
New York Times word usage frequency, 1970-2018 - admiralspoo
https://twitter.com/arram/status/1288140788442861568
======
TeaDrunk
Several of the terms listed include terms that literally didn't exist in 1970s
so I'm not surprised that they spike up... I also don't know what the graphs
mean- are they all on the same scale, or is it measuring their frequency
relative to themselves? It makes sense for a term like "amazon" to double or
triple in frequency from the 1970s, because the literal Amazon company is
probably double or triply influencial than however many times the Science
section can cover the amazon rainforest...

For example, it's difficult to deviate that racism is an outrage culture
strategy from the NYT if Black Lives Matter was coined in 2013 (and then
became popular in 2014) which coincides with the graphs about race. [0].

For example, it makes sense that amazon got more attention over time- it
literally didn't exist in 1970s and only became prominent recently.[1].

0\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lives_Matter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lives_Matter)
1\.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_\(company\))

EDIT: There is also a claim that this noticeably differentiates from google
trends of words searched for. Do comparable graphs exist to prove this claim?
Does it also differentiate from social media words being used, or from other
media sources like Reuters, Fox News, CNN, Washington Post, etc? Without
further context about this, I don't know what conclusions should be drawn
specifically about NYT.

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legerdemain
Unless the reader knows how the choice of words was made, it remains possible
to choose a set of words to fit any narrative.

The word "intersectionality" has only recently reached popular discourse.
What's the 70s word for "intersectionality"? I have no idea, but I'm sure it
was really groovy.

Show us the words with the biggest net positive trends and the biggest net
negative trends, globally or within some semantic domain. Then we might have a
narrative instead of innuendo.

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jszymborski
While I applaud the author's efforts to bring to light the NYT's policy of
doxing, as well as their asymmetric coverage in the 2016 US election, I think
this word frequency figure fails to illustrate (and somewhat undermines) the
intended message (i.e.: sensationalist news media).

That the NYT writes more stories in 2018 about e.g. gay rights or sexism or
oppressed classes than they did in 1970 more likely represents progress. While
these problems always existed, they were often dismissed by journos,
politicos, academics, and society by-and-large. Acknowledging that these
issues exists is progress, and if anything I think that these graphs show that
progress is slow, but steady.

Again, sympathetic to the overall message @arram is expressing, but this graph
is an exceptionally poor way to show it imho.

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arram
Graphs are the work of Zach Goldberg:
[https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1133440945201061888](https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1133440945201061888)

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icedistilled
The words highlighted in the word usage trends don't support the claim that
NYT "abandoned it's commitment to nonpartisan reporting" Explain how a big
uptick in the use of words like "feminism", "islamaphobia" and "anti-semitism"
mean the NYT became partisan?

I have a lot of beef with the NYT but the graphs don't show what he claims.
And if he actually believes they do, then I have seriously questions about his
viewpoints.

Especially considering events that happened around the phase change, like the
muslim ban and Me Too movement, that could easily explain the step changes in
word frequency around 2014-2016. And is there any comparison with other news
outlets word frequencies?

If anything, the step changes show that before 2014ish, NYT was failing at
recognizing important issues that they have now started reporting on.

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dexen
An exploratory thread by Zach Goldberg [1] where he discusses more words &
expressions, and compares to other, broader trends.

\--

[1]
[https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1133440945201061888](https://twitter.com/ZachG932/status/1133440945201061888)

~~~
SECProto
None of that makes me say "holy fucking shit" (linked author's words). For
example, that systemic racism was effectively unmentioned in news articles
until 2012 is not at all surprising to me. Rather, the media (and public
discourse in general) just recently started to acknowledge issues that have
been around forever, but haven't been addressed before.

There's a lot of selection bias there. I bet if a similar chart was created
for "civil rights", there'd be a peak in the 1960s.

Or maybe if the charts were normalized to the number of articles per year, the
charts would look much less exponential. It's hard to say.

And actually, if you read #14, you see the twitter thread has a major issue -
where it lacks data from the earlier years of the trends. That effectively
renders it no more worthy than an anecdote.

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typon
Let's see the usage of the word "steam engine" and "quantum computers" plotted
on a graph. What a weird tweetstorm.

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wodenokoto
Looks like their word frequency has increased /s

Anyway, this is a selection of "woke words", seemingly selected to make NY
Times look like they are not serious, since they have increased their usage of
such words. I'm not sure I agree with the argument.

------
starmftronajoll
The writer purports to make a case about the profit motives of the New York
Times, but the graphs are presented without broader context. A more convincing
graphic might be to put these graphs side-by-side with Google Books Ngram
Viewer graphs of the same terms, since the Google Books data would presumably
represent a wider sample of the culture at large.

The writer of the Twitter thread does mention Google Trends in passing, but
only to hand-wave it away by saying that we "don't see corresponding spikes."
Citation needed, I guess, since the Google Books data (which strikes me as a
better comparison corpus than Trends) often _does_ show a large uptick,
suggesting a given trend is more cultural than specific to the NYT. And in
many cases, how could the data _not_ show a spike, given that a lot of the
words on the graphic (e.g., "intersectionality," [1] "mansplaining," [2]) were
not part of common parlance a decade ago?

That said, there are certainly also cases where the slope on the NYT graph for
a given word is much steeper than the corresponding uptick in the Google Books
data (e.g., "sexism" [3], "patriarchy" [4]). To some extent, I think this is
to be expected, because the respective publication schedules + subject matter
of news sites vs. books leads the former to react more quickly and decidedly
to short-term linguistic trends. Nonetheless, I think singling out cases where
the NYT clearly diverges from the culture at large would go further to make
that author's point -- which, I should be clear, I think is reasonable one and
strikes me as basically "right," and I believe it's an argument that could
probably be illustrated by data. I'm just not convinced that the data
presented in the Twitter thread makes the powerful case that the author
claims.

[1]
[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?smoothing=3&corpus=26&...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?smoothing=3&corpus=26&year_end=2019&year_start=1970&content=intersectionality&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cintersectionality%3B%2Cc0)

[2]
[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?smoothing=3&corpus=26&...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?smoothing=3&corpus=26&year_end=2019&year_start=1970&content=mansplaining&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cmansplaining%3B%2Cc0)

[3]
[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?smoothing=3&corpus=26&...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?smoothing=3&corpus=26&year_end=2019&year_start=1970&content=sexism&direct_url=t1%3B%2Csexism%3B%2Cc0)

[4]
[https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?smoothing=3&corpus=26&...](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?smoothing=3&corpus=26&year_end=2019&year_start=1970&content=patriarchy&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cpatriarchy%3B%2Cc0)

