Social Distancing Mentions Fade On Television News Post-Election
The timeline below shows the percentage of daily airtime mentioning social distancing across BBC News London, CNN, MSNBC and Fox News since the start of this year using a 7-day rolling average. The raw unsmoothed graph shows that mentions began dropping on November 1 as coverage shifted to the impending election and never returned. While mentions still account for 0.2-0.5% of daily airtime they are far less than pre-election levels.
The timeline below shows the total seconds of daily airtime (again using 7-day rolling average smoothing) in which social distancing appeared in the onscreen text, showing that the three US channels phased it out during the George Floyd protests, while BBC continued using it for a while longer, but that since mid-July all four channels mention it only for a few hundred seconds daily.
