Back in 2007-08, the word “change” was so popular that Hugh Atkin, the brilliant Australian mashup artist, made a hilarious video of David Bowie’s “Changes” as sung by the Democratic and Republican presidential primary candidates. And as this intriguing chart from Google Trends shows, there was a substantial jump in the number of news references to “change” in the United States starting at the beginning of 2008, spiking right around November (when Obama was elected), and then remaining at fairly high levels, compared to before 2008, almost to the present.
But look what’s been happening to news references to “change” since the beginning of spring. Spread out over the last twelve months the shift may appear to be modest, but when you look at the time series over a the longer period the drop is startling.
Last twelve months, news references to “change”:
The 2012 time period alone, compared to the all-time references tracked by Google (basically, our first chart above, with just this year isolated):
Why would references to “change” be dropping from American news media? Searches for the word are going up steadily, regardless of how often the news mentions it.
Could it be that the public wants more change than the system is giving it?