Ran across this while reading the Numbers Guy blog over at blogs.wsj.com. Nicolas Kayser-Bril, a graduate student in media and economics, published a series of maps showing world news coverage for ten 'international' media organizations. The maps show the amount of coverage countries received from the media organization.
There are several problems with the data used to produced the maps, or cartograms. Most of the data was gathered by Mr. Kayser-Bril who went to the websites of the organizations and counted the number of times a country was mentioned in an article published in 2007. Some of the other problems with the data is the difficulty in determining the difference between country names and peoples name (i.e. Chad and Chad Johnson) and some countries have multiple ways of being identified (i.e. England, Great Britain). Even Mr. Kayser-Bril, acknowledges that the maps are not very accurate and were published as a blogger not as a researcher.
Below are some cartograms of The Economist, The New York Times and The Australian:
The Economist
The Australian
A couple of totally unrelated points about this:
- Think of Others - we tend to think of only those things that are immediately around us. Most of the news lately has been how terrible the US economy is, but what is happening with the rest of the world? Is it as bad as it is here?
- Don't Accept Everything At Face Value - while there is probably a lot of truth behind the data Mr Kayser-Bril used to make these maps, there are enough problems with it that requires us think discount it. Enron!
- Everything Is Local (this is a corollary to item #1.) - even though the world has shrunk, most people only care about what is immediately around them. Humans have short attention spans.
Source:
"Why It’s Hard to Map Media Coverage", by Carl Bialik
"Le monde dans les yeux d’un rédac chef, l’Américaine version", by Nicolas Kayser-Bril
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