‘Yours Sincerely, the Fourth Estate'. :: 9th Aug 2019
This project was made as contribution to an exhibit at Manchester’s People’s History Museum.
”From _______ To ________” marks the 200 year anniversary of the Peterloo Massacre.
It made me think about social oppression in the UK today.
You can read more of that courtesy of a transcript of my interview with Mashable.
On the 9 Aug 2019 I did a Google search for “transgender” on a few English news outlets.
These are the results for the editorial output over 12 months (# of ‘reports’).
Click for a full year of headlines:
:: The Times of London (158)
[inc. Sunday Times]
:: The Daily Mail (128)
[inc. Mail on Sunday]
:: The BBC (124)
:: The Guardian (120)
[inc. Observer]
:: The Mirror (107)
:: The Telegraph (87)
:: The Spectator (72)
:: The Sun (54)
:: The Economist (28)
.
No semantic filtering was added.
Screenshots were taken for each page.
Results were de-duped. Anomalies were removed.
Receipts are available
The results are ordered according to Google's filter of ‘relevance'. The date range is Aug 9 2018 to Aug 8 2019
No editing was done regarding the positive or negative or neutrality of the coverage / opinion.
878 articles in 365 days. For a community comprising 0.5 to 0.6% of the population.
They’re not all bad - but they’re not all necessary.
We hope this serves to understand what 3 ‘articles’ a day about your community feels like.
Obviously, if we tried to track all ’trans’ articles online we would need someone clever.
We stopped when results felt irrelevant. i.e. Transgender is mentioned in many hundreds of ‘news’ or opinion pieces without relevance to the news item in question. (Here’s looking at you Sunday Times)
No, it’s not scientific. Yes, the methodology can be questioned.
Knock yourself out / Do better / Or.. perhaps, just leave us alone.
10 Aug, 2019