Every story fades with time, except for one

Jeremy Musighi argues that news attention normally follows a predictable peak-and-decay pattern, but coverage of Israel breaks that rule: using 14.7 million news articles in 65 languages, cable-news airtime logs, and social media data from X, he finds Israel dominates in duration, volume, and negativity. After Oct 7, Israel exceeded 1% of US cable-news airtime on 344 of 365 days, while Sudan - with an estimated 400,000 deaths - topped 1% on only 8 of 390 days as its genocide intensified. In nine of the last ten years Israel drew more media stories per capita than any other country; despite ~10 million people (roughly #95 by population) it ranked #6 in absolute coverage over the decade and in 2024 produced one of every 26 global articles.

The analysis also highlights extreme imbalances: 2024 generated more than twice as many stories about Israel as about all 48 sub-Saharan African countries combined, and per conflict death in 2022 Israel was discussed about 10,000 times more than Ethiopia’s Tigray war. Sentiment measured by GDELT averaged −2.77 for Israel over the past decade, more negative than Iran, North Korea, Sudan, China, Congo, and Russia. He frames these patterns as deliberate repetition that fosters belief, calls the media’s handling of Israel a measurable bias, and has open-sourced his methodology and underlying data in a detailed write-up titled Center of Attention.