Data & Method

This media monitoring tool presents news coverage of Trump’s tariffs using articles published between February 1, 2025 and September 30, 2025 by US legacy media outlets. 

The news outlets featured in this tool include the following: 

• Bloomberg

• CBS News

• Chicago Tribune

• CNBC

• Fox News

• MSNBC News

• NBC News

• New York Post

• NPR

• The New York Times

• Time Magazine

The all-distilroberta-v1 sentence-embedding model was used to identify topics in the data. GPT-5.1 was used to complete high-level topic merging, creating broader, interpretable categories. The data is presented using Microsoft PowerBI. 

All data used in the media monitoring tool was sourced from the GDELT Project. Articles were filtered based on the presence of the word “tariff” and/or “tariffs” in the URL of the article. Human interest stories and idiosyncratic publication formats, including weekly debriefs and news quizzes, were generally excluded from the analysis to simplify topic modelling. Articles that could not be sorted into a topic were flagged and subsequently deleted from the model. The final version of the data set featured in the media monitoring tool contains 2183 articles. There are 55 topics organized into 15 subcategories.