Last Week In The News

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

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.

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.

“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:

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:

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.

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

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

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.