The coverage of the news in the United States is typically far more episodic than thematic. Episodic coverage focuses on a narrow case: Who did what? When? Who suffered? The media report on the identity of the perpetrator, what he or she did, and the identity of the victim. There is much less thematic coverage, which looks into the context of an action: Why do things happen? What is the background? Is there a larger theme to what happened? I think that this tendency to focus on the specific case rather than on the whole theme has increased in recent times.

Click on the tabs to view the corresponding charts:

There has been much less foreign reporting since the end of the Cold War. American news coverage of events abroad has decreased dramatically. Yet even during the Cold War there was a lack of contextual coverage, particularly when themes did not fit into the Cold War conflict between the two power blocs. Following the Iran hostage crisis, Columbia University professor Edward Said, a leading scholar on the Middle East, made a great point in his book Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World which I think we need to heed:

News consumers in the United States—particularly the vast majority of Americans who receive most of their political news from television—never got a full picture of the developments, the feelings, the problems, and the issues in the Muslim and Arab world. In a way, one could say it was a good result that the American public finally learned a great deal more about this part of the world. But the negative reality is that they learned only because of the events of Black Tuesday.