The Olympic Sap-o-Meter

By Jeremy Singer-Vine

Feb. 15, 2010

Every two years, NBC's coverage of the Olympics somehow manages to be sappier and cheesier than it was the last time around. Starting in 2008, Slate's sports desk has been scientifically monitoring the bathos of each day's coverage. This consists of measuring the frequency of about two dozen bellwether words using the previous day's transcripts and a lot of interns.

To help readers keep score, we kept a running tally of each word in a stacked bar chart. This visualization shows both the day's total score—the height of the bar—and each individual word in the color code.

Since picking out individuals words is a little tricky, you can double-click on a bar to see only that word over time.