The Observatoire des Médias hosts an interactive map showing the intensity of Western media coverage in different regions. News outlets studied include the Guardian, The Economist, France’s Rue89.com, the Daily Mail, Slate.com, “the Blogosphere” and others. The map above is for the New York Times.
I’m not sure what the methodology here is, but if it’s accurate, it’s pretty telling. Note how much more coverage Australia gets than Africa, India, China or South America, despite the fact that most of us live in their borders. Now imagine if CNN and FOX had been included in the study…
From the site:
The world according to newspapers is a project that came up while writing a dissertation for school. I first published some maps on L’Observatoire des Médias, a French blog. Seeing the response, Gilles Bruno and I decided to go further and keep track of newspaper coverage. We want the maps above to be updated daily (or weekly) in order to pressure editors into covering more diverse issues.
We will build a scraper that will automatically retrieve the data for the 164 countries on several newspapers and a Java or Flash interface that will morph the maps. If you have any skill in cartograms, or data scraping, or if you have funds to buy these skills, you are more than welcome in the team!
Via Boing Boing.
3 responses so far ↓
1 FT // Mar 25, 2008 at 12:09 pm
Hey Mark,
Good point. You should try Courrier International (www.courrierinternational.com) which has a good coverage of all countries. Available in French, Portuguese and Japanese. Keep up the good work.
Hasta el viernes
F.
2 FT // Mar 25, 2008 at 12:22 pm
In italiano
http://www.internazionale.it/home/
3 B // Mar 25, 2008 at 10:56 pm
I guess a next step would be to look at the quality of reporting as well as biases.
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