Radio Television Suisse (RTS) is the main broadcasting organization in the French speaking Switzerland (Suisse Romande). Together with SRG and SSR (their German and Italian counterparts) they form the national media.
We obtained nearly 90 years of data of RTS broadcast, from 1930 until 2017. With an expansive dataset from such a media outlet, we wondered what kind of social questions we can answer.
We started with the belief that RTS being a news/entertainment medium, many of the social and international trends and events that shaped the Swiss in the 20th century can be studied and visualized. Therefore we set out to answer theses questions:
What type of programs were produced in each time period? What/Who are the dominant themes/characters for the different historical periods ?
How has the RTS covered the news around the globe ? How equitable was the coverage? Is there any noticeable bias?
How has RTS coverage evolved across the years?
How did the RTS coverage of important social phenomena like the sexual revolution, women’s voting right, and terrorism evolved over time?
How has the distribution of genders for anchors and presenters evolved over the course of the years? Was there a gender bias? If yes, how is it changed?
1. What type of programs were produced in each time period? What/Who are the dominant themes/characters for the different historical periods ?
To have an ensemble view on the topics of the programs, the number of occurrences of each word by year was added. The word cloud below offers a nice way to visualize the evolution of different themes over the year. The dropdown menu on top of the cloud has four options : Genres, Topics, Persons and Locations. The slider at the bottom allows to pick a year between 1900 and 2017, it can be navigated with the arrow keys once selected. There is considerably more data for the last decades and very little for the beginning of the 20th century.
As expected, the main topic of the years between 1939 and 1945 is the World War II. What is interesting to observe is the evolution of the surrounding topics. In 1939 we can see the importance of national or war oriented words like “army”, “armed conflict”, “patriotism” or “international relationships”.
(Take me to 1939) Even in this context the second main topics are art-related (history, literature, dramatic art, writer). Amusingly, for the years 1942-43 we get “rationnement” and “recette culinaire” which translates to rationing and cooking recipes. Around the end of the war peace is the second word, followed by “military surrender,” “military release” and “armistice”.
Let’s see what the persons have to offer in recent year. 2010 is the year that the movie Serge Gainsbourg (vie héroïque) came out, this is also the year of the football world cup in South Africa. Both of these themes, clearly trending in the RTS coverage. In 2013 Matthieu Chedid’s new album “Îles” came out and he also did an international tour that year. 2014 Group Etat Islamique (ISIS) comes big. This is the year when ISIS gained global prominence when it drove Iraqi government forces out of key cities. 2015 “Group Etat Islamique” and “Etat Islamique” are still dominant, but now “Charlie Hebdo” is added to the bigger terms. Let’s go back to the topic section to see how they look like for the same period. The same subject have emerged with the terms “Islam” and “terrorism”.
We conclude this section on an amusing observation. From 1956 to 1960 the top topic is “cloche” which translates to “bell”. The term appears from nowhere and completely disappears the following years. Such results are hard to explain with only our history knowledge so we dig into the data. As a matter of fact, there wasn’t much to explain, we found out that there was a radio program that lasted for three years that was about different church’s bells around Switzerland. Other than that there was no further information.
2. How has the RTS covered the news around the globe ? How equitable was the coverage? Is there any noticeable bias?
3. How has RTS coverage evolved across the years?
The interactive heat map below shows the 90 years of RTS coverage around the globe. You can pan and discover the coverage by selecting the genres of programs to include in the heat map. By default all of the broadcasts are included, from all genres and across the whole time span.
Moreover, you can see how the coverage changed around the years. Seek a date on the time line, set the playback speed, press “Play” and watch as the history unfolds, as reported by the RTS. You can use the given presents to zoom to a specific area. Using the presents when the animation is not playing also resets the plot to show the total heatmap.
Set the timeline to the year 1941 and watch as the world (or Europe) erupts in the fires of the second world war. We observe the most news coverage, is still local, but occasionally news happens accross the Europe, from Germany to Spain and also from Russia to United States — especially in the closing years of the fight. Finally you observe the relatively low coverage of the news after the WWII dust settles. This is followed by a spurt in the late 40’s and start of 50’s.
Looking at the RTS coverage around the world , it is clear that altogether, this news/media outlet has covered most of the world at least once. However, the coverage is far from uniform, as better evidenced by coverage in Switzerland and Europe. In Switzerland, there is (not surprisingly) a much stronger coverage for the French Speaking part, while important locations in the German speaking region is also covered. In Europe, the coverage is more skewed towards West Europe. Especially before 1991 and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
How has the distribution of genders for anchors and presenters evolved over the course of the years? Was there a gender bias? If yes, how has it changed?
There are over 100 different presenter roles in the RTS dataset. Here we have selected to plot what we thought are the most interesting ones.
In general we can see various patterns. For ‘Interviewer’ and ‘Presenter,’ we see a very nice progress over the last decades.
For such roles as ‘Producer, ‘ there is not much progress and these roles stay a pretty much dominated by men.
There are also roles where the gender balance was essentially fair since earlier years. For example, this is the case
for ‘weather presenter’ role.
In general we can observe that the roles that have a direct contact with the audience (in audio or visual format) have
made very good progress in term of equal gender representation over the past years and are now pretty close to equality
(with repect to the number of male and female). This, for example, can be seen for ‘weather presenter’, ‘Interviewer’
and ‘Presenter’ roles.
On the other hand, some roles have not made any progress. One notable case in the ‘Interviewed’ case. This is the list of all
people (usually experts) that have been interviewed, on very various topics, by RTS. It gives a nice image of the society
(mostly at the elite level). We can see that there is still a lot of progress to be made in this front.
Project done by Mohammad Yaghini, Sina Fakheri and Leonardo Wirz.
Major Social Phenomena
We have chosen to study some of the major social phenomenas of the 20th century.
Looking at the various plots below, we can see some trends appearing :
Note: Hover over the bar plots to see the co-occurrences for a given year.
A co-occurrence happens when words show up frequently together (un a cirtain year). In some years, there is no dominant co-occurence. This is because we set a threshold and filter the words with co-occurrences lower the threshold.
Women’s Voting Rights
For women’s voting right, the co-occurrences peaks at 1971 when a referendum was held in Switzerland. In the following years, presumably because it’s more or less a resolved issue. However, there are some exceptions. The last time the subject passed our threshold was in 2017, as the Saudi women gained right to vote in certain elections.
Homosexuality
In the case of Homosexuality, we observe that there was absolutely no mention of the topic until 1960s! The interest in the topic picks at 2003. We observe that in the first appearances, the dominant co-occurences are “films” (movies), “livre” (books) showing that artists were trying to talk about the subject. Whereas in the last years, although the number of occurrences has not changed (even decreased over the last five years), the dominant co-occurrences are marriage, children and medicine which shows the progress made on the subject.
Terrorism
Finally, for terrorism, it’s interesting to see that after every peak, there is an important dip in the occurrences, in the following year.
The co-occurrences here give nice insights about major terrorist attacks over the last 50 years. You can see for example, amongst others: