Nate Silver

In 2008, the year Barack Obama was elected the first African-American president and the global economy teetered near collapse, the word “inequality” was used just 14 times on the liberal-leaning cable network MSNBC. So far in 2014, which is barely more than a third over, the word has been said 647 times on the network.

These results are based on a LexisNexis search of transcripts of MSNBC’s original news programming (in other words, not the prison dramas shown on weekends). Each instance of the term “inequality” is counted separately -- so, if it is used 29 times on the same program (as it was on one episode of Melissa Harris-Perry’s show), it counts 29 times.

How substantial is 647 mentions of “inequality” in the context of MSNBC’s programming budget? LexisNexis records about 250,000 words’ worth of MSNBC transcripts each week, and there are about 6,000 words spoken per hour of programming (I calculated this as 150 words per minute times 40 minutes of noncommercial time per hour). That implies that “inequality” is said 0.87 times per hour of original programming on MSNBC. By comparison, it was used only 0.006 times per hour in 2008.