Our understanding of the word is shaped by the information we encounter - and the information we don't.

And despite recent erosion in trust of media outlets, the news industry is still one of the main filters that determines what information Americans see. According Pew Research Center data, nearly two-thirds of U.S. adults regularly get information from news websites or apps on computers or mobile devices.

So the way that American media outlets cover other countries can have a significant effect on their consumers’ collective understanding of the world. But how do U.S. outlets see the world around them? Which countries get news coverage and why?

We looked for U.S. news headlines containing country names in the Global Database of Events, Language and Tone (GDELT)’s Global Frontpage Graph database, focusing on headlines that appeared from January 2019 through May 2023 on the main landing pages of three popular news outlets representing different points on the spectrum of American political ideology: The New York Times, USA Today, and Fox News.

Our analysis of 94,000 headlines from those three outlets revealed that large countries whose economic and political interests intersect with those of the United States receive the most frequent “front-page” coverage — a finding reinforced by the way that the conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Gaza region dominated U.S. news coverage in late 2023 — but also shed light on regions that are largely ignored by U.S. media.

How are countries around the world represented in the U.S. news?

This is the world according to The New York Times, Fox News and USA Today in the last four and a half years.

Each rectangle represents the total number of times a country was mentioned by the three outlets, from one headline to approximately 18,000 headlines.

Studies show that international news coverage by American outlets has long been dominated by a small number of countries highly relevant to U.S. foreign policy. Recent years have been no different; just 10 countries, including the U.S., accounted for 80% of all headlines that name a country.

The trend of a few countries dominating coverage remains consistent when you look at smaller regions across the globe. Two countries are responsible for more than half of the top headlines in each region except for Sub-Saharan Africa, where South Africa, Sudan, Nigeria and Ethiopia are the most covered countries.

Sub-Saharan Africa also had the smallest number of countries mentioned in U.S. headlines, despite having more countries than any region besides Europe and Central Asia. While the U.S. is, unsurprisingly, the most covered single country, Europe has been the most covered region during the last four and a half years.

Ten countries, mostly island countries with small populations, did not appear in headlines at any of the three outlets during the observation period.

Some countries — like China, Russia and Israel — were among the most frequently mentioned by all three outlets, but there was significant variance between the outlets as well.

The New York Times had the largest share of articles related to the United Kingdom and India. The newspaper also covered the largest number of countries in Africa.

Each rectangle is now sized by the share of headlines containing country name in each media. Highlighted countries represent higher share of headlines with a this country name in one of the media.

Fox News, the conservative cable news organization, published home page stories about the largest number of countries and was the most likely to mention Venezuela, where there was high-profile political unrest that came to a head in 2019, as well as other countries that have had an antagonistic relationship with the U.S., namely Iran and Afghanistan.

And USA Today may have been the outlet that mentioned the smallest number of countries, but it was the most likely of the three to report on European countries.

What do countries that are covered the most have in common?

One of the most common factors among the countries that get the most U.S. headlines is population. In general, the larger a country’s population, the more likely it is to receive coverage — except for Sub-Saharan Africa, which accounts for 40% of the countries with a population over 500,000 and 10 or fewer mentions in U.S. outlets.

The larger a country’s population, the more likely it is to receive coverage

Relationship between the country's population and number of mentions in headlines in 2021.

Rectangles are scaled according to the population size. The further outward a country is, the less headlines it was mentioned in (log scale).

Other factors, like economic ties or geographic proximity to the U.S., were not significant predictors of coverage levels. The headlines we analyzed included economically developed countries and poorer ones, direct neighbors and countries far away, and both frequent and infrequent trading partners.

But we can look at four countries that remain near the top of the American news agenda regardless of year-to-year fluctuations — China, Russia, Mexico and Iran — and several nations where coverage spiked in one of the years we examined to find another key element that gets foreign countries covered by American media: intersections with U.S. foreign policy, especially when contentious political climates or outright conflict are involved.

What were the most frequently mentioned issues?

