A line chart showing two lines - one for cable-news clip mentions of COVID and one for mentions of Ukraine. The line for COVID decreases slowly from Jan through February and the line for Ukraine significantly increases in early February to over 3,000 mentions by the end of the month.
We ran a search of CNN, Fox News and MSNBC coverage from Jan. 1 to Feb. 28, 2022, in the Television News Archive using the GDELT Television API. In that database, daily news footage is split into 15-second clips, and searches return the clips that contain a mention of our query (“Ukraine” or “COVID”). The cutoff for measuring coverage for any given day is midnight Eastern Time.