Content Frequency Analyses

The Media Impact Project has established two sources for analyzing media content on a large scale: The USC Norman Lear Center Script Database and the All-Inclusive TV & Radio Database. These two sources allow for large scale analyses of the frequency of keywords related to important issues and communities.
Scripted TV and Film

The Norman Lear Center (NLC) Script Database is a valuable resource for evaluating how key terms show up in scripted entertainment. Starting with the transcript of dialogue cards from the 1910 silent film Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the NLC Script Database contains over 167,000 transcripts from scripted films and television shows over the last 113 years.

The database is used to analyze how important issues and communities are depicted in scripted entertainment. Publications include:
  • A Glaring Absence: The Climate Crisis is Virtually Nonexistent in Scripted Entertainment
    To establish a baseline for representation of the climate crisis in scripted entertainment, we monitored the frequency of mentions of 36 keywords related to climate change in 37,453 scripted TV episodes and films from 2016-2020.

  • Spotlighting Domestic Worker Representation in Scripted TV and Film
    The National Domestic Workers Alliance partnered with the Norman Lear Center Media Impact Project at USC to commission a research report analyzing the history of domestic worker representation across scripted film and TV from 1910 to 2020.

  • Poverty Narratives in Scripted Entertainment
    In partnership with The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, we used the script database to build a content analysis sample of shows that have included poverty narratives.

  • Charitable Giving in the Media
    To establish a baseline of how charitable giving is depicted in scripted film and television, we analyzed charity keywords from 2010-2020.

  • Stories Matter: Health Equity
    We conducted a qualitative thematic analysis of narratives related to social determinants of health in scripted TV and film from 2015-2020, finding four existing narratives in entertainment with varying emphasis on individual versus systemic causes of and solutions to health problems.
All-Inclusive TV & Radio

The Media Impact Project is able to search over 2,000 TV stations and radio stations from all 210 U.S. media markets as well as several other countries. To conduct an all-inclusive analysis of how various issues and communities are depicted in television and radio, we analyze hundreds of thousands of keyword mentions from a 30-day period. Our team of human coders identifies the genre, viewership, network, and context of each mention, which allows us to tell the story of how the issue is being addressed in the media. Publications include:
  • Africa in the Media
    To establish a baseline for how often Africa is depicted in U.S. news and entertainment programming, the MIP team monitored the frequency of mentions of “Africa,” “African” (excluding African-American), “Africans,” and the names of the continent’s 54 nations on almost 700,000 hours of U.S. television during the entire month of March 2018.

  • Charitable Giving in the Media
    To establish a baseline for how often charitable giving appears in U.S. news and entertainment programming, we monitored the frequency of mentions of twelve keywords related to giving.

  • Poverty Narratives on TV
    To understand how often poverty-related issues are depicted in U.S. news and entertainment programming, we conducted a rigorous analysis of TV coverage, including news, scripted TV, and unscripted TV during the month of December 2020. We captured a total of 166,214 mentions of 15 poverty-related keywords.
Contact Us To Learn More

If you want to see how various terms describing an issue or a community are showing up in scripted film and TV or all television and radio, please contact Adam Rogers to schedule a demo.
The Norman Lear Center's Media Impact Project researches how entertainment and news influence our thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, knowledge and actions. We work with researchers, the film and TV industry, nonprofits, and news organizations, and share our research with the public. We are part of the University of Southern California's Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.