Taking the temperature: Germany and refugees

The tone of German media coverage of the refugee situation is wavering, and public interest past its peak, according to an analysis of two big data sources.

Our first-hand reporting from Germany also suggests the welcome may be wearing thin. 

In the graphic below, we plot the tone of over 80,000 articles published on German websites, as provided by the GDELT database, and compare that with Google's ranking of the volume of searches in Germany for refugee-related terms.

Key moments:

In early August, officials announced they expected 800,000 refugees to reach Germany. In the third week of August, Germany announced that Syrian refugees could stay, rather than be removed to their original point of entry to the EU. This corresponds to a further negative turn in the tone of German media coverage.

The photos of Syrian toddler Aylan [Alan] Kurdi published in the first week of September triggered a jump in searches on refugees in Germany. The mood of German news coverage peaks as Angela Merkel addressed the UN General Assembly on 25 September. 

The tone of the coverage, as measured by GDELT, never reaches a neutral value of 0. Further dips in the tone of coverage in October coincide with debates on the shaky EU quota plan and objections from the state of Bavaria about plans for refugees. 

After a dramatic summer, these two big data sources suggest the tone of news coverage about refugees has settled back to the levels of early August, but that public interest remains relatively high.

About GDELT's tone data : 

Computerized "tone mining" essentially assigns a score to each English word based on the emotional response it is most likely to generate; for example, recording that the word "delightful" traditionally has a positive connotation, while "horrific" usually connotes something bad, and saves this into a large dictionary. Tone-mining software then assigns an emotional score from positive to negative to a passage of text by looking up each word in the dictionary and computing the average score of all its words. While highly simplistic, this yields an approximation of the overall tone of a document. And when you feed in enough documents, patterns start to emerge."

Note: GDELT translates German automatically.