the royal wedding. This is a bit of a departure from past mass shootings like Parkland and Las Vegas, which had the most headlines by far for their respective months.

• Separating the North Korea prisoner release from the rest of the North Korea news was not intended to make the topics more equalized. It just seemed to me like a clear sub-plot of the larger North Korea story that was going on.

• Near the bottom, you'll notice a category for 'school shooting.' This is separate from the Santa Fe shooting because it contains every other school shooting that happened in May. There was Highland High School in California in California, Clayton County School Performing Arts Center in Georgia, and Noblesville West Middle School in Indiana. The Clayton County shooting happened the same day as the Santa Fe shooting. Look at those stories I linked to and think about the implications of this.