is attempting to answer some of these questions using a quantitative approach. The service is sponsored by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. Media Cloud continually archives and processes hundreds of Internet-based news stories and blogs. Visualization tools let site visitors graph the data and analyze coverage across certain phrases, news providers, or geography. The analysis is fairly basic right now but eventually this open-source project could become an interpretive goldmine for newshounds, media analysts and those who are just plain curious about what kind of news the Internet is churning out.

It works like this: Users enter up to three news sources they would like to compare -- I chose the New York Times, BBC News and Al-Jazeera English. I chose the last one to see how AJE might compare to Western news sources. The charts are intriguing and fairly informative, but occasionally some results can be difficult to understand.

For instance, one type of chart generates the 10 most-mentioned terms for each of the chosen news sources. "United States" ranked higher for AJE than for the BBC, and the BBC's fifth most-popular term was "Christmas."

The possibilities to slice and dice the data with Media Cloud are endless. Querying the top 10 terms used by the New York Times, the BBC and Fox News around the word "Katrina," the :

"... Notice that Fox was more likely to include Katrina in stories that also talked about Iraq and Dick Cheney -- suggesting 'what went wrong with the Bush presidency' stories and a primarily political view of the story. The Times gave more prominence to the geographical names of Louisiana, Mississippi, and New Orleans, suggesting more on-the-ground reporting. And the BBC talked about it within the context of Burma, China, earthquakes, and floods -- indicating it saw Katrina through the lens of other natural disasters."