This graphic represents the 50 most mentioned words each of the headlines across the three outlets.

Let's look at the most common words used in the headlines about countries. Each line represents a word.

War is one of the most common topics that comes up across all three outlets.

Approximately one-third of the headlines using the word “war” were about the conflict between Russia and Ukraine, which captured attention across the globe as countries chose sides. The ongoing war also drew coverage due to Ukraine’s proximity to U.S. allies in Europe and the conflict’s effects on global economies.

Not all articles referred to “war” in the sense of armed aggression, though. China was frequently referenced in “war” headlines — sometimes due to China’s role in the Russia-Ukraine conflict, but also because of its “trade war” with the U.S.

And some conflicts got more attention in one media outlet than in others. The Tigray War in Ethiopia, fought from 2020 to 2022, was mentioned in 16 New York Times articles, more often than in either of the other two outlets we analyzed.

Other terms relating to violence or death — “attack,” “dead,” “death,” and “killed” — were also frequently used in headlines, though more frequently by Fox News and USA Today than by The New York Times. Russia and Ukraine were frequently mentioned alongside these terms in headlines as well.

Fox News and USA Today were more likely to report on people being killed or dying in Mexico, while death-related terms were more likely to appear alongside mentions of Israel in The New York Times.

How does the coverage of countries in conflict resemble reality? We looked at a measure of conflict severity in 2022 and the number of headlines about countries (all headlines, not only those related to conflict).

The war in Ukraine, the most frequently mentioned conflict, was categorized as a severe conflict and had the highest death toll, with estimates of nearly 200,000 total killed in action — and an additional 9,500 civilian deaths — as of August.

Ongoing conflicts in Mexico and Afghanistan, two of the most frequently mentioned countries, were also categorized as severe. But struggles in Mali and Burkina Faso, despite having approximately the same number of fatalities as Afghanistan, were mentioned fewer than 10 times, while Afghanistan drew 470 headlines over the time period.

And South Sudan, which saw 2,000 people killed in 2022, was mentioned in U.S. headlines just once.

World leaders are also among the most commonly mentioned topics in headlines. “Biden” and “Trump” were among the top five terms in all three media outlets — they were the two most common words in Fox News headlines. And “president” was the most used word across New York Times headlines.

Russian president Vladimir Putin was also a frequently mentioned figure, and Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy was on the list of top topics in USA Today headlines (but not Fox News or The New York Times).

Borders were another common theme in the headlines we analyzed. Fox News, which has devoted major airtime to immigration issues, published several articles referencing migration to the U.S. from Mexico and Haiti, while USA Today focused most on the country’s border-sharing neighbors, Canada and Mexico.

Sporting events, soccer in particular, were more common in the headlines of USA Today.

Overall, the data we analyzed, focusing on the coverage of international news by the three American media outlets, sheds light on some persistent trends in global coverage in the last four and a half years. It underscores the dominance of a select few countries in news headlines, reflecting their significance in U.S. foreign policy and highlights more transient issues that appear in the headlines occasionally. Population size is one of the key factors in determining a country's media coverage, with larger nations generally receiving more attention. Yet, it's noteworthy that Sub-Saharan Africa, despite its substantial population and diversity, remains underrepresented in U.S. headlines.

The prevalence of the terms connected to violence in media coverage highlights the global impact of conflicts on our representation of the world. The Russia-Ukraine conflict, in particular, gained significant attention.

Methodology

For this analysis, we looked at headlines from primary landing pages for Fox News, The New York Times and USA Today from January 2019 through May 2023. The headlines were collected by the Global Database of Events, Language and Tone (GDELT) for its Global Frontpage Graph database. Headlines were only included the first time they appeared on the landing page, and were tagged to countries if they included alternate spellings or references to nationalities (e.g. a headline including "Chinese" would be categorized as a China headline). Regional groupings and population data come from the World Bank.

Feel free to use the information from this analysis, but please link back to this page for attribution purposes if you do.