Breaking Down the News: August

Aretha Franklin, who passed away on August 17, recording in the studio for Atlantic Records in 1967.

Photo courtesy of Getty Images.

Daily News Breakdown

At this point in the history of America, it's incredibly difficult to predict what stories will remain important and which ones will eventually fade and be forgotten. But August 21 seems like it will be a day that news junkies like myself will always remember. The Paul Manafort criminal case and the Michael Cohen plea deal broke not just on the same day, but in the same two-hour span of the afternoon. The alerts on my phone did things I had never seen before, stacking AP notifications so quickly I could barely keep up with them. And just to add another element to the cycle of chaos, the suspect in the Mollie Tibbetts murder case was arrested on the same day, around the same time. Even a few weeks later, it doesn't seem like any of these stories will necessarily be the most impactful event from this month. Cohen has the best chance to continue mattering, just because the Special Counsel in general is likely to stay relevant. It was an incredible run for those few hours, though.

This is also the best time for me to mention that I have a tangential connection to one of the headlines on that graph. One of the candidates in the Florida primary elections at the end of the month was Melissa Howard, who graduated from Miami University. Allegedly. A local newspaper checked with the college and discovered that there was no record that she had actually finished her studies and did not have a degree. I wrote an article about the story on August 13, outlining the statements from both sides and digging a little further into her connections to Butler County. One day later, Howard dropped out of the race. Coincidence? No, but also not causality- she dropped out because of the scrutiny from many outlets, not just some intern in Ohio who did a basic background request.

Most Popular News Topics

• I assumed that adding AP headlines would lead to some changes in the trends, but I was not expecting the sheer number of new headlines. In the previous few months, the story that generated the most headlines would end up with around 20 total mentions. August had four topics that ended up in that zone of coverage, and the various midterm elections generated thirty headlines.

• I'm not surprised the Mollie Tibbetts case stayed in the headlines this much. A young, white, Midwestern college girl was murdered and an illegal immigrant was eventually arrested in the case; it's almost a parody of the kind of local crime story that gets national attention. I would like to point out, though, that three of those headlines were from the AP and all the rest were Fox News. Not a single mention of the case by the Times.

• I generally group all celebrity deaths under one category, ominous labeled 'Death.' I don't remember the last time that one person generated enough post-mortem headlines that they deserved a special category of coverage. That happened twice this month, as both Aretha Franklin and John McCain reached that level of fame and impact.

• It says a depressing amount about the number of mass shooting that I had to refresh my memory about what 'Mall Shooting' actually referenced. It was an attack on a Jacksonville mall that killed three people, for the record.

• Most of the plane crash stories you'll read are depressing, but one of them had some lighter details. On the same day as the Cohen/ Manafort/ Tibbetts headlines, Post Malone's plane had to make an emergency landing in New York. Fox News was the only outlet that pushed a headline, which did not mention Malone by name and only referred to a private jet landing. And the airport they went to was within my girlfriend's area of local New York coverage.