This is a map series visualising a comprehensive data set kindly provided to me on request by the editors of the Guardian Data Blog a couple of months ago (special thanks to Peter Martin and Grant Klopper for this!). The work on these maps started with the idea to make an update of the still quite frequently accessed maps of global news coverage of the Guardian.co.uk news website that I created for the years 2010 and 2011. As explained back then, while being the snapshot of one single newspaper this data also gives some indications of the way the countries of the world are represented in the print media in the United Kingdom, hence giving a picture of how the world looks through the eyes of the British people (it’ll vary slightly for other media outlets, though the overall picture will result in similar patterns).
I have now updated this map using the most recent data that the data store team sent to me (unfortunately it is not available in the data store this time). The data lists the total number of news items on the website of the British Newspaper The Guardian that are tagged with a specific country name. For the year 2012 the news coverage (leaving out the United Kingdom) on their website was distributed as shown in this cartogram:
With the United States being consistently the second largest country represented in the data (after the UK which is excluded in this map) it should be mentioned that this may not only be explained with a certainly quite prevalent US-biased media coverage in most of the British press, but could in the case of the Guardian also be explained with the additional fact that the Guardian is expanding its media activities more and more actively across the Atlantic (also launching a dedicated online US edition in 2011), and indeed worldwide, as the very recent move to the domain http://www.theguardian.com/ suggests.
With having a series of three years (ranging from 2010 to 2012) available, I was now able not only to look at an update to the previous maps, but could also start a little look into the changing patterns that emerge from the data. The following animation shows how the news coverage has shifted in this period:
The same animation can also be looked at including the news items for the United Kingdom – which are (due to its location) dominate the picture and therefore hide some of the detail that can be seen in the above animation:
For the sake of completeness and to allow the investigation of each of the snapshots in more detail, here are the individual maps that the above animations are made of as static images.
Guardian Online News Coverage in 2012 (without the United Kingdom)
(click for larger version)
Guardian Online News Coverage in 2011 (without the United Kingdom)
(click for larger version)
Guardian Online News Coverage in 2010 (without the United Kingdom)
(click for larger version)
Guardian Online News Coverage in 2012 (including the United Kingdom)
(click for larger version)
Guardian Online News Coverage in 2011 (including the United Kingdom)
(click for larger version)
Guardian Online News Coverage in 2010 (including the United Kingdom)
(click for larger version)
With so many maps featured on one page, I spare me any further commentary and leave that to the reader’s mind. There is more that one can do with that data, so keep your eyes open for more maps from this data series in the next post of this blog…
The content on this page has been created by Benjamin D. Hennig using data from the Guardian Data Blog team. Please contact me for further details on the terms of use.