New York Times word usage frequency, 1970-2018
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For example, it's difficult to deviate that racism is an outrage culture strategy from the NYT if Black Lives Matter was coined in 2013 (and then became popular in 2014) which coincides with the graphs about race. [0].
For example, it makes sense that amazon got more attention over time- it literally didn't exist in 1970s and only became prominent recently.[1].
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Lives_Matter 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_(company)
EDIT: There is also a claim that this noticeably differentiates from google trends of words searched for. Do comparable graphs exist to prove this claim? Does it also differentiate from social media words being used, or from other media sources like Reuters, Fox News, CNN, Washington Post, etc? Without further context about this, I don't know what conclusions should be drawn specifically about NYT.
The word "intersectionality" has only recently reached popular discourse. What's the 70s word for "intersectionality"? I have no idea, but I'm sure it was really groovy.
Show us the words with the biggest net positive trends and the biggest net negative trends, globally or within some semantic domain. Then we might have a narrative instead of innuendo.
That the NYT writes more stories in 2018 about e.g. gay rights or sexism or oppressed classes than they did in 1970 more likely represents progress. While these problems always existed, they were often dismissed by journos, politicos, academics, and society by-and-large. Acknowledging that these issues exists is progress, and if anything I think that these graphs show that progress is slow, but steady.
Again, sympathetic to the overall message @arram is expressing, but this graph is an exceptionally poor way to show it imho.
I have a lot of beef with the NYT but the graphs don't show what he claims. And if he actually believes they do, then I have seriously questions about his viewpoints.
Especially considering events that happened around the phase change, like the muslim ban and Me Too movement, that could easily explain the step changes in word frequency around 2014-2016. And is there any comparison with other news outlets word frequencies?
If anything, the step changes show that before 2014ish, NYT was failing at recognizing important issues that they have now started reporting on.
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There's a lot of selection bias there. I bet if a similar chart was created for "civil rights", there'd be a peak in the 1960s.
Or maybe if the charts were normalized to the number of articles per year, the charts would look much less exponential. It's hard to say.
And actually, if you read #14, you see the twitter thread has a major issue - where it lacks data from the earlier years of the trends. That effectively renders it no more worthy than an anecdote.
Anyway, this is a selection of "woke words", seemingly selected to make NY Times look like they are not serious, since they have increased their usage of such words. I'm not sure I agree with the argument.
The writer of the Twitter thread does mention Google Trends in passing, but only to hand-wave it away by saying that we "don't see corresponding spikes." Citation needed, I guess, since the Google Books data (which strikes me as a better comparison corpus than Trends) often _does_ show a large uptick, suggesting a given trend is more cultural than specific to the NYT. And in many cases, how could the data _not_ show a spike, given that a lot of the words on the graphic (e.g., "intersectionality," [1] "mansplaining," [2]) were not part of common parlance a decade ago?
That said, there are certainly also cases where the slope on the NYT graph for a given word is much steeper than the corresponding uptick in the Google Books data (e.g., "sexism" [3], "patriarchy" [4]). To some extent, I think this is to be expected, because the respective publication schedules + subject matter of news sites vs. books leads the former to react more quickly and decidedly to short-term linguistic trends. Nonetheless, I think singling out cases where the NYT clearly diverges from the culture at large would go further to make that author's point -- which, I should be clear, I think is reasonable one and strikes me as basically "right," and I believe it's an argument that could probably be illustrated by data. I'm just not convinced that the data presented in the Twitter thread makes the powerful case that the author claims.
[1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?smoothing=3&corpus=26&...
[2] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?smoothing=3&corpus=26&...
[3] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?smoothing=3&corpus=26&...
[4] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?smoothing=3&corpus=26&...