Last Week In The News
May 21-28: Baby Formula Shortage, Monkeypox, Texas Shooting Police Response, US on Defending Taiwan
In Top Down News, we collect, compare, and distill a multitude of mainstream perspectives that capture the majority of America’s political readership to approximate the truth. Dive deeper into the analysis for this post here, powered by AI-based Natural Language Understanding and D3-based Dynamic visualizations.1
Top Stories Aggregated Across Mainstream Media
Two of the top five stories are oriented around the school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, making it the biggest topic of the week. For all of the top stories besides Taiwan, there’s a distinct pattern in either the amount of coverage between different sources or the word-choice bias in how they’re covered.
Everyone Is United On Defending Taiwan
From Biden Says U.S. Military Would Defend Taiwan if China Invaded,
“You didn’t want to get involved in the Ukraine conflict militarily for obvious reasons,” a reporter said to Mr. Biden. “Are you willing to get involved militarily to defend Taiwan if it comes to that?”
“Yes,” Mr. Biden answered flatly.
This marks a potential departure from the US’s “strategic ambiguity” stance on defending against China. News outlets across the political spectrum are ranking this high on their front pages.
The Baby Formula Shortage
“Baby formula is hard to find. Nationwide, 21% of powdered baby formula was out of stock in early May, according to the latest figures from research firm IRI.” This predominantly affects low-income new-born parents across the country. Parents may be driving for hours in search of formula.
Left-leaning journals are scantly focused on it, even though Biden, the FDA, US-Military, and numerous companies and countries across the world are coordinating to fix this. It’s unclear to me why Reuters is placing such an emphasis on this compared to the rest of the Mainstream media.
NYTimes’ only front page article2 on this last week was Baby Formula Shortage Reveals Gaps in Regulation and Reporting, which is predominantly an investigation of an Abbott baby formula plant in Michigan; this bacteria-related factory shutdown further worsened the pre-existing formula shortage. Fascinatingly, NYTimes just released an episode on the Daily about this, perhaps to address its missing coverage:
Monkeypox Moves From Fringe To Mainstream
Last week, I talked about how while NYTimes was focused on rising Covid cases, Fox was the lone wolf sounding the alarm bells, publishing this topic as its 3rd highest headline on May 19th. Things have changed. We’re seeing coverage across all outlets, with Fox News and Reuters emphasizing their coverage.
In the last 10 days, the World Health Organization held an emergency meeting on Monkeypox and Biden declared that everyone should be concerned about Monkeypox. The top headlines, even within a single source, present unclear takeaways:
Fox News: President Biden sounds alarm on monkeypox outbreak, says 'everybody' should be concerned
Reuters: More U.S. monkeypox cases likely, risk to public is low -official says
Reuters: Biden says 'everybody' should be concerned about monkeypox outbreak
NYTimes: How serious is monkeypox? It’s not like Covid, but there is cause for concern. Experts weighed in.
Since it’s early, there is simply a lot of uncertainty on how dangerous this virus is. We’ll continue to watch this topic as it evolves.
Criticism of Police In Texas School Shooting
Parents of the victims of the school shooting are voicing their anger and criticism of the police response. Here’s the breakdown of coverage on this topic.
NYTimes, CNN, and WSJ all published banner headlines that ranked in the top three of their front page
NYTimes: Parents Escalate Criticism of Police Delay After Shooting Began
CNN: Parents seen frustrated with police at shooting scene in new video
Meanwhile, Fox’s headlines on this topic didn’t break the top 20 on its front page throughout all of last week. In all of their headlines, the word choice seems carefully designed not to validate the criticism of the police.
Mother of Sandy Hook victim sends message to parents of Texas school shooting victims
Parkland school shooting victim's father calls out officials after Texas tragedy
Parents clashed with police at scene of Texas school shooting
Stories you may have missed
If you read Fox News, these stories were emphasized by the outlets below
If you read CNN, these stories were emphasized in the outlets listed below
As always, all the data and visualizations are available on Observable - dive deeper, and please call out the issues you’ll see so we can improve our algorithms to present you with the best data possible.
Occurs in the top 30 headlines on the front page
Thanks for the latest post! It’s getting much better and the analysis is on point. Your commentary is my favorite part!
I didn’t see anything about the Taiwan comment. That seems like a material change on a decade long stance of strategic ambiguity and is getting the coverage it deserves. It seems like the short to medium term prediction for china US relationship is only escalation. That’s very scary, especially for families like mine :(.
Some minor feedback:
If you read Fox News, these stories were emphasized by the outlets below
This wording is a bit confusing. Maybe word it something like if you read Fox News, you might have missed these headlines
For the stories themselves, I’d suggest to label the stories with a short topic name on the graph, and optionally include the title underneath, instead of using the full title as labels. Makes the graphs easier to scan.