Have you ever wondered what newspapers think would make you want to buy their paper? Supposedly what appears above the fold on the front page is what the editors and publishers think will draw your attention enough to induce you to buy the paper. Above is the most frequently used words found above the fold in the month of October, 2017 in the Washington Post (in blue, considered liberal), the Wall Street Journal (in green, considered conservative though I find it pretty unbiased), and the Washington Times (in red, considered conservative). All of these words appeared more than once over the month and the font size is an indication of the frequency of the word. The font sizes are scaled the same for all of the sources, so if a word appeared 10 times in all three papers, it is the same size font for all. I also used word roots so that, for example, the word “campaigns” became “campaign.” If various forms of the words were meant differently then I didn’t reduce them to their roots, so “Senate” and “senator” were not reduced to the same root. Also Wordle eliminates “common” words such as articles, pronouns, etc.
It’s not surprising that “Trump” appeared most often in all three papers, though it tied with “U.S.” in the Journal.
Though all of the papers mentioned the GOP, Mueller, Republicans, Russia, and Trump, they clearly emphasize different issues. As one would expect the WSJ is the only paper that included articles about the CVS and Aetna merger and GE’s plans to drop the manufacture of trains. The WSJ also covered “health care’ and “health law” as opposed to the Times that covered “Obamacare.” The Post had nothing about that topic above the fold. The WSJ is the only paper to use the “president” to refer to Trump.
The Post is the only paper that had anything about the legislation that restricted the DEA’s power over the manufacture of opioids. It was also the only paper to put anything above the fold about Trump’s controversial calls to families of killed military personnel. It is the only place you’ll see any mention of Bannon, Kelly, and the upheaval in Catalonia.
The Times was the only paper to include the words abortion, Obamacare, social media, Democrats, and “Islamic State” above the fold. Unlike both the Post and WSJ, it didn’t include anything about the wildfires in California or the current tax bill.