An in-depth study by the team at Media Matters found that the number of Fox News segments on weekdays about violent crime plummeted after the midterm elections, averaging 141 weekly during September and October, and peaking at 193 during the five day period between Monday, October 31st and November 4th, before dropping down to 71 last week, November 7th thru the 11th.

It ticked back up to 74 segments during the first three days of this week, but Media Matters ascribes this to the murders at the Universities of Virginia and Idaho that gained national coverage.

On a related note, we wish Media Matters were a little more transparent with the tools they used to gather this data. See, we wanted to do a “Crimeflation” combo chart, but the problem is our query with Archive.org for inflation over the last month only returns what hours in which the word “inflation” was mentioned at least once and, as you can see, it was around the clock before the midterms, literally 24 of 24 hours on most days. It’s not entirely useless for this purpose (but almost is) as you can see there clearly was a drop-off after the Midterms. But for want of just a little more data from Archive.org, specifically an occurrence count of a specific word within all of their auto-archived Fox News programming, we’re stuck with just saying it kind of fell off without really being able to tell our readers how much it actually did. Not hard to imagine they were hammering the shit out of it (and violent crime too) on Frau Ingraham’s show last Monday only for her to mention them in passing once this Monday, but Archive.org counts that all the same.