Here is further discussion, noting that I am a little confused about how the U.S. is counted and why it doesn’t appear more often.
Which countries does the NYT cover?
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France being 3rd really shows you how sycophantic the NYT Style section is…
On the undercount of the “U.S.”
The “U.S.” isn’t counted. According to the note on the post, “United States: searched “America,” and subtracted “Latin America,” “South America,” and “Central America”.”
Actually, the inquiry of economic concern would be if the NYT is so cosmpolitan in its outlook as
to be of interest the world over, if that has anything to do with its present finances.
I think John B. Chilton’s got it. It looks like the data on number of articles per country were pulled from a simple “Advanced Search” on the NYT website, set to fetch articles from Jan. 1, 2000 onward. Then they were standardized by dividing by the total number of articles published since 2000, and multiplied by 10âµ. A quick check of Germany and France gives 3181 and 4020, which seem close enough since both have doubtless been mentioned a few times since the chart was cooked up. So, shouldn’t this be standardized using the total number of articles mentioning a country? This would bias the U.S. back up, at least in terms of the “total articles” figure.
The US is probably under-represnted because not all articles about the US have the tags “America,” “United States, etc in them. For example, an article about a hurricane in Flordia might not actually say “America” in the text. Unless, of course, we are only trying to measure relative coverage of foreign policy issues.
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