When was the last time I heard about Kamala Harris? (A Study in 8 Graphs)
The thought hit me unbidden, “I feel like I hear about Kamala Harris less than I did about previous Vice Presidents.” I set about determining if this was true.
To do so, I compared Harris with Mike Pence, her most recent predecessor and the one for which data about online news coverage was readily available.
Figuring that all Vice Presidents received disproportionate coverage at specific milestones (e.g., candidacy announcement, VP debates, election victory), I compared equivalent periods of their VP tenure.
The earliest date in our data isJanuary 1st, 2017, just prior to Pence’s inauguration on the 20th. Harris’s first term as VP is ongoing so the latest date is the present (January 27th, 2022, as of this writing). Setting inauguration as Day 0, this determined the comparison period of Day -19 to Day 372 of their respective tenures.
The below chart shows the % of online news articles containing either “Kamala Harris” or “Mike Pence” for each day in that window:
Or as a daily average:
So yes, there is a difference. For every 4 articles written about Harris, there were 5 written about Pence. Likely because of Pence’s association with Trump, who garnered disproportionate media attention during his time in office (In fact, where Pence gets 25% more coverage than Harris, Trump got 80% more than Biden).
But a 4 to 5 ratio didn’t account for the difference I felt. So, I looked at the absolute number of articles (rather than the % of articles written) and found this:
Whoa. This is a different story. Not 25% more coverage of Pence, but 130% more coverage.
And it isn’t that the data collection method changed. The driver is something that surprised me – a decline in the total volume of online written news:
This is based on GDELT data (accessed with GDELT summary), an initiative which claims to “examine all worldwide online news coverage” and says that queries like mine include English language news as well as “65 languages representing 98.4% of its daily non-English monitoring volume”.
I have questions about this data (Namely, what happened from September to mid-November in 2020?) but, accepting it as directionally correct, it suggests another reason I feel I’m hearing less about Kamala Harris than past VPs: the absolute number of news articles written in Kamala’s tenure is about half of what it was for Pence. Traditional news, which disproportionately covers political content, is in decline.
My sense is that user-generated social media content that has risen to replace traditional news is both (i) less likely to talk about Vice Presidents organically and (ii) less likely to amplify traditional content when there is less of it.
There is, however, another major source of political coverage: television. The decline that has hit written news has not hit TV. As an indicator, look at employment in both sectors, indexed to 2004:
Data on TV coverage went back further, so I started at the earliest point relevant to our Vice Presidencies (just before Pence was announced as a VP running mate) and ended at the present as before (Day -193 to Day 372). I pulled from CNN and Fox, so the dataset had left leaning and right leaning representation.
The below chart shows the % of 15-second segments in which “Kamala Harris” or “Mike Pence” was mentioned during the comparison period:
The story here is the inverse of earlier. For every 4 Pence mentions there are 5 Harris mentions. And unlike with news articles, where the denominator can vary, the number of 15-second segments in 24 hours of broadcast is fixed.
Then I looked at which stations made the mentions:
Coverage of Pence’s tenure is evenly split. Harris is getting more than twice the coverage on Fox as she is on CNN.
To understand why – is news just more polarized now than it was in 2016 or is it something else? – I pulled the Pence data for the matching dates rather than matching tenure. Here’s the same chart, but both data sets are from June 10th, 2020 to January 27th, 2022:
Pence gets the same divided coverage as Harris (but inverted so his ideological opponents are the ones offering twice the airtime) suggesting polarity. Now, unlike during Pence’s VP tenure, TV news focuses disproportionately on the people their audience is supposed to dislike.
As someone who’s tech-tailored feeds and social circles lean left by American standards, I’m less likely to get exposure to TV-based Kamala content.
So, the answer to our question comes in three parts:
The sensationalism of the preceding Trump presidency has waned, resulting in less Vice Presidential content as a share of written coverage
There is simply less written coverage by traditional news outlets, meaning less content about topics that traditional news outlets disproportionately cover like Vice Presidential ongoings
TV news has become more polarized with stations skewing content towards ideological opponents, meaning less coverage of the Democratic Vice President for left-leaning audiences
But then again, who cares? It’s the Vice Presidency. Largely a ceremonial position. At most a tie-breaking vote. Nothing to fuss about.
Thanks for reading.
-Tom
