What Are They Talking About?
Every day, a program counts which wars the world’s news covered most — and whether that coverage is rising or falling.
Rankings
Which wars came up most?
Tap a war to see it over time, at the bottom of the page. One story can mention more than one war, so it counts once for each. Arrows compare the second half of the period with the first half.
Themes
What were the war stories about?
Share of war stories that touch each theme. One story can touch several themes, so these add up to more than 100%.
By Region & Country
Who covers which war?
Pick a country or region to see what its biggest outlets wrote about, compared with the world as a whole.
The Network
Which wars are mentioned together, and who mentions them?
A line means those two showed up in the same stories. Countries are the tracker’s countries and regions. Outlets are each newsroom. Drag a dot, scroll or use + and − to zoom, drag the background to pan.
Descriptive Statistics
The numbers behind the rankings, per day
- Avg / day — the typical day's count (the mean).
- Median — the middle day. Less thrown off by one huge day.
- Spread — how much it jumps around from day to day (standard deviation).
- Low / High — the quietest and the busiest day.
- Share — out of all war stories, how many mentioned this one.
- Per 1,000 — out of every 1,000 news stories of any kind. Fair across busy and slow news days.
- Tone — GDELT's mood score. 0 = neutral, minus = darker.
How the coverage moved, day by day
Movement — day by day
Each bar is one counted day. Taller bar = more war stories that day.
How it works — in plain words
- 1A free service called GDELT reads the world's news all day, in many languages, and keeps a list of every story.
- 2Once a day, our program reads all 96 of GDELT's 15-minute snapshots a day — from both English and translated feeds — and checks each headline for war relevance.
- 3It saves every day forever in a small file that this page reads, so every visitor sees the numbers right away — and the history keeps growing.
Source: the GDELT Project. All 96 of GDELT's 15-minute snapshots a day, from both English and translated feeds, are a sample, not every article on Earth, so the numbers are best for comparing wars and spotting movement.
What we count — the program's word lists and outlets, straight from its settings. Tap to open.
Wars and the words that count for them
Outlets, by country and region
Think we're missing a war or an outlet? Get in touch through the Contact section